Page 69 - PDF Flip TR Program Demo

organ, to pull up a church from beneath the sea. On this piano the gargoyles dance, the gnomes fly, and hell itself breathes forth.
To choose its opposite next: Véra, the elegant, steely virtuoso, its solid brass notes perfectly pitched to resolve any confusion in an étude: every note is clear, sung out, thrown to the far walls. Like a perfectly dressed hussar, or one of the Viennese Lipizzaner stallions, every foot is placed exactly right, every nuance of a note can be phrased and voiced with the most exacting accuracy. Voices can be separated from the crowd of chords: a child soprano can be heard in the middle of the Wagnerian chorus. The sun shines brightly over the entire countryside. Gone are the storms and lightning strikes of CD-18, and in its place the brisk air of autumn tints the leaves with Chopinesque filigree.
And then the opposite of both Véra and Kira: the murmurs and feather boas, the canons and car- riages, the oboes and bassoons of the expressive Seraphina, the odalisque of the drawing room, where samovars scent the air and candlelight tinges a distant tapestry. Anything is possible in the haze that surrounds her bells and strings; more than all our pianos, Seraphina responds instantly to any touch, to every desire. Somewhere children dance around a bandstand in the Prater at dusk, and silverware clinks under the chandeliers in
the Blaue Bar of the Hotel Sacher. Where the Hapsburg Empire was slowly waltzing its way to war, Hofmannsthal’s distant planets silently falling. The bygone lassitudes of Grillparzer, the salons of the golden houses, the twilight of the Magyars, all of whom had estates of not less than 1,400 acres, reverberate from every note in Brahms, and many measures in Schubert and Schumann.
By 1900 the nobility had retreated into its country estates, and a new middle class had emerged,
in whose drawing rooms a piano like Seraphina might have been found. Markets had crashed, the prosperity of the Empire had foundered, and revo- lution had been in the air for half a century, along with the seeds of National Socialism, directed against exactly the cultured Jewish society which produced the paintings, sonatas, buildings, and novels by which we remember that era.
So the purpose of Seraphina, built in memory of an era already vanished, was to evoke the past, to keep alive the memory of those idle days in the Viennese woods, of those lost chords in the Biedermeier ballrooms of the Liberal Age. A musician like Brahms was a recidivist, dedicated to the vanishing values which sustained his salary, that kept alive the illusions with which
he buttressed his Rhapsodies. Rachmaninoff, too, carried the vanished world with him until,
in the pink stucco greenhouses of Hollywood, it disappeared, along with the roots of his genius. Italian opera kept the old world alive well into the 1930s, until the new Russians like Stravinsky mi- grated to America, buried it forever.
Pianos are made for the society which will buy them, and it wasn’t long before the new middle class wanted pianos that invoked Strauss waltzes, and the latest compositions which imitated the sounds of industry, of the airplane, the siren, the railroad. The alpine naiveté, the Gemütlichkeit, the Sehnsucht, the Weltschmerz, all tinged with the premonition of their own demise, was gone. But with Seraphina, singer of Bavarian folk songs, painter of Klimt’s gilt and Kokoschka’s colored chaos, it lives again.
—Peter Halstead
2018 Summer Season 69