David Dubal: History and Musical Tradition pt1.
Bio: David Dubal is internationally known as a pianist, teacher, writer, and broadcaster. An acknowledged authority on the piano literature, Mr. Dubal’s highly acclaimed books include The Art of the Piano, Evenings with Horowitz, Reflections from the Keyboard, and Conversations with Menuhin. David Dubal has been a faculty member of The Juilliard School since 1983, and joined the faculty of the Manhattan School of Music in 1994. He has performed in recitals and lecture-recitals in forty states, conducted master classes and lectured world-wide, and judged many international competitions, including the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.
Q: David, let’s talk about your teachers and the impact they’ve had on you. Who were they and how did they affect your life?
Dubal: Well, I think that every piano teacher affects the life of the student very much for positive or negative, or both. My parents got me into piano at age nine, I guess because they wanted to keep up with their friends, but who knows? In America, keeping up with the Jones’ is a tremendous pastime. So I went to this woman, Miss Fisher (now deceased), and I liked her very much. I was nine years old, and I didn’t know what to say or what to do, but I think she had a common influence on everyone. I didn’t know if she was good or not, but I liked her. Liking someone is always an important thing. She taught me as well as she could, but she didn’t give me any solid repertoire or understanding.
In the four years I studied with her I became her best student. During her programs, I would be lead, her little star, or whatever. So practicing became very much a part of my life. Kids were not terribly undisciplined then. If your mother said you didn’t practice today, you would try to make up for it. I think this was not unusual because for my time many people were taught to work. Not like today where it’s an entitlement generation, where they sit in front of computers and cell phones all day. This has made them totally invisible to culture.
At age 13, something very lucky happened to me. I was outside playing baseball and my mother called me in with a long scream that I heard in the baseball field. I went in and there was this fellow by the name of James Stream who studied at Julliard and his parents were good friends of my parents. He was trying to sell tickets to a recital he was going to give in Cleveland, and that ended up being my first great musical experience. To this day I remember every note. He played for us and I was overwhelmed. He played things I did not know, and I was just spellbound. Then he said, “Play for me”. I played for him, and he said, “He’s a real talent, but doesn’t he play any Bach?” I said I never had any Bach. I didn’t know anything about anything—techniques, scales, this and that. The next summer I studied with him, and he was a damn good teacher.
I had been introduced to the piano from the radio. I would sneak down and listen - from about age 8 through 11 - to the FM station because there was a man on there called Henry Tilden. He played a Chopin waltz and then he would play classical music through the night, and I would try to stay up as late as possible. There was no environment for it, no genetic necessity for it, but I just heard that music and that music just made me crazy. I loved it so much. Everyone is different, and if the parents can figure it out a little and spend a little time, maybe we would have a lot more success.
I then went to a woman named Francis Baldencourt Cotoriers. Her husband, who was almost 40 years older than her when she married, was a pupil of Liszt in Rome, and so by God, I had already been reading a great deal about music because I think when you are really interested in a subject - even as a kid - you find the right books. I found out that Madam Cotorier was one of the great teachers of Ohio, and people came from all over to study with her. I couldn’t predict it, but I was accepted as her pupil. She was 81 and lived alone in a mansion with her two concert Grands and a picture of Beethoven on the wall just like in the movies. She never played for me, but she was a real teacher with her notebooks filled out every lesson.
Things were more difficult for me when I got into Julliard because in many ways I was not prepared musically. Piano lessons were not enough, but my parents didn’t know this. You have to learn so fast; it’s a sightseeing game when you are young. You have to learn the harmony and theory, and parents have never even heard of these words. I had to practice because I was not the major virtuoso at Julliard in the post Cliburn Browning years.
When I graduated from Juilliard I decided to study with, Arthur Loesser, the writer of Men, Woman, and Pianos, a great sociological history on the piano. He’s one of the great pianists – not one of the great known pianists, but known in his circle. And in Cleveland, he was a God. So in some ways he was a role model, because I told everyone including myself that you’ve got to do a lot of things to survive in music. You’re not going to be one of the six people who make a big living from the piano, and so I say, “Diversify, man, diversify.” I say that to the kids. “Do whatever you can, but try to stay in music.”
I, then, began teaching at a music school for the blind. I went to the Bronx every single day and taught the blind kids for a year and it was incredible. I would come home and still practice. I had those little urges as a young man in my 20s that I would be able to play in public, never thinking that I would go into a competition or anything like that; because I could never face that sort of thing. So, those were the early days, where the competition reigned like Van Cliburn, but I could never have held up in a competition. The sensitive don’t do well.
Then one day I heard of a possibility of a job in radio and I said, “Oh my God, do I want this?!” It was literally the programming of a whole station - a small cult station that over the next year I had built up to a major force. I realized I had to take this radio job. If I had stayed in Cleveland I would have been stuck teaching children the rest of my life.
My teachers’ influences have always been there, but I really consider myself self-taught. I tell people that if you’re an artist in your heart and soul you will start developing in your own way. After age 24, I never played again for anyone. Everything had to stem from me. This is the way I want to play: with whatever way my technique develops - and I loved this process. I tried to instill this idea that they will have much more fun and think of themselves as an artist if they play for themselves, which is the important thing; as a pianist, not as some student all their lives, looking for the golden teacher.
Q: David, you have interviewed some of the great pianists of the past century- including Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould, Claudio Arrau, and many more. How did this remarkable path of recording the life history of such great artists begin for you?
Dubal: Absolutely, that started as soon as I began in radio. I felt that the piano is my life; I adore it. I want to be its spokesman in a way. I understood I’m not going to be the next Horowitz, and it wasn’t in me to be that kind of person, nor did I have that kind of ability. But I had others. I had the sheer love for the piano. I tell my students, “Figure out how you were going to go”. I think I’ve always figured out how I was going to go. The moment I had a chance to be on the radio, I did that. The first chance I had to do a lecture, I did that. The first time I had the chance to do a lecture recital, I did that. So everything I could do without any ego without any “oh, this is great”, or “I am terrific.” Arthur Lester said something very important: “If you’re not a servant to music than you are nothing. I don’t care what your status is,” and I think to be a servant to this great art has been spiritually a blessing for me.
Q: The musicians you interviewed must have gotten the sense that you cared about their history.
Dubal: I think they certainly understood that I understood each of their own playing and that each one of them is dear to me in a way.
Q: What did interviewing and talking with musicians things like Horowitz and Claudio Arrau bring to you? Did you gain more about the quest for creating great art in music?
Dubal: Absolutely, when you’re talking to an Arrau, you are talking about an ingrown and introverted great Faustian figure. When you’re talking to Horowitz, you’re talking to a very different type. When it was a Pogorelich who had enough mental health not to be too arrogant, you had to treat him in a certain way and work around the fanaticism of what he had been told, so to speak. He was just too young to have known anything, but was always winning competitions and was a master of publicity.
When it came to talking about the piano with these artists who were highly successful, each one of them showed almost a manic desire to play repertoire that was different. They each had a characteristic. Garrick Ohlsson wanted to play things that no one else played, not because they were neglected, but because he loved French music. Stephen Bishop-Kovacevich would practice savagely to make sure he could play Beethoven’s sonatas the way he should. The dedication of all of these people was stupendous.
Nothing was put on. Once they are talking about music, their real person comes out, and the real person is usually very fabulous if they succeed. They succeed because they not only have talent, but also the desire to continue practicing and the desire to be on stage. Talent is not enough; you have to have the desire to be on stage. It has to be fierce. But it can’t just be an ego thing; these are not actors. They are not exhibitionists. They are actors in the sense that they have to act many parts. It’s very serious to play Bach and then have to play another composer a different way from Bach. It’s a great strain if you are someone serious. Someone will say to you that your Bach is not like Gould; but, of course, you have to also make sure it’s not like anyone else’s, yet it has to be Bach. It’s a tough world.
Q: What do you feel happened in the post WW II period of last century that pushed classical music away from its roots of romanticism and beauty?
Dubal: That’s a big question. I think that there was a great musicalization of America through pop music, through the invention of the LP in ‘48 where the record companies could’ve promoted this much better. School systems still had programs. But the impact of the mass media, the 50’s, the Elvises; there was no longer the big band era, where you had this sweet dance music from the great ones of that era - Guy Lombardo or Glen Miller or countless bands. They were in every hotel; they were everywhere; a kind of non-violent music. As the century became more multicultural and more “me, me, me”, it was more and more violent. The Beatles look like cute little kids from Liverpool now. The record companies saw that the middle class white kids had tremendous disposable income from their parents. The parents lost control of them; the 60’s became out of control. There was no culture, no interest in it. There was the opening of the sex revolution, which was truly alive in cities like New York and San Francisco - the free and easy aspects, which at that moment looked so good.
Now, in retrospect, there was nothing created at all, even in the world of music. Cage’s music, which is not going to be performed. The idea of equality started there with Cage – a very dangerous dictum that all sounds are equal. It just means he had no ear, and he didn’t, as Virgil Thompson told me. He had no idea what he was really hearing. He was just a very interesting mind, and there were a lot of interesting minds that did a lot of things, but they didn’t have any lasting power or tradition.
Popular music is not art. It can be very wonderful, and anything with words has always been an extracurricular activity to a specific kind of art. Even Schubert’s songs we cannot consider on the level of his Ninth Symphony or String Quartets or the Sonatas. They are wonderful depictions of poems.
So, today, we live in a world of pop culture, which are words. We don’t have that silence that instrumental music gives us. I'm constantly moving away because if anyone is sensitive to tone they can’t sit in a restaurant, they can’t talk, they can’t be in public at all, you can’t go into a store without this tremendous fascism of music hounding you, and always with words so silly you want to vomit. I’m not talking about the fact that I’m some iconoclastic nut, I’m talking about someone who’s sensitive to the world around him.
Q: Did the revolt against tradition come out of that 1960’s period you just spoke of?
Dubal: It did! It was so permissive, you couldn’t imagine it! It was unlike anything that we knew today in our surveillance age over indulged entertainment passivity. It was really wild. People were now able to do things that they never did and they did it in excess. That’s what created AIDS; that’s what created the fat culture, the endless eating, the endless let’s just do what we want. This was just part of the unconscious death wish that’s come from the bomb. Let’s get it over with, you know; let’s just be me, me, me.
We are into such superficiality, how can you stand it? I stand it because I’m always with enough creative young people. Maybe of the hundred pianists at the school there are 10 of tremendous worth that will go on and make their career into something filled with love, etc. But there will be many that will become bitter. And then there will be those that will deviate after graduation, get married, and go on into their father’s business or whatever - you know, just leave music completely. If they don’t love it by this time, they’re not even going to be ticket holders later on. Many educated parents don’t even give their kids piano lessons. In the 1960’s, you still had a piano in every single suburban home and every home on 5th Avenue and Park Avenue had Steinways.
Q: What did Steinway get right that other piano firms were not able to quite come up to in their level of piano making?
Dubal: They have a great tradition from the first Steinway made by Henry Steinway, who was born in 1797. He came here in the year of the 1848 revolution. He kept all of his family in the business. Theodore Steinway was a piano and acoustic genius and he developed the double mechanism; the double way is a unique characteristic that the Steinway works; you can’t play good pianos unless you know what Steinway did. They knew how to do the wood from North America; they understood the climate, the over-stringing. Everything comes from tremendous experimentation of the family. That’s another example of a family creating something together over a long period of time. None of the family is in it now. No family left.
Henry died two summers ago, I believe. He was the first one to sell it to CBS. He thought it was going to help the firm, but it didn’t. They’ve sold it to a few others since. There are lots of complaints about their pianos lately, but what do I care? Why do we have to continue thinking that this society is good? It is only interested in the bottom line. They’re not interested in quality.
Q: What are your lasting memories of speaking with Glenn Gould?
Dubal: Glen Gould, who was really the great revolutionary pianist of the 20th century, without a doubt. He doesn’t play the romantic music, which is the piano repertoire in performance. He plays Bach in the sense that when he gives you his music, it is what a 20th century performer must do, which is the combination of the composer and a great creative imagination of the performer with a technique that has no limitations.
There was nothing like Glen Gould. He was mysterious. He had all of the makings of a great 19th century creature, who are still able to produce a few of what’s called eccentrics usually. Horowitz was not eccentric, and Gould was not eccentric. They were original creators trying to mold their environment around their needs – which was very hard. Horowitz failed and Gould failed in the sense that he had to escape through drugs, and finally he died at 50 - much too early! I told him on the phone: Get rid of the piano in your life, you’ve done enough with it! It’s not going to give you back anything more. Do something great; become a Dali Lama or do something interesting. Become the president of Canada or become an actor, because he loved acting, but stop this piano! What are you going to do, ten Goldbergs? You could really talk to him like that! He laughed, he laughed. At least play some more Scarlatti Sonatas, and he said, “Ah, that’s just popcorn.”
We would talk on the phone after midnight; that’s when he would call! You didn’t call him, and my interview with him was the very last interview we ever did that was published in “Reflections from the Keyboard.” It’s a great story, but he just rewrote my questions and answered three, and they were just great—everything about him was to create a great mysterious entity. What pianist has written about or had documentaries every year or had a magazine devoted to him? By the way, he was so affable; the sound of his voice would linger in your ear for a long time. He was such an affable character!
Q: It seems Glenn died just at the time technology and the business of classical music would change dramatically in the 1980’s.
Dubal: Yes, he was a great pusher of technology, but he was still editing in the old fashioned way. I can’t believe a man would prefer hearing records than to hear him. But he said, no, I can’t play in public, I can’t stand it. But I think he was really right. He couldn’t artistically abide the fact that statistically he would play it much better the second time in the concert. I want to give them the dollars worth and I’m not able to do that. There was a very honest, sincere, but inflexible man in there. And he told the whole world that performing is obsolete. That hit a lot of people. Remember the unconscious or a bomb in a deal like that takes over and hundreds and hundreds of pianists in the next generation from the 70’s, 80’s with Gould’s influence - they all said, “Yeah, it’s not really a great thing to play in public, you know it’s records that count”. He gave it up, remember in 1965! He was only 32 years old! That means a whole generation were indoctrinated with this idea that “oh, playing on stage is no good.” He tarnished it tremendously with his love of technology! I wonder how he would have fared today with the cell phone every minute and people on Broadway bumping into you, and the loudness and the ‘this’ and the ‘that’ and the computer all day long. Would Glen Gould practice ever? You know, he was an addictive guy; he’d go to the computer and he’d probably stay there and say is the way life should be or the assembling of the Ipod or whatever they do in China. Is this life? This is as bad as the early days of the industrial revolution that you were describing in China
Q: He was a romantic but someone like him could not thrive in our environment today.
Dubal: No, he wouldn’t have survived today. He just barely did then, and he had to close himself to the world. He did it, and he died in 82; that is dinosaur time for us now.
Q: How did the older artists like Horowitz feel in his later years, seeing the changes that had occurred through the 1970’s and 80’s?
Dubal: He felt alone. I don’t think he felt that there were any pianists that could really talk to him. I mean, they played for him and he taught. I gave him students myself. Murray Perahia was not Horowitz either but he comes to him that same period I was there and I think that was a misjudgment for Perahia and he’s not that kind of pianist.
We always want to be what we are not, but Horowitz gave him assistance, but this was not through his hands. The point is that when they say that he was the last romantic that, yeah, we can look at it that way. He’s still alive to the public and all the young pianists in the world. That’s the only pianist that was ever produced for them. There was no one really else than Horowitz - not Gould, not any other pianists that are around—no one but Horowitz for the young.
Q: Pop culture as commerce has even manifested in computers today.
Dubal: Look at the Apple computer. They must pay a fortune for all the movies they show up in. Every scene has a computer in it, or you have to see the damn thing on a desk. They say, “Oh, it’s so friendly, it’s human you know. It’s so user friendly. It makes me an artist in photography.” Everyone is a great artist now. It destroyed, in no time, the art of photography. Everyone is a great artist now.
There’s no concentration. Editing on television is by quarter second. Multitasking is impossible for the brain. Would Rembrandt be on the text while he’s painting his portrait? When you play the piano, what are you thinking? Getting back to computer and seeing pornography, which has become the only reason men buy the god damn thing. The point is it’s already taking its toll. We are quite over the edge.
There will only be a cult of what we call classical music or great music. It will continue on a very, very slim level, and it’s almost non-existent now. It will just be people who are called eccentric, strange, who love Chopin.
Horowitz said to me that he doubts there will be a recital 50 years after my death. Well he’s not wrong. In the 1960’s you would have the New York Times actually print up all of the recital programs at town hall and everywhere else with whatever the pianist was playing. There was enough cultivation in the public to actually read a newspaper and say, “Oh, I want to go to that because she’s playing the Handel variations.” Now it’s degenerated to just interest in who is going to play the program, not what they’re going to be playing
Katherine Anne Porter used to say, “In 1910 when I went to school, like it or not, classical culture was something to be honored and something to be cherished – the great books, the great literature, etc.” Well, we’re 100 years away from that, and we turned into a consumer mechanical world.