Mozart - Rondo, K 511

1946 recording. ~~~ Artur Schnabel (1882 - 1951), was born in Lipnik, Austria. Schnabel's piano career began at age six, when his sister's piano teacher noticed that he instantly mastered, without teaching, the lessons his sister had to practice. Schnabel made his public debut at age 11. By 1898 he was still studying piano in Vienna but was good enough to take on piano students himself; financially independent, if barely so, he headed for Berlin, Germany. Schnabel's career was slow to build, but after he gave a Berlin debut concert featuring the music of Franz Schubert, he acquired an agent and began to find intermittent concert engagements. After a series of performances as soloist with the renowned Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Schnabel became a recognized name in German musical life. In the years prior to World War I he toured most of the major European countries, including Russia. Schnabel's repertoire ran straight up the middle of the intellectual Germanic tradition, seldom straying from that path. He favored music that seemed to hold profundities that would forever be just beyond his grasp, once saying, according to Saerchinger, "Now I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed." He loved the comparatively simple sonatas of Mozart, pointing out that "Children are given Mozart because of the small quantity of the notes; grown-ups avoid Mozart because of the great quality of the notes." The most important of composers for Schnabel was Beethoven, especially the piano sonatas that spanned most of his career; although he had far refused to make any recordings at all, he recorded all 32 sonatas between 1931 and 1935. Many other pianists in the future would record the complete cycle, but Schnabel's was the first. Schnabel's recordings were prized by collectors in spite of the fact that in Beethoven's more difficult pieces, his technique was clearly not up to the job. Schnabel considered errors incidental flaws in a performance, rather than major difficulties to be agonized over. Schonberg related a famous Schnabel story wherein the pianist suffered a memory lapse in the middle of a performance with the New York Philharmonic Orchestra—severe enough to cause the music to grind to a halt. Any other pianist would have been mortified, but Schnabel, Schonberg wrote, "merely grinned, shrugged his shoulders, got up from the piano, and walked over to the podium" to confer with the conductor, after which he began the music again. For Schnabel, what mattered was the communication of the meaning of the music to the audience, not a display of technical perfection. For several years he avoided performing in the United States, but returned in 1930 as a soloist with the Boston Symphony. In 1936, performing his live cycle of the Beethoven sonatas at Carnegie Hall, he drew a crowd of 18,000 total listeners, and this softened his attitude toward what would become his adopted country. He left Germany in 1933; after the Nazi takeover of the country, his concerts had been abruptly canceled, and he had quit his teaching job at the State Academy of Music as he noticed a hardening in the attitudes of his non-Jewish colleagues. For several years he and his family lived mostly at their villa in Switzerland. Schnabel visited his mother in Vienna in 1937 and never saw her again; she was arrested after Germany's annexation of Austria in 1938 and disappeared. In 1939, Schnabel decided that the United States was the best place for himself and his family. He took up residence in a New York City apartment hotel and became a citizen during World War II. During his own lifetime, Schnabel's own music remained much less well known than his piano performances. In contrast to the conservative nature of his piano repertoire, which rarely, if ever, encompassed contemporary music, Schnabel as a composer was something of a radical, writing three massive symphonies that employed dissonant modern harmonies...

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