Leuven University Press

Chapter Title: The Inner Ear: An Interview with Leon Fleisher

Chapter Author(s): Leon Fleisher

Book Title: Experimental Affinities in Music

Book Editor(s): Paulo de Assis
Published by: Leuven University Press. (2015)
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2bctk7.11

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 Chapter Eight

The Inner Ear

An Interview with Leon Fleisher
Peabody Conservatory of Music, Baltimore
Curtis Institute of Music, Philadelphia

[This interview was prepared by the Orpheus Institute research fellows Paulo
de Assis, Joost Vanmaele, and Alessandro Cervino and was conducted by Paulo
de Assis on 20 November 2008 as a part of the Orpheus Research Festival
2008. A period for questions from the audience followed the formal interview;
although, unfortunately, we cannot identify the questioners, we have tran-
scribed the exchanges because they were so informative.]

orcim: We would like to start with three quotations and one question. The first quotation
stems from Theodor Leschetizky [1830–1915], who is said to have said to Artur Schnabel
(when becoming his teacher) that “you will never be a pianist; you are a musician”—
implying a gap between pure music and music as played by an instrumentalist in its con-
crete, technical rendering. Artur Schnabel [1882–1951], himself a composer, deplored the
separation of composer from performer that had become the norm since the late nineteenth
century. He once said (and here is our second quotation) that he felt only attracted to music
“which is better than it can be performed,” suggesting an ideal state for musical works that
would be independent from their acoustic realisation or from their manual materialisation
through the performer. In this same direction, you also stated that “Suddenly I realised
that the most important thing in my life wasn’t playing with my two hands: it was music.”
These three quotations all share the idea of a separation between music as an abstract,
autonomous entity, and music’s particular renderings in the here-and-now of performa-
tive contingencies. In your opinion, to what extent do you think a musical work remains
somehow “utopian,” i.e., impossible to really be rendered through concrete performance?

leon fleisher: This is a very legitimate question but, in a sense, I think it is

answered by the three quotations that you read. The challenges of a great piece
of music are internal. The Mozart A-Minor Rondo, no matter how well or how
beautifully you play it, always offers new possibilities, other new awarenesses.
That’s the earmark of a masterpiece. And I think that’s what Schnabel meant by
saying that he was only interested in playing that music that he felt was better
than could be played. He felt, I think, that the challenges of something like

DOI http://dx.doi.org/10.11116/9789461661883.ch08

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 The Inner Ear

a Tchaikovsky concerto, with its octaves, is susceptible, or can be resolved by

what he called “seating capacity.” You know, you sit long enough and you’ll get
faster and faster octaves—if that’s what you are interested in. And that was not
his interest. Today, it would seem to me, there are many young people who,
unfortunately—well, “unfortunately” . . . I don’t know . . . There is a certain
joy, a kind of joie de vivre (if one can use a cliché like that), in being able to race
around the keyboard and do extraordinary things. It is athletic, it is invigorat-
ing, it’s good for the muscles; but if pursued as the main goal it would seem to
me more appropriate that you wind up with a circus—where they do extraor-
dinary things, physically. And I think that does not have much to do with the
making of music. I think the distinction lies there.

Another important topic for the ORCiM community has to do with editions of music. In
the words of Alfred Brendel (2001, 25), “every generation of musicians is unconsciously
influenced by the editions with which it has grown up.” Schnabel made a technical-inter-
pretative edition of Beethoven piano sonatas. This edition, with its copious footnotes, gives
a very good image not only of his understanding of Beethoven but, moreover, of his deepest
concepts about piano playing and aesthetics. In a recent interview (Fleisher and Stewart
2004) you revealed that your first recording of Schubert’s B♭ Sonata (D. 960)—made
fifty years ago—had an enormous “clinker,” due to a printed wrong note in the edition
you were working with. In that context you said, “the editions that were available then
were somewhat lacking.” Do you think that music editions can change our perception of
musical works?

Oh yes, absolutely! And not just in terms of wrong notes or text mistakes. I think
it is terribly important to get as close as possible to the express written intention
of the composer. And those editions that are “ameliorated” by an editor who
does not distinguish (generally through a change in print) between his sugges-
tions and what the composer has written are worthless editions because you end
up playing the editor, not the composer. So finding what is known as an Urtext—
everybody knows this, I think—is what is vital. I know, for example, Henle is a
very respected edition, but Henle’s Chopin for me is terrible because Chopin
oversaw the publication of various editions—the English edition, the French
edition, the German edition. I am not sure if he oversaw Carl Mikuli’s edition,
which is most reliable; and, in addition, he very often made little adjustments
depending on who the student was. I have a sense that if there was a very pretty
student, he would make it a little bit easier . . . But the Henle Chopin edition
chooses on its own, without any reference to which edition it is following. It
makes its own choice; and, for my taste, this is usually one of the more uninter-
esting choices. Whereas the idea that was started by the Paderewski edition—
which was until that time the most comprehensive and the most informative
(now you have most Polish editions with voluminous footnotes saying where
their choices come from)—the wonderful thing about the Paderewski edition
is that it not only told you where it came from but it also showed all the other
possibilities. It showed what the other editions of a work had.

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 An Interview with Leon Fleisher

I think that probably one of the first people to do that was Schnabel with the
Beethoven sonatas, which is an extraordinary publication. Schnabel, in effect,
tried to put on paper—in kind of primitive terms—what we find in the music:
everything that he had learned about the piece in his whole career, in his whole
life. So, in a way, reading the Schnabel edition of the Beethoven sonatas is like
a lesson. His remarks are in different print, instantly recognisable as not being
from Beethoven. Everything that Beethoven wrote is in ink and bold print. You
can tell what is Beethoven and what is not Beethoven.

Now we would like to focus on your own artistic work. When you start a new piece do you
have an idea in advance that then, through practice, you try to realise, or is it through the
working process that the idea is going to emerge? Or is it a combination?

It is a combination—I can’t help. It’s quite extraordinary, and we don’t really

realise—even experienced and seasoned performers—we don’t really realise
how we make little adjustments for physical reasons, adjustments to the instru-
ment, and we try to justify these adjustments with a musical rationale. So I find
most advisable, before you ever take the piece to the instrument, sit down in a
comfortable chair and read it! And make certain basic decisions, certain basic
choices, as you read the music, as you begin to understand the structure, how
it’s written, even insofar as imagining certain orchestral instruments playing
through some materials. Our problem—or, better, our biggest challenge—is
that all the notes are equally black. So we have to decide what is important and
what is not important. We have to decide what is filler and what is essential. If
we can make most of these choices before we go to the instrument we already
have a sound in our inner ear. And most important, because—as I mentioned—
we made little adjustments to accommodate the instrumental problems, most
important is to establish a pulse for the piece.
Much has been said about the connection or the relationship between music
and mathematics. I find that, in a sense, a kind of primitive literature. I think
music is far more related to physics, because music passes in time, music is
a horizontal activity, it goes from point A to point Z, but the point Z is two
minutes away, or one and a half hours away, as in a Mahler symphony. So it is
movement. And therefore, it is subject to all the forces that movement is sub-
ject to—to drive, to momentum, etc. When you go around a corner you have
a scale that goes up and comes down again, or that goes down and comes up
again: it’s subject to centrifugal or centripetal force. It’s like when you drive a
car: you turn your wheel to the right but your body goes to the left. And when
you go around a corner there is that sense. And it’s not like a typewriter—taka-
taka-taka—unless the music demands that. So one of the big challenges of the
piano, in spite of it being the best instrument there is, is that we are faced with
producing the sense of movement. It’s interesting: every other instrument,
every string instrument from violin to double bass, every wind or brass instru-
ment from piccolo down to tuba depends on movement to make it sound. You
stop the bow and the sound stops; you stop blowing air and the sound stops.
All these movements are horizontal movements: the blowing of air, the moving

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 The Inner Ear

of the bow. How are we going to produce this irresistible sense of movement
and direction horizontally by a totally vertical activity? You put little keys up and
down; they don’t go sideways, they go up and down, exactly 3/16th of an inch.
That’s our challenge.

One thing you just mentioned seems to be extremely important: working away from the
piano, sitting down and reading a score. This is something you very often refer to in your
interviews . . .

It’s a way of working music: one makes music on the piano, one makes music on
the kazoo, one makes music—wherever, wherever your choice of instrument is.
There is nothing special or sacred about the piano. What is special and sacred
is music.

Another thing you mentioned is the “inner ear.”

Oh, ja! This is something I learned from Schnabel. You have to hear before you
play. You have to have in your inner ear exactly what it is you want to sound
like. If you don’t have a goal for every note that you play, what happens is an
accident. You just have a series of accidents, and once you start you just try to
somehow relate them or make them organically generate what comes after-
wards. No, you have to hear everything that you play before you play. It’s really
an extraordinary activity, it’s a kind of schizophrenic activity, if it is done well.
Because I think we are three people in one: we are person A who hears before
they play, we are person B who actually does the playing, who puts down the
keys, and we are person C who sits a little bit apart and listens. And if what
person C hears is not what person A intended, person C tells person B what
to adjust. And this is a process that goes on constantly, simultaneously, every
moment that you are making music.

Do you have special moments, special points in the piece where you particularly focus
for this kind of schizophrenic dialogue to happen? Is this in particular chords, structural
points, or what kind of singular events within the piece?

No, I think it goes on all the time. There are probably, let’s say, islands in the
piece—from a physical point of view—where you might regroup or somehow
use to refresh. No, but this process is constant, constantly ongoing. It also is a
wonderful way of avoiding nerves, as you are so busy that you have no time to
be nervous. Nerves are the result of self-consciousness: “Are they going to like
me?” “Am I looking the way I wanted to look?” “If I make a clinker, if I make a
mistake, will my career be ruined?” But if you have a goal every single moment,
you don’t have time for all that nonsense. Also it is very interesting, I think, in
relation to the listener—if everybody is caught up in something that’s happen-
ing in the music these little errors pass by partly unnoticed. But if the goal of
the making of music is a kind of physical perfection, a kind of brilliance only
from the physical point of view and not really with the kind of immediacy and

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 An Interview with Leon Fleisher

urgency that comes from having musical intentions, then these little mistakes
sound very important, very big. Because nothing else is going on. But if some-
thing else is going on, not to worry.

It is a commonplace to talk about “reflection” and “conceptualisation” as a part of a dual-

ism, the other part being a combination of “intuition” and/or “tradition.” When study-
ing, practising, or performing a piece do you in some way reflect this dualism? In which
part of the working process do you predominantly use reflection; and when, intuition? In
the face of a concrete problem do you tend to solve it through the use of your knowledge or
through intuition?

Well, while you perform, I don’t think you have time to think back and wonder
about this or that. These two sides are not mutually exclusive; they combine,
they make no final product. I think these distinctions are not very productive.
The art is the entity, it is the entirety of the whole. Certainly, it never hurts to
know what you are doing. It also never hurts for your own sense of authority
to know why you are doing, and I think it is best served by being able to point
to this reason, to that reason, to a structural reason, whatever . . . And then, of
course, you listen to your instinct. But if your instinct is contradicted by the
composer—if you feel something to be forte and the composer writes piano—I
think you try it piano until eventually the sense of what piano means in this place
begins to make itself apparent.
Everybody knows Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, this beautiful E♭-major
chord in the orchestra followed by these waves where the piano goes up to the
top. Well, it doesn’t hurt to know that in this wonderful chord in the orchestra,
that eighty-nine to one hundred people are playing, nobody is playing a B♭. E♭
major, no B♭, no fifths? Everybody in the orchestra is playing E♭ or G. And then
comes the piano player [Fleisher quasi-sings simulating the arpeggios of the piano],
and it gets to the top, and there it is: B♭. Not just one but nine! [Fleisher qua-
si-sings simulating the trill of the piano part]. That has to have a meaning. And that
gives a sense of having gotten a little bit into Beethoven’s psyche. He was miss-
ing the B♭ in the chord and then there is this tsunami of waves and then this
insistence. Is that a consequence of “intellectualism”? No, it’s just discovering
what the hell the music is about. Or when the theme comes again for the first
time on the piano—at the second entrance [Fleisher sings the first four bars of this
theme]—he writes “dolce.” That’s interesting, that’s curious: something that is
so maestoso, so noble . . . he writes “dolce.” With many young people today, the
music, in terms of characterisation, is so often either heroic or revolutionary,
or the other side, which is what I call “I love you.” People feel that somehow
they have to demonstrate how much the music affects them, how much they
can pour their innards into the music. Because if they demonstrate how much
they are affected by their music, maybe you will be more inclined to buy tick-
ets to their concerts than to the other from the next studio, who might not be
demonstrating how much affected he or she is by the music.

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 The Inner Ear

On several occasions, after 1967, you talked about the problem of articulating in words
what you till then expressed through your music making. From that moment you devoted
yourself to teaching and conducting, being forced to put the music in words. To what extent
did this necessity change your understanding of music?

Well, the reason that I finally had to become more precise in my thinking about
music was the onset of this physical problem that I have, which is called focal
dystonia. I could no longer play with my right hand. So when I wanted to change
something about how the student was playing I would push him or her off the
chair and say, “I think it should go this way, because of this and such and such
reason.” I wasn’t able to do that anymore. I had to really listen and determine
for myself, and be able to express in words what was different between what I
thought they should do and what they were doing. That taught me in a way to
listen in a much finer, more exact way.

audience questions
A very simple question: what brought you to playing piano? What was your first contact
with the instrument?

I have an older brother and he was taking piano lessons. And he was not that
interested. I remember those days—the piano teacher came to the home, the
doctor also came to the home—and I just listened to his lessons. When the les-
son was finished he would go to the schoolyard and play, and apparently I went
to the piano and reproduced everything that the teacher had required of him.
So my parents decided that they were giving piano lessons to the wrong child.
That’s how I started.

I would like you to talk further on the question of how to make a crescendo or a forte in
Beethoven, in Chopin, in Mozart. What is a crescendo or a sforzando or where is the phrase
driving in Beethoven, as opposed to Mozart, for example?

Well, one might say there are certain stylistic criteria or concerns. A crescendo
in Mozart is probably not, or possibly not, as violent as . . . But, you know, there
are so many different instances, different kinds of crescendos . . . It really
depends on the context, on the material. Is it a crescendo that is like a bloom-
ing, an opening of a flower, it just increases in a kind of breadth and scope and
light; or is it an aggressive crescendo? And this can happen in any composer.
And what distinguishes between the composers is a question of stylistic con-
cern. You wouldn’t play as loud in Mozart as in Beethoven . . . No, no . . . Trying
to make generalisations is very dangerous. So I prefer not to generalise. I just
say that the individual contexts you have to determine by what is going on in
the music.

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 An Interview with Leon Fleisher

I once have seen a television programme (broadcasted on ARTE)1 where you talked about
your ordeal with focal dystonia. I don’t remember all the details but one question comes
to my mind as you mentioned before the “inner ear.” Has your ordeal with focal dystonia
brought you to even more emphasis on the inner ear, consciously or unconsciously?

I don’t think that emphasis on hearing in your head, hearing the music, had
any influence one way or the other on my dystonia. Dystonia is a neurological
movement disorder. It is in the same class as Parkinson’s [disease], which is the
most prevalent disorder. Then comes a category, which is “essential tremors,”
and a third category is “dystonia.” It is comparatively recently that it has been
identified. And there are two kinds of dystonia. One is genetic; it attacks the
whole body and produces uncontrolled and involuntary contractions of certain
muscles, people become contorted and it’s very painful. The other kind of dys-
tonia, which is my kind, is called “focal” or “task specific”; it only attacks a mus-
cle or a group of muscles in doing a specific task, usually where it hurts—for a
musician it is in the hands, for a horn player it is in the lips, and there is nothing
to be done . . . Glass blowers, surgeons, golfers . . . And the irony of it is that
it is not painful. At least if we could suffer from it there would be some sense
of justification. And no one knows what causes it. There are some hypotheses,
what is called “repetitive stress syndrome,” but it’s not sure. So there are no
known causes and there is no cure for it. But some doctor figured out that they
could alleviate the symptoms by the administration of a terrible poison, which
is Botox—Botulinum toxin, type A. Women and men get it administered for
cosmetic and pathological reasons. What it does is that the poison paralyses
whatever muscle it is injected into. And in my case the fourth and fifth fingers
of the right hand, which wanted to do “that” and stay that way (involuntarily
and uncontrolled), if they got a very small amount of Botox, they would be par-
alysed and therefore not contract. It allows the opposed muscles, the extensors
to be more effective. So that is what that condition is. I get those injections
once every four months. There are some ten thousand musicians around the
world who suffer from focal dystonia—and they don’t like to let it be known,
because if it gets out, their chops will be affected. So they disguise it, they get
“indisposed” or “cold” or flu, or something . . . I didn’t do that. I got up on
my legs and screamed. This is already back 1964 or 1965. So I went through
thirty, thirty-five years of not playing with my right hand—but trying everyday.
It made me start teaching much more. And I started conducting. And I have
had such pleasures from these activities, such satisfactions, that if I had to do
the whole thing all over again I am not so sure I would change it, you know?

1 The reference is almost certainly to Leon Fleisher: Les leçons d’un maître, directed by Mark Kidel (2001).

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 The Inner Ear

I have a more personal question: you mentioned today Schnabel a couple of times. Could
you talk a bit about Schnabel and your work with him?

Oh, this could go on and on for a long time . . . Besides being, historically, one
of the most important figures of the twentieth century . . . I think that the nine-
teenth century was filled with bad habits—that’s when performers began to
emerge as being differentiated from composers/performers, and this whole
idea of playing for the public rather than just for the court, or the duke, or the
count, or the archbishop. In order to have success they began changing the
composer’s intention because that was thought to be more successful for the
public. And then came Schnabel and another musician from a different angle
but with the same motivation: that was Toscanini. I think between Schnabel
and Toscanini they brought back the integrity of the composer. It’s a very inter-
esting relationship: it’s a triadic relationship between composer, performer,
and listener. The performer is indispensable, because without the performer
the music simply remains black dots on a piece of paper. It needs to be brought
to life by a performer. But the performer is not the centre of attention—the
music is the centre of attention. There is a very fine line to walk: to be indispen-
sable and yet to be only the vessel from the composer to the listener.
Schnabel was the most inspired and inspiring person I have ever met in my
life, which doesn’t say much particularly. The level of his music making con-
stantly took you out of yourself, and you lived on another level of human aware-
ness. One thing that I followed him in doing was his way of teaching. He had
only a small handful of students at a time, but he invited all to be present at
everybody else’s lessons, which was of enormous benefit, as if we were four stu-
dents at a time, we would hear four times the repertoire. We would all share
the challenges and we would have an overview of music that was invaluable—
whether it was Spanish, Russian, or German music, there are almost physical
laws of music. Laws are, of course, meant to be broken (because they are man-
made), but if you are going to break the law you have to realise that it is a law,
why it’s a law, and why you are breaking it. And all of this began to make a pool
of thought, a pool of feeling, a reservoir that was irreplaceable and almost inde-
scribable. Ten years I worked with him, from the age of nine to nineteen. It is
almost as if he had two different lives: when he taught in Berlin, back in the
1920s and 1930s, his students were not always positive, they said he could be
sarcastic, and I think he damaged, psychologically, some of his pupils, who then
taught in the same manner; but when I met him he already had moved to Italy.
I couldn’t imagine that crossing that border would make that huge difference,
but he was like a Santa Claus. He was smiling; his English, his command of
English, was remarkable. He spoke a bit like Richard Burton with a German
accent, a slow speech where every syllable was caressed and massaged. He was
never abusive, but he demanded a lot and he could become impatient when
you were slow in responding. He was a remarkable person.

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 An Interview with Leon Fleisher

references
Brendel, Alfred. 2001. “Notes on a Fleisher, Leon, and Randy Stewart. 2004.
Complete Recording of Beethoven’s “Arts News Leon Fleisher Interview.”
Piano Works.” In Alfred Brendel on Music: KSMU—Ozarks Public Radio. Accessed 12
Collected Essays, 16–29. Chicago: A August 2015. http://ksmu.org/post/arts-
Capella Books. Essay first published news-leon-fleisher-interview#stream/0.
in German as “Anmerkungen zu einer Kidel, Mark, dir. 2001. Leon Fleisher: Les leçons
Gesamtaufnahme der Klavierwerke d’un maître. Paris: ARTE / Les Films d’ici.
Beethovens” (Hi Fi Stereophonie, May First broadcast 30 January 2002.
1966).

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