Andras Schiff: "Music Comes Out Of Silence"

Books about music by eminent musicians are rare. Books about music are usually written by amateurs, journalists, critics, or academic musicologists. A refreshing glass of water from an eminent musician is the book “Music comes out of Silence” by the Hungarian pianist Andras Schiff. Schiff is a celebrated pianist, but I know his playing only from a recording in a Brahms piano quintet (with the Takacs Quartet). No views on his playing, but I loved his book and find it engrossing reading. Excellent ideas on cadenzas, “original instruments”, pianos versus harpsichords and clavichords. On most pages he has me nodding in agreement. The book is interspersed, interestingly, with his views on modern Hungarian politics, and on growing up in a Jewish community in Hungary during the 1950s and 60s, and in the communist state for many years thereafter.

Schiff, born in Budapest in 1953, is roughly of my generation (albeit a decade or so younger) so we share many of the same experiences and views as to conductors and instrumentalists. Schiff is a devotee, above all, of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert (with a few oddities such as Schumann, Mendelssohn and Bartok). His views are stimulating and thoughtful and we usually agree: “does anyone really enjoy 75 minutes of harpsichord playing?” when discussing Bach's Goldberg Variations. Many of his youthful heroes such as the Busch String Quartet, and Otto Klemperer, are also my youthful heroes, and I was interested to read that he, like me, grew up in the 1950s with a 78 rpm set of the Mendelssohn violin concerto played by Yehudi Menuhin (with George Enescu conducting). Halfway through reading his book, I looked out Edwin Fischer's recording of Bach's 48 Preludes & Fugues, and they will be next in my CD player. Interesting books get you thinking and reminiscing. My interest piqued by Schiff's thoughts on Bach's Goldberg Variation, I have ordered a CD of the work recorded by him and I'll see how it checks out against my current favourite (Beatrice Rana). Reading between the lines, I sense that Schiff and I agree on thumbs down concerning Glenn Gould in the Goldbergs. We both appear to agree, however, on the absolute pre-eminence of Johann Sebastian Bach. He is a little more pro-Beethoven than I am, but that may be down to him being a pianist. We both agree on Mozart and Schubert though, again as a pianist, Georg Frideric Händel does not get much space in Schiff's reminiscing, and we have to disagree on Bela Bartok (but Schiff is a Hungarian, after all). He appears to be a less enamoured of the music of Rachmaninov and Shostakovich than I am, but maybe again that's because he is Hungarian and they were Russians.

As I started off by saying: stimulating and thoughtful books by practising musicians are rare. “Music comes out of Silence” by Andras Schiff is a laudable exception and makes stimulating reading for music lovers, as well as for pianists and keyboard players.