The piano is the easiest musical instrument to play, and the most difficult to be musical on. For it is firstly a machine, from whose depths anyone can conjure notes, thereby enabling any fool to believe he is producing music. But of course, it is not music at all but a series of sounds which might indeed have a melodic connection, just as the notes emanating from a barrel organ or a hurdy gurdy form the shape of a recognisable tune.
But the noise itself is not proof of musicality, merely of a certain mechanistic skill; musicality is the creation of the musician above and beyond the technical manipulations required to persuade the instrument to create the notes. Proof of musicality comes from grace and delicacy and emotion and intellect and intuition and timing; and of these, only the last comes close to being quantifiable, and even then in such limited ways as to be almost meaningless. For time is a vector quality, unitary and predictable; timing is scalar and subjective and wholly unpredictable. A composer might compose to a certain tempo; but it is the pianist who imposes his own temporal vision on the composition before him.
Sailing vessels
That is why great pianists are among the most prized of musicians. They work a machine, a great device which is the musical equivalent of a sailing vessel. It is perhaps no coincidence that the pianoforte, with its internal rigging of wire hausers and cables, came into existence at the same time that Europe was perfecting the three-decker, three-masted intercontinental sailing vessel. The technologies are not similar so much as parallel and related. Both depend on an intimate trigonometrical understanding and mastery of organised, structured stress. The quarterdeck of one is the keyboard of another.
And both developments explain the technological and musical eminence of Europe a quarter of a millennium ago. From one flowed the peopling of the Americas and Australasia and the spread of European empires across the globe; and from the other emanated the sonatas, etudes, nocturnes and fugues of the musical traditions of the continent of Europe, which was in time to transform the music of the world. Both achievements are intensely theoretical. Both probably result from the mathematical advances of Sir Isaac Newton.
Yet it is hardly a coincidence that the peoples who used the new mathematics to master the technologies and format of novel music forms were for the most part from the city-state cultures of Italy and Germany (with admittedly much help from the most musical empire in the history of the world, the largely landlocked Hapsburgs), while the maritime and imperial cultures of Britain, Holland, France and Spain employed the new intellectual tools to lay down oceanic ships to hold or build empires. In other words, if you made ships, you did not make pianos; and vice versa. Pianos are sailing ships on their side.
French pianist
The combination of the technology of the piano with musical keyboard genius is as exciting today as it was when the two came together for the first time, as the appearance tonight of the French pianist Francois-Frederic Guy at the National Concert Hall tonight will reliably testify. His programme manages to span the period during which the piano emerged, the earliest item being from the proto-piano days of Bach, when the piano-ancestors were only just emerging from harpsichordean seas and were beginning to turn fin to limb, with his English Suite, Number 1.
By the time that Beethoven was composing, a couple of generationslater (and the French, Spanish, Dutch and British were deploying their mastery of trigonometrical stress in fleet actions from Egypt to Ushant), musical technology had similarly advanced, so that the piano that we know today was an evolved reality. Beethoven was not merely the first great composer to write for the piano, but he understood the technical aspects of playing of it more completely than any of his contemporaries. His sonatas, "Moonlight" and "Pathetique", represent the first conjunction of composing genius with the new pianoforte technology: they are as much loved and remain as much of a musical challenge today as they were two centuries (or so) ago.
Just as Beethoven was a truly formidable player of the piano - and perhaps the first man to understand the role of the thumb in its playing - in performance, Liszt was the Beethoven of his day. Indeed, Beethoven acknowledged this, hailing him when the young Hungarian was merely 11 years old with a public kiss. Tonight's concert includes Liszt's "Funerailles", about which in all honesty, I know Schubert's Festive Acoustics, i.e., SFA. Which indeed is about as much as I know about Shostakovich's Prelude and Fugue which Francois-Frederick Guy is also playing tonight.
"Irresistible vitality"
F-F G has received the most extraordinary reviews for his performances around the world for his performances. "Magnificent. . .blessed with penetrating intelligence. . .and as an interpreter of Beethoven. . .something of a genius," murmured the Ameri- can Record Guide. Le Monde de la Musique spoke of "an irresistible vitality with stunning contrasts of dynamics and colours". Dear me, I wish I could write like that. Oops, hello, here comes some more: "His rare sense of polyphony and architecture allows for phrasing that can be tense in the extreme yet gently nuanced."
It is late notice, to be sure, for a concert tonight: but it is not too late to make a phone call and invite a friend or ten to witness unsurpassable 18th-century technology being matched with the musical genius of the 21st.