This weekend's find at the Kiwanis Sale is Seraphim ID-6047, Mozart Complete Music for Piano Solo, volume 1. The pianist is Walter Gieseking. 4 LPs, mono, just the way I like'em, for $3.

Gieseking is pretty interesting. He lived and performed in Germany through WWII and was not able to fully resume his international concert career until '53 or so. He was famous for his powers of musical memorization and concentration. He would prepare to perform a piece by studying the score and memorizing it, spending almost no time actually practicing the piano. In light of this I thought his comments on playing Mozart in the liner notes were interesting so I asked Joe to type them out for me:

This may sound paradoxical, but my opinion about Mozart's piano music is described best when I say that it is at the same time the most easy and the most difficult music to play correctly.

On the one side, it requires practically no particular effort. It is completely natural and easy to play Mozart. On the other side, it might be called very difficult for a musician to attain the stage at which technical command, musical feelings and all the mental and psychic faculties are so harmoniously coordinated that the fingers obey with the necessary amount of security the impulses of expression suggested by the natural flow and enchanting beauty of Mozart's melodic lines.

Of course, when I say "no particular effort," this means that the complete concentration on the task of performing a composition is taken for granted as the condition sine qua non, and that the utmost attention is given to every detail of technique, musical value and mood of expression, at every moment and without interruption. But not every composer makes it so easy (this is, of course, my personal feeling) to proceed from this concentration to the - shall I call it blessed and happy? - state of communion or identity, or at least the illusion of identity between composer and performer.

To Mozart, music must have been as normal and as instinctively natural as breathing. The easiness and perfection of his composing places his works above human frailty, above earthly laboriousness; makes them something that one is compelled to call superhuman, or metaphysical, or, simply, nature's beauty transcribed into sound!

Now the musician trying to recreate Mozart's inspirations to the fullest possible extent for his listeners must be also, as far as possible, above not only all technical problems, but also above the need of speculation, reflection, or any kind of cerebral work. There must not be any calculation of possible effects and a priori idea of interpretation.

The simple, natural beauty of Mozart's music which covers, in spite of this apparent simplicity (or shall we call it the masterful economy of a true genius?), such a wide range of emotion and expression, must be recreated in the simplest, most natural way, with no aim nor incentive than the feeling of admiration and, perhaps, happiness that springs out of such wonderful music.

I may confess that in the few works which were part of my concert repertoire before I made these recordings, the works which I should have known better than all the others, I experienced some difficulties. Having lost the complete freshness of approach, I could not immediately return to the spontaneous and inspiring pleasure, and the independence of feeling, which were such a great help in all the music that I had read and studied just enough to be well acquainted with every detail.

Mozart is technically no problem to sensitive fingers, to fingers that are accustomed to translating into sound the impulses given by the inner ear, fingers which know how to sing and breathe naturally in connection with the piano keys.

The listener may decide how far I was able to achieve my, or rather, Mozart's intentions. In any case, I hop that my recording will convey to others some of the spontaneous pleasure and deep joy that came to me out of Mozart's music.

Technically, I may mention that I scarcely touched the right pedal, because this device had not been invented, or was only so recently adapted to some pianos when Mozart wrote his music, that I feel he conceived piano music without taking the possibilities of the new pedal effects into consideration. The fuller sounding arpeggios or chords are held over with the fingers, often as long as the harmony doesn't change, this being the original meaning of playing legatissimo.

But let me repeat that these technical details are not the result of speculation or historical studies, though European experts confirmed my suspicion that Mozart used pianos without the pedal which we now call the right pedal. My desire for utmost clarity, which I felt was necessary for correct Mozart playing, was the compelling for playing without pedal; or, to be more precise, to use the right pedal only without making it conspicuous, without producing any pedal effects. To my ears, even one single note sounds different when it is played with pedal (with raised dampers), the resonance of all the strings tuned to overtones or to the tones of the same chord giving something veiled, something romantically overcharged (I won't say impure) to even a single, isolated note.

A pure, clear tone is not dry, even if it may seem so at first to ears accustomed to plenty of pedal. And I am not personally convinced that clarity of tone and beautiful expression are not incompatible just as the perfection of the classical form does not diminish the power of a composer's deepest feelings.

I'm going to post more music from this but for now here is the Kleiner Trauermarsch k453a, written according to the liner notes as an entry in the autograph album of Babette Ployer.