Antonei Sergejvitch Tartarov

Antonei Sergejvitch Tartarov is a pseudonym of the Swiss pianist and composer Jean-Jacques Hauser (born June 30, 1932, † February 22, 2009).

As a Tartarov he gave a concert on April 16, 1968 in the Great Tonhallesaal in Zurich in front of an audience of around 2,000. The concert consisted to a small extent of original works by Alexander Nikolajewitsch Scriabin , Béla Bartók and Maurice Ravel , the main part of the evening was played by Hauser with improvisations in the style of important composers who were his specialty. He presented an alleged fragment of Ludwig van Beethoven's 33rd piano sonata , an alleged rondo by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart on a “Swiss Song” (the Sechseläutenmarsch ), a “Second Toccata” by Sergei Sergejewitsch Prokofjew and a “Great Fantasy” by Franz Liszt . Furthermore, improvisations on the melodies of several folk songs were part of the concert program.

background

The Swiss deep-sea diver, computer pioneer and entrepreneur Hannes Keller was the organizer of this concert, who invented and built up the mysterious figure Tartarov in advance with a ten-day media campaign, so that the concert evening was sold out. The full recording of this concert and complete information is available on the organizer's website. All proceeds from the concert were donated to UNICEF .

The mute Tartarov was originally a stable boy on a farm in the Ukraine , who developed particularly authentic forms of expression on an old grand piano due to his muteness. The reason for the silence of the figure is obvious, because the almost absurdly disguised pianist Hauser could not have understood a question put in Russian. It was particularly revealing that an insider tried beforehand to clear up the hoax and turned to the operator of the concert hall and the press. Since no one believed her because of Keller's seriousness and after his convincing media campaign, the concert took place anyway.

meaning

The concert did away with the almost metaphysical devotion to the composers by showing that improvisation, as it is still practiced on the organ or in jazz in contemporary music practice, can convincingly imitate historical styles on other instruments as well. It has become unusual in the classical concert business, although some pianists such as B. Friedrich Gulda still used them occasionally. It was common and popular up into the 19th century, as the examples of Bach , Mozart or Franz Liszt and other composers and virtuosos of the 19th century show. Improvisation competitions are still held today not only on the organ.

At the end of the concert, Keller gave a short speech that clarified the matter and offered the misled audience reimbursement of the entrance fee and compensation. Quotation from this address: "So I [...] took the liberty of transforming the audience's negative bias into a positive one for the duration of this concert." This statement can be heard on the Keller website just like the complete recording of the concert, see under web links . From this it becomes clear that the audience of traditional concerts would hardly have been willing to attend an evening with improvisations by a Jean-Jacques Hauser, while they enthusiastically accepted a hitherto unknown Russian “miracle pianist” with a correspondingly dramatic résumé who played supposedly little-known original works would have. The program booklet was a parody of romantically transfiguring accompanying texts.

criticism

Numerous newspapers reported on the strange concert, with different judgments, sometimes benevolent, sometimes incomprehensible to hostile. Since Keller clarified the truth about this concert in a short address at the end, no false information about the music was conveyed. According to Keller, no one has reclaimed the entrance fee. However, the experiment was not in the sense of the reproducibility of a scientific study.

literature

• Dieter Kühn : Lion music. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1979, ISBN 3-518-10984-7 , pp. 35-50.

Web links

• Website for Antonei Sergejvitch Tartarov