Claudio Arrau

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Claudio Arrau (1974)

Claudio Arrau León (born February 6, 1903 in Chillán , Chile ; † June 9, 1991 in Mürzzuschlag , Austria ) was a Chilean pianist .

Life

Claudio Arrau as a child

Claudio Arrau was the youngest of three children of the married couple Dr. Don Carlos and Lucretia Leon de Arrau. His mother, who was 43 when he was born, gave piano lessons. His father, who worked as an ophthalmologist in Chillán, died in a riding accident when his son Claudio was one year old.

Arrau made his first public appearance at the age of five. A grant from the Chilean government enabled him from 1913 to continue his studies in Berlin at the Stern Conservatory . His teacher Martin Krause , one of the last students of Franz Liszt , not only taught Arrau, but also replaced his father, who died early, and ensured that Arrau received a comprehensive education. Martin Krause died when Arrau was 15 years old. Out of respect for his teacher and his lessons based on Liszt's teaching, he refused any other piano teacher and perfected his technical and musical mastery alone from then on. Around 1919 he met the then 13-year-old pianist Grete Sultan in Berlin , with whom he had a lifelong, close friendship. In 1920 he gave his first concert with the Berlin Philharmonic .

Memorial plaque on the house at Stübbenstrasse 8 in Berlin-Schöneberg , where Arrau lived from 1930 to 1937

After an American tour in 1923/24, Arrau fell into a deep human and pianistic crisis, which he, with the help of the analyst Dr. Abrahamson slowly overcame in Berlin. From 1925 to 1940 he was a professor at the Stern Conservatory. From 1935 to 1937 he performed the complete pianistic works of Bach , Mozart and Schubert in concert series . In 1937 he married the Frankfurt mezzo-soprano Ruth Schneider. The marriage resulted in three children: Carmen (1938–2006), Mario (1940–1988) and Christopher (* 1959).

During the Second World War (1940/41) Arrau emigrated to the USA and settled with his family in the New York borough of Queens . In the following decades he toured all over the world and gave over 100 concerts a year. Despite this high workload and the development of an enormous repertoire, Arrau dealt with many cultural and intellectual topics in addition to music. He read a lot on his concert tours and, in addition to German, learned English, French and Italian. In 1967 he set up the Claudio Arrau Foundation in New York to promote young musicians.

In Chile he gave only two piano recitals between 1960 and 1983, both in July 1967 in Santiago . According to Allan Kozinn , Arrau rejected both the socialism of the government of Salvador Allende (1970–1973) and the subsequent military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973–1990). In 1983 the Chilean Ministry of Culture awarded Arrau the National Art Prize. In 1984 Arrau officially accepted the award. He ended his boycott and after 17 years gave another concert in Chile: On May 12, 1984 he performed piano concertos by Beethoven and Brahms in the Santiago Opera House. The audience thanked them with standing applause for 12 minutes and urged Arrau to return to the stage 15 times. A solo evening followed on May 15, and an extraordinary concert with two piano concertos by Beethoven in the Cathedral of Santiago on May 18. The following day the concerts were broadcast nationwide on television.

In April 1988, Arrau lost his son Mario in a traffic accident. In June 1988 Arrau recorded some Mozart piano sonatas in Switzerland , completing the project that had begun fifteen years earlier to record all of Mozart's sonatas. In April 1989 his wife Ruth died. In June 1989, Arrau fell on the stairs of his New York home. He injured his right wrist and shoulder so that he could no longer give concerts. During his convalescence, he lived with a relative in neighboring Nassau County for several months . In April 1990 he moved to Munich . In October 1990 he gave two farewell concerts in Mexico City , once with the city's Philharmonic Orchestra under Luis Herrera de la Fuente , followed a few days later by a solo program.

Arrau's grave in Chillán

At the age of 88, Arrau began a planned recording of the entire piano works by Johann Sebastian Bach : In March 1991, he recorded four of Bach's six partitas in La Chaux-de-Fonds , Switzerland . These were his last studio recordings. He wanted to perform again on June 11, 1991 to honor the opening of the Johannes Brahms Museum in Mürzzuschlag, Austria, with works by Beethoven, Mozart and Liszt. For June 14, Arrau had planned another solo evening in Düsseldorf, at which Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was to present him with the gold medal of the Royal Philharmonic Society . However, Arrau suffered an intestinal obstruction in Mürzzuschlag and died on June 9 after an emergency operation in the local hospital. Arrau left two children and six grandchildren. His grave is in his hometown of Chillán in Chile.

Act

repertoire

In 80 years of piano virtuosity, Arrau developed a huge repertoire that included classical as well as romantic and impressionist composers. According to information from 1963, Arrau's repertoire at that time would have been estimated to have been sufficient to give 76 solo evenings without repeating any of the works; there were also more than 60 works for piano and orchestra. Arrau had performed all of the piano works by Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, among others, as well as works by lesser-known composers such as Alkan and Busoni .

Arrau was one of the first pianists to perform and record complete works. He was of the opinion that you always have to play all the works in a cycle. In 1965, for example, he announced: “I will now do a cycle with all of Debussy's piano works , and then I'll do the Ravel series.” Arrau didn't want to commit to any musical epoch. A musician has to interpret all great music well, and pianists who commit themselves to a certain epoch are amateurs. His interpretations of Beethoven 's sonatas are just as famous and recognized as his recordings of the works of Franz Liszt and Claude Debussy. The French writer Julien Green described Claudio Arrau as the greatest interpreter of the works of Robert Schumann .

Recordings

Claudio Arrau (1929)

Out of his many recordings, the following stand out:

student

Claudio Arrau (1974)

Arrau has given classes throughout his career; a large number of students attest to this (including Karlrobert Kreiten , Donald Sutherland, Rafael de Silva, Roberto Szidon , Garrick Ohlsson, Heinz Zimbehl, Greville Rothon, Philip Lorenz and Wolfgang Leibnitz ).

The pianist Victoria von Arx, lecturer at the University at Albany , published a book about Claudio Arrau's piano lessons in 2014. She had collected the material mainly from interviews with students still alive in Arrau, and she also evaluated tape recordings of lessons and videos of Arrau's piano playing. She had also been a student of two Arrau students herself. According to von Arx, the crowd of Arrau's students grew steadily thanks to his idealistic commitment as a teacher and included professional pianists as well as beginners and amateurs, all in all musicians from “at least three generations”. As a teacher, Arrau had consistently emphasized the importance of artistic expression, intellectual power and creativity and downplayed the sensational effect of virtuosity.

Arrau as editor

Arrau published Beethoven's piano sonatas as a two-volume Urtext edition at Edition Peters . The work on the edition, which was carried out with the collaboration of his student and assistant Philip Lorenz, lasted from 1969 to 1978. The first volume (sonatas 1–15) appeared in 1973, the second volume (sonatas 16–32) in 1978. The The edition is designed according to today's principles of an original text, provided that all additions by the editor are marked as such. While special notes on dynamics and phrasing with special characters appear in the music text itself, other performance-related notes on the individual sonatas, such as metronome indications or suggestions for a historically correct execution of the ornamentation are listed as an appendix at the end of the volumes.

Since Beethoven gave only sparse indications of the fingering , Arrau added his own fingerings. Arrau's fingerings differ significantly from those of the other editions. They reflect Arrau's pianism and many are difficult to understand without knowledge of his technique. These include his views on the use of arm weight, the looseness of the entire body, various forms of movement such as rotational, circular and vibration movements, the importance of the thumb and his conviction that finger movements can never be seen independently of the arm. The special features of the Arrauschen fingering include the systematic omission of the fourth finger in the series 3-4-5 and the frequent replacement of the fourth finger with the third for double fingerings and chords, because in Arrau's opinion the fourth finger is too weak and not is agile enough. The fingers are used according to their physiological conditions in order to achieve the greatest possible clarity in technical and musical expression in connection with the required hand and arm movements. This is a radical departure from the older piano method, which believed that frequent use could make the weak fingers just as strong as the strong, an impossibility, as physiology teaches and was already recognized by Chopin, who also uses the fingers according to their physiological requirements began. This often leads to idiosyncratic fingerings that can only be used meaningfully by the user of the Arrau edition if the underlying principles of Arrau are observed. Arrau was well aware of the peculiarity of his fingerings and it happened that at work he exclaimed, “How is a person supposed to understand how to do this? That must seem completely crazy ”. For this reason Arrau sometimes put his own fingerings in brackets and gave the so-called normal fingering as an alternative.

Awards (selection)

literature

  • Ingo Harden and Gregor Willmes: pianist profiles. 600 performers: their biography, their style, their recordings . With the collaboration of Peter Seidle. Bärenreiter-Verlag, Kassel u. a., 2008, ISBN 978-3-7618-1616-5 . Article: Claudio Arrau . Pp. 34-37.
  • Ingo Harden: Claudio Arrau. An artist portrait (= Ullstein book No. 40001). Ullstein-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main u. a. 1983, ISBN 978-3-548-40001-3 (with an audio cassette).
  • David Dubal: The Art of the Piano. Its performers, literature, and recordings . Third edition. Amadeus Press, Pompton Plains, New Jersey 2004. (1st edition 1989). ISBN 1-57467-088-3 . Article: Claudio Arrau , pp. 18-22.
  • Claudio Arrau: Living with Music. Recorded by Joseph Horowitz . German by Rudolf Hermstein. Scherz Verlag, Bern 1984. ISBN 3-502-18012-1 . (Original English edition under the title: Conversations with Arrau . Alfred A. Knopf, New York 1982. ISBN 0-394-51390-8 .)
  • Robert Christian Bachmann: Talking about great interpreters. Hallwag Verlag, Bern 1976.
  • Moritz von Bredow: rebellious pianist. The life of Grete Sultan between Berlin and New York. Schott Music, Mainz 2012, ISBN 978-3-7957-0800-9 . (Biography of the childhood friend Claudio Arraus with many references to Arrau as well as photos and letters published for the first time).
  • Victoria A. von Arx: Piano Lessons with Claudio Arrau. A guide to his philosophy and techniques . Oxford University Press, New York 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-992434-9 .

See also

Web links

Commons : Claudio Arrau  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. List of teachers at the Stern Conservatory (1850–1936)
  2. ^ Joachim Kaiser : One hundred and fifty concerts a year. Die Zeit , April 23, 1965, accessed June 8, 2016 .
  3. Claudio Arrau: Chronology, section 1941–1962 and section 1963–1983 arrauhouse.org (English)
  4. a b Allan Kozinn : Claudio Arrau, pianist, Is Dead at 88. The New York Times, June 10, 1991, accessed on June 8, 2016 (English).
  5. a b c Claudio Arrau: Chronology, section 1984–1991 arrauhouse.org (English)
  6. Pictures from the funeral service and burial on June 16, 1991 in Chillán arrauhouse.org
  7. ^ Thomas F. Johnson: Arrau at 60 , in: Musical America, March 1963
  8. Arrau. It's madness , in: Der Spiegel , April 7, 1965
  9. At arrauhouse.org you will find a complete discography , sorted by composer in 43 submenus.
  10. Victoria von Arx: Piano Lessons with Claudio Arrau: A Guide to His Philosophy and Techniques. Oxford University Press, New York 2014, ISBN 978-0-19-992434-9 . See also the book's website .
  11. Maria Razumovskaya: A Virtuoso's Legacy on sineris.es. Review of the book Piano Lessons with Claudio Arrau .
  12. s. The publication of the Beethoven sonatas. Conversation with Philip Lorenz . In: Claudio Arrau: Living with Music. Recorded by Joseph Horowitz . German by Rudolf Hermstein. Scherz Verlag, Bern 1984. ISBN 3-502-18012-1 . Pp. 241-251.
  13. s. see the chapter on piano technology in: Claudio Arrau: Living with music. Recorded by Joseph Horowitz . German by Rudolf Hermstein. Scherz Verlag, Bern 1984. ISBN 3-502-18012-1 . Pp. 155-170.
  14. Claudio Arrau: Living with Music. Recorded by Joseph Horowitz . German by Rudolf Hermstein. Scherz Verlag, Bern 1984. ISBN 3-502-18012-1 . P. 245
  15. Claudio Arrau: Living with Music. Recorded by Joseph Horowitz . German by Rudolf Hermstein. Scherz Verlag, Bern 1984. ISBN 3-502-18012-1 . P. 249
  16. H. Sachs, D. Manildi: Rubinstein: a life . Grove Press, 1995, p. 379.