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GG, Helfgott & Dutton
Hello miners,
I recently found the following in The Spectator (no relation to the
American Spectator but, I hear, of the same high standard), published in
London. Anyone know who Dennis Dutton is? Is he an f-miner? If not, why
not? My apologies for the length of the article but (a) DD is obviously a
keen GG fan, (b) there was a Helfgott thread on the f-minor list a couple
of months ago, (c) DD mentions the dreaded Rach... word (ditto re
threads), and (d) this is one of the best-written reviews of a living
person I have read for some time -- so, there should be enough there to
interest most of the people on this list. Is DD correct in saying that
Gould never sang during live concerts?
(BTW, I hope The Spectator and DD don't sue me for plagiarism or
unlicensed copying. If they do I shall be looking for sturdy support from
the f-minor ranks. You have been warned. I expect everyone to say they
didn't read it. Even better, you should all claim to be illiterate. I
know I will...and I can prove it.)
--------------------
THE SPECTATOR 3 May 1997 (pp 46-47)
Losing that shine
-----------------
David Helfgott's piano recitals
have generated bitter controversy.
Denis Dutton explains why
-------------------------------
With the musical reputation of David Helfgott now in tatters, the
question persists how an incompetent, mentally disturbed pianist has
found himself touring to sold-out halls, promoted in the expensive
souvenir programme as `one of the world's leading pianists'. Why don't
his champions snap out of the delusion that his recitals are supreme
musical events? Is it despite or because of the most scathing reviews
dumped on any pianist in recent memory that Helfgott continues to get
rapturous, standing ovations?
The Helfgott entourage, of course, has been asking for it. The repeated
descriptions of Helfgott as a `genius', as `the Nineties version of
Horowitz and Rubinstein', in the words of an official of his recording
company, have rubbed knowledgeable piano buffs the wrong way. Comparisons
of his grunts and mutterings during performances with the behaviour of
the great Glenn Gould are downright offensive, and not just in terms of
technical and intellectual capacities: Gould never sang during live
concerts.
Recent events in North America duplicate the pattern established by
Helfgott's visit several weeks ago here in New Zealand, where he began
his world tour. Perhaps his handlers were hoping for a gentle start,
working up toward the concert halls and critics of North America and
Britain. But even though people in this green and pleasant land are
polite to a fault, Helfgott's five recitals generated more acrimony and
hurt feelings than any musical episode in years.
New Zealand critics and seasoned listeners dismissed his performances as
inaccurate, eccentric, self-indulgent and amateurish. There were repeated
references to circus and freak shows, and assertions that without the
film Shine no one would take Helfgott seriously as a concert musician.
Given Helfgott's overt displays of mental peculiarity, his playing put
one observer in mind of Dr Johnson's remark about the dog that walked on
its hind legs: `It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it
done at all.' Another had the uneasy feeling that he wasn't so much
listening to a piano recital as eavesdropping on someone's therapy
session.
To judge by the outrage and indignation these criticisms provoked, you'd
have thought someone had denounced Sir Edmund Hillary as a poofter or
mocked the Special Olympics. Among the dozens of concert-goers
complaining about blunt newspaper reviews, one woman wrote: `This wasn't
just a piano recital, it was a chance to touch the world of an
extraordinary human being, and everyone with a heart will have been
enriched by the experience.' Another stated that never had she been `so
moved and enjoyed a recital so much'. One person decried the inaccuracy
and prejudice a critic displayed: `The only thing the reviewer got
right,' he said, `was to notice that Helfgott was not a very good
pianist.'
Ah, yes. That any purely musical evaluation of Helfgott `missed the
point' was an accusation repeatedly heard. An academic defender of a
Helfgott performance wrote that the concert `was part of a wonderful and
deeply moving story of music and the human spirit. The story was
brilliantly portrayed in a film which most of the audience had seen, but
the story was also true, and now the audience were part of it.'
It was obvious that Helfgott's audiences were made up largely of Shine
fans who had never before attended a classical piano recital. They
applauded between movements of Beethoven's Waldstein, and even during the
Chopin F minor Ballade, in which they were abetted by Helfgott himself.
New Zealand audiences consistently mistook the soft cascade of chords
which precedes the stormy finale of the Ballade for its end. As cheers
and clapping began, Helfgott would spring to his feet and bow to what
then became general applause. Bows completed, he shot back to the piano
and played the last bars of the Ballade, then stood for another, even
more excited round. The same routine has been followed elsewhere on his
tour.
Helfgott plays with suggestions of what once might have been a fluent
natural technique. His tone is pleasant, but absent is any sense
whatsoever of an organising musical intelligence. In the slow Chopin
Etude Opus 10 No. 3, for example, he would lavish close, obsessive
attention in some phrase or detail, only to seem vacantly distracted in
the next bar. If, as Goethe claimed, architecture is frozen music, David
Helfgott is the musician who finally proves the converse: that music can
also be melted architecture - a structureless rubble of notes.
The Ballade also rambled senselessly, accompanied, as with everything
else, by Helfgott's continuous chatter and atonal singing. One especially
intrusive squeal was followed by a wink in the style of Victor Borge. The
audience's laughter and approval weren't so much a knowing response to a
comedian, as the indulgence of a child showing off one time too many.
The Waldstein was a collection of fragments, alternating slow swoons over
the keyboard with frenetic passage work. The shallow fingering produced a
smooth, blurred legato which masked the fact that whole handfuls of notes
failed to sound. The dropped notes, however, were less of a defect than
the complete lack of dramatic tension. It was Beethoven on Prozac, but to
the crowd it merited a standing ovation and demands for encores.
There is no doubt that many Shine fans are enormously taken by the
movie's melodramatic story. Here is a tale of abuse and breakdown,
therapy and slow recovery, and final redemption by the love of a good
woman. The cult of burning genius is represented most mawkishly in the
scenes where John Gielgud exhorts his young student to conquer the
Rachmaninov Third before it conquers him. It's the sheerest Hollywood
drivel: musical art as a touch of genius passed on from a great teacher
to his pupil.
As for opinions that Helfgott's dubbed-in piano-playing in the movie is
`brilliant', I averted my eyes from the screen to assess its actually
pianistic, as opposed to cinematic, qualities. Sure enough, it was the
choppy, technically deficient, unstructured playing I'd heard the week
before in the concert hall, except that there were fewer actual mistakes.
The only piano passage in the film that struck me as adequate (an excerpt
from Beethoven's Appassionata which Helfgott performs once he's on the
comeback trail) turned out, on close reading of the credits, to be the
only significant part dubbed by a pianist other than David Helfgott.
Anyway, what should I have expected? The film did what films do: it
created a fantasy. In truth, it would require a literal miracle for any
pianist to take a decade's holiday from serious practice, undergo
electric shock treatment, and who knows what medications, and come out
the other end still a virtuoso. David Helfgott was and still is mentally
disabled. Whatever its aetiology, his disease is not something explained
by life with an unpleasant father. This is a view shared by Helfgott's
sister, Margaret, who has objected to the `derogatory and insulting'
portrayal of their father in the film. As for their mother, who now lives
in Israel, she has stated that Shine `haunts me day and night. .. I feel
an evil has been done'. It should hardly come as a surprise to learn that
Helfgott's abilities as a pianist are as fancifully portrayed in the film
as are other features of his life.
The result of this complex crossing of musical truth and dramatic fiction
has been a deep and bitter controversy. The lovers of the tradition of
piano artistry from Rachmaninov and Josef Hofmann through to Gould and
Martha Argerich are absolutely right to find Helfgott's incoherent,
grunting performances a travesty of piano art. But how then do we account
for the feelings of his fans? They leave his concerts inspired by a deep
sense of human communication. Quality of piano playing is for them not
the issue, rather the triumph of someone who has been hauled back from
the abyss. Still, I don't think celebrity and victimhood alone can
account for the intensity of their emotions.
Writing of Helfgott's Boston debut in the New York Times, Anthony
Tommasini remarked that `it is hard to imagine that listeners, whose
first experience of Beethoven's colossal Waldstein Sonata was Helfgott's
sketchy monodynamic performance, went away with any idea of this music's
boldness and feisty vitality'. It may be hard to imagine, but not
impossible. Doubtless there were many thousands of music listeners in the
19th century wh only knew the Waldstein through amateur performances even
less adequate than Helfgott's. I'd be reluctant to say that none of them
knew about the boldness and vitality of the music.
Even a flaccid, inaccurate performance of the Waldstein is a presentation
of one of the summits of piano music. If a naive audience finds in the
experience of the Waldstein that new musical vistas are being opened
before it, perhaps it is right. The same can be said for Chopin, even
badly played. If Helfgott's audience is listening intently for the spark
of genius, who can blame them for being a little confused? Their only
mistake is to imagine it's the particular talent of David Helfgott that
is achieving some miracle of human expression and musical pleasure. There
are geniuses at work in Helfgott's recitals, but they are our old friends
Chopin, Liszt and Beethoven - minds whose musical ideas will always
outlive marketing hype.
I hope that some of the Helfgott fans move on to better things, that in a
few years names such as Ashkenazy, Schiff and Pletnev will be familiar to
them. Maybe by then, they'll look back on the Helfgott episode as some of
us look back on the Pastoral Symphony sequence from Fantasia. It was
kitsch, to be sure, but it could also be a young person's first glimpse
of Mount Beethoven.
Alas, for me, sadly watching Helfgott's dabblings and the audience's
unrestrained enthusiasm, it wasn't Beethoven, Horowitz or even Disney I
was thinking of. It was the spectre of Blind Tom.
The mentally retarded Tom, born a slave in Georgia in 1850, was toured by
his owner in the late 19th century as `the greatest musical prodigy since
Mozart'. Lauded by the media of his day as `incredibly gifted', Ton
attracted more attention than all other American pianists put together.
He even played at the White House. Tom died in obscurity in New Jersey in
1908. Where his exploiters retired to is unrecorded.
There's no likelihood that David Helfgott will die in the poorhouse. Nor,
it must be said, will the producers, associate producers, managers and
even lawyers listed in the back of his programme. But his concerts will
continue to raise vexing questions as he and his entourage stumble and
mutter towards the sold-out Royal Festival Hall on Monday.
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Denis Dutton teaches the philosophy of art at the University of
Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand. He is editor of the journal
Philosophy and Literature (Johns Hopkins University Press). Further
recitals by David Helfgott will take place in London, Nottingham,
Birmingham and Glasgow; for tour information call: 0990 274444.
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End of quote. I hope you all enjoyed it re GG, although if DD is right
about Helfgott -- and most critics seem to agree with him -- Helfgott is
to be pitied rather than admired.