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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.

---------------------------------------------------------------------

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.