Exactly. These videos do not represent Hofmann at his best any more than the London or Moscow concerts represent Horowitz's best playing.
I think Sebok had it right when he said that for your fingers to be moveable you need to feel flexible in the forearm, shoulder and pelvis.
Clifford Curzon, an absolute master of the piano (I posted about him in the Master discussion group) studied with Schnabel and this talk by Curzon is instructive and eloquent.
Schnabel coined the terms "arming" and "handing" as analogues to "fingering" because they also play essential roles in the rendering of a musical gesture. Of course an obsessive attention to the mechanics of rendering the gesture could be disastrous. In other words, one does not gesture successfully by trying to command all the parts of the body to perform certain movements. Then the gesture becomes mechanical and meaningless.
The whole body is involved in musical gesturing but this gesturing should be extremely focused and directed the piano so that the piano becomes a perfect extension of this gesturing. This is what Horowitz and Curzon achieved in their playing.
The "Emperor" video doesn't even represent Hofmann's best playing? Wow. He had such amazing scales (better than I've ever heard from Horowitz) even when his technique was in a relative state of decline. I can only imagine what Hofmann's technique must've sounded like in his prime. I'll have to search for some of his earliest recordings.
What do you think was the reason for Hofmann's loss of technique? He didn't display any of the odd, potentially stressful hand positions that Horowitz did.
Perhaps correct technique is simply an issue of keeping the forearm free and preventing it from interfering with the natural flow of the fingers, as opposed to directly using the weight of the forearm to create sound. It would be ludicrous to watch Hofmann play scales and insist that finger independence has nothing to do with piano playing.
Well, Hofmann didn't lose his basic capability as a pianist and neither did Horowitz. Horowitz still did remarkable things in some of his worst concerts. Hofmann developed a serious drinking habit later in life and this might have affected his alertness and coordination. Also he didn't practice a whole lot and preferred to work with his gadgets and chemistry sets. He was a keen amateur inventor. So this might account for some of the missed notes and carelessness. But he can still do wonderful things.
Rachmaninoff himself once said that Hofmann is the best pianist in the world provided he is "in the mood."
I don't think he experienced a technical decline like Yehudi Menuhin because his fundamentals were strong. Incidentally, did you know he was a poor sight-reader? He relied on his phenomenal hearing and memory.
Hofmann's recordings probably don't do him full justice. I think Rachmaninoff was more serious about the quality of his recorded work. His recording of Liszt's Waldesrauschen is on youtube and it is a magnificent technical achievement.
I think the whole body should involved in piano technique. There are ways that arm movements can interfere with the fingers by pulling them out of alignment but there are also ways in which they can aid the fingers. It all depends on the overall coordination of the musical gesture. In Craft of Piano the goal is to have a floating assembly of bones where a the finger drops into the key and manipulates it. However this assembly has to be fluid and has to prepare the finger so it can articulate each note.
Yes, neither Hofmann or Horowitz completely lost their technique. So you think that a lack of practice was partly to blame for Hofmann's slight decline? Did he practice more when he was younger? In his book, he says that it takes a lot more work to maintain a big technique than to maintain a low-level technique.
Sometimes, I hear contradictory reports about how long pianists practice. In an interview from the 1930's, Horowitz was quoted as saying that he only practiced four hours a day. However, Gitta Gradova said that when he had to performance the Tchaikovsky Concerto in Bb minor, he would practice octaves for six hours a day and that he might spend five or six hours on two measures from a Chopin Mazurka. I would think that Horowitz's practice session would have to involve a lot more than just octaves or two measures from a Mazurka, so it's hard to believe that he was only practicing four hours a day if he was spending so many hours on individual passages.
I did hear that Hofmann was a poor sightreader, in Schonberg's book. I guess even great artists have their Achilles heels.
Glad to hear Hoffman was a poor sightreader!
I've noticed that pianists with (very) small hands often excell eg Larochas, Haskil. Probably they are forced to align by using body and arm whilst us with big hands easily adopt lazy habits like strechting and thus create tensions and unefficient movements. Trying to play like if you had a small hand can be very useful.
Technique is a fresh product and I'm pretty sure there is no way to keep a standard like Horowitz without regular maintainance-practice and then very intensive practicing before a major recital. Only Wanda knew how much Horowitz practiced. Pianists own statements about their practice habits I wouldn't consider as highly reliable. Or their wife's..
Now I guess that it also depends of what you want to acheive with your technique playing soft blues or Summertime in a bar is different to playing Rach#3 and doesn't require that much practicing.
I agree the Craft of Piano "method" with an accent on sceletality is a very clever way to set the mind on the right track it's like all pieces suddenly start to fit together.
Clara Haskil had huge hands from what I read. She could stretch as much as a twelfth. Her pianistic talent was certainly one of the most special. Have you heard the story of how she played Feux Follets after hearing it once? I doubt that even Hofmann was capable of doing some of the things she could.
Menuhin also confirmed that Horowitz was an obsessive practicer who basically lived to play the piano. Harold Schonberg wrote a book called the Glorious Ones about the legendary performers of classical music. Like his other books I think it is a pretty sloppy, careless piece of work. However in the chapter about Horowitz it does say that his finely polished miniatures were the result of work routines.
Clifford Curzon also used to work for hours on a few measures of music. Maybe with his relatively restricted repertoire Horowitz was capable of doing that kind of detailed work each day.
Maybe it was only those bars that presented the greatest problems to him and if he could get those bars right, the conception of the whole piece would start to clarify quickly. After all I doubt that these bars would present any crude mechanical difficulties to Horowitz. Have you read the story about how he was sight reading Moscheles etudes and stumbled on a difficult passage. He played it slowly once and then executed it perfectly and at speed the next time.
I suppose your right that pianists may not be honest about how long they practice. Maybe spending two measures on a Mazurka was the exception rather than the rule of his practice. However, if he had to spend six hours on octaves, how long would he have spent practicing runs? If that was part of Horowitz's regular practice routine, then I think he would have been practicing a lot longer than four hours- unless six hours of octave practice was another exception to his regular routine that he only did for very difficult pieces.
I do remember Schonberg telling the story about Horowitz quickly mastering the passage in the Moscheles, although should we doubt the validity of such an anecdote since we have seen that Schonberg tends to exaggerate? We also have the story about Leonid Hambro hearing Horowitz play two measures from a Liszt Etude 99 times in a row. Each repetition sounded just as good as the first one; some sounded even better than the first. Hambro asked him why he was practicing a passage he knew so well, and Horowitz said that he gets so nervous he must ensure that he can play the passage even if the house is on fire. Once again, if that was Horowitz's normal practice routine, I would think he was spending a lot more time at the keyboard than he cared to admit.
Yes, we should be suspicious of Schonberg's claims. But I think the point is that Horowitz could solve these basic mechanical coordination problems very quickly and he knew the keyboard topography and patterns and textures very well. Also he used to sight read and improvise a lot and these things might not count as disciplined, goal oriented practice.
Maybe he did more sight reading to familiarize himself with a composer and understand the composer's musical thinking. Then having selected pieces he finds interesting he might get into more detailed work. The final stage would be to form a template or basic set of restrictions for the whole piece within which he can play spontaneously.
I think it is much more instructive to ask about how Horowitz or any great pianist about the music and solves problems rather than how much time is spent. Sometimes the solutions come quickly, other times they require lots of experimentation and trial and error.
Horowitz used like pointing out Clementi's piano figurations and comparing them to Beethoven's and this way of thinking is essential because you have to understand the logic of the keyboard - how musical ideas and textures can be produced on the instrument. Liszt, Busoni and Rachmaninoff, being pianist composers, must have understood this better than most.
Regarding the Liszt etude, you also have to remember that pianists can sometimes have a fixation over a passage so that whenever it comes they get nervous. This can be completely idiosyncratic and unrelated to "difficulty." In fact the whole concept of technical difficulty tends to be very misleading.
Yeah Clara Haskil had huge hands I always mix that up with that she was very weak.And had a fantastic sound.A pity she didn't leave so many recordings She was one of the best !!
