Finally, You Can Look Them Up

When Grete Sultan walked onto the stage of Merkin Hall in New York late last June to perform the “Goldberg” Variations, she looked her age. It may not be gallant to say so, but that surely was what was on the mind of every single person in the large and distinguished audience. Her age happened to be 90 years and four days. She was not well and, in fact, she would go into the hospital for surgery the next morning. But she was determined to play Bach’s masterpiece in public once more.

Sultan walked with effort to the piano but became young again as soon as she seated herself on the bench. Her fingers weren’t entirely at her command; she stumbled over a passage here and there. But each variation is in two parts with everything repeated (she took many but not all the repeats), and she never faltered at the same place twice. Nor did she ever lose the thread of the musical line. The performance was slow, lasting around 80 minutes, and her concentration was such that the 30 variations had an integrity that very few pianists have ever been able to maintain. Nothing in the Olympics came close, or even had the possibility of coming close to matching this kind of triumph of will.

So who is Grete Sultan?

Look her up in the standard references, including the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, and you won’t find her. Look for her recordings in the 1996 Schwann Artist, the recording catalog, and you won’t find any.

The last situation, at least, will change. Concord Concerto (a new classical offshoot of the Concord Jazz label) has just released “The Legacy of Grete Sultan, Vol. 1,” a two-CD set of recordings of live performances of works by Schoenberg, Cage and Debussy, along with a studio performance of the “Goldberg” Variations. The Variations was recorded in 1959 in one take and played with all the inspiring nobility of the 90-year-old and all the technique of a fine pianist in her prime.

Sultan is a pianist with a remarkable story. She was born in Berlin in 1906. She came from a musical family; her aunt knew Clara Schumann. She made a harrowing escape from Nazi Germany in 1940, one of the last Jews to get out, and just barely. She settled in New York and became the quintessential Greenwich Village bohemian pianist. She worked with ultramodern dancers. She befriended the avant-garde and most notably John Cage, who wrote his monumental keyboard composition, “Etudes Australes,” for her. (And her amazing recording of it is, in fact, available on a three-CD Wergo set, despite the Schwann gap.)

But Sultan also remained devoted to the classics, which she continued to perform and which she taught to several generations of pianists. She performed the “Goldberg” Variations in the early ‘50s in hip hangouts such as the Circle in the Square, and it was because of musicians like her that the early beats thought that Bach was cool. Her admirers included the pianist Claudio Arrau.

That Sultan so naturally lived in these very different artistic worlds may seem unusual. But she wasn’t alone. In Berlin, she had studied with Richard Buhlig, who happened to have been doing exactly the same thing, a generation earlier.

So, now look up Buhlig in the references. All you will likely find is a small paragraph about a pianist who was born in Chicago in 1880 and who spent some time in Berlin early in the century. He ultimately settled in Los Angeles, where he became a noted piano teacher (Leonard Stein, John Cage, Earl Wild and the composer Leon Kirchner were among his pupils).

Buhlig appears to have made no commercial recordings and is pretty much forgotten these days. But a live recording of him playing Bach and Beethoven, made privately in Los Angeles in 1938, has surfaced on Dante, a small French label specializing in historic piano releases. And included on it is one of the most daredevil performances of Beethoven’s “Hammerklavier” Sonata to be found anywhere.

Buhlig was by all accounts an extraordinary pianist. He was a pupil of Theodore Leschetizky, a famous 19th century pedagogue (Artur Schnabel, one of Buhlig’s good friends, studied with him as did many other of the early 20th century keyboard greats). Ferrucio Busoni was so impressed with Buhlig that he dedicated one of the versions of his keyboard masterpiece “Fantasia Contrappuntistica” to him.

Buhlig was the first pianist to play all 32 Beethoven sonatas as a cycle in Los Angeles (he did it twice in the ‘40s at the Evenings on the Roof series, the predecessor of the current Monday Evening Concerts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art). He was a great proponent of Bach, who was not much played at the time. And he also took a lively interest in all the arts and especially in the most radical composers of his day.

He was friends with Schoenberg, for example, and premiered the composer’s groundbreaking Opus 11 piano pieces in Berlin and London. He was a close friend and champion of the Bay Area composer Henry Cowell, who pioneered multicultural music early in the century and was the originator of playing tone clusters on the keyboard and playing the strings inside the piano.

It was Buhlig who initiated Cage into the musical avant-garde by sending him to study with Cowell. It was Buhlig who directed Sultan to Cowell’s music, which she gladly played in Germany in the ‘30s, when Cowell was little heard there or anywhere else. It was also Buhlig who helped Sultan get established in New York and who introduced her to Cage.

The impact of Buhlig and Sultan, together, on American music encompasses both coasts and the whole century. In fact, they encapsulate, maybe better than any two other pianists, the entire scope of 20th century pianism. They represent its connection to the great virtuoso tradition of the 19th century and its move into a future of far-reaching concepts about what music is and what a piano can do. They also reflect its obsession with the past and especially with Bach, who has come to provide the foundation of our thinking about the keyboard.

Then why are Buhlig and Sultan so obscure?

That is not an easy question to answer. In Sultan’s case, temperament seems to have something to do with it. She is a nervous performer and not nearly pushy enough to have made a big career. The dignity and refinement of her playing surely worked against her at a time when women were less respected as musicians than they are now. Qualities that would be called poetic in men were thought of as musically reticent in women.

The women who got ahead at the keyboard, women such as Myra Hess and the harpsichordist Wanda Landowska, had to be extremely aggressive. And how in the world could Sultan’s stately approach to the “Goldbergs” in 1959 compete with Glenn Gould, who had made such a name for himself with his flashy, unpredictable and great recording two years earlier?

Buhlig, on the other hand, had the temperament. Those who knew him (he died in 1952 at age 71) speak of him as a big personality, and his playing on the Dante disc certainly confirms that. Perhaps settling in the Los Angeles of the ‘20s and ‘30s meant he was too far from the classical hot spots to maintain his international reputation.

But there is another possible explanation for why so little remains of Buhlig’s or Sultan’s careers, and it can be found on these new discs. Both pianists had big techniques, but they were not particularly interested in displaying them for their own flashy ends. Instead, they were much more attracted to the idea of playing old music as if it were a new experience, to responding to the musical imperatives of their milieu. In particular, Buhlig plays Bach so that it sounds like Busoni and Beethoven, astonishingly, like Cowell. Sultan plays Bach and Debussy as if it were Cage. The eras of Paderewski and Horowitz just might not have been ready for them.

Buhlig was criticized by some knuckleheaded Angeleno Beethovenians for making many mistakes in his sonata cycles, and the mistakes are now there for everyone to hear. But so is the demonic force that causes them as he rushes headlong into shattering climaxes, to sound just like the fistsful of notes that Cowell so loved. This is Beethoven with enough thunder for dissonant modern urban life. In the slow movement of the “Hammerklavier” and the variations movement of the Sonata No. 30, Op. 109, also on the disc, there is a transcendental quality to the playing, especially in a tone deep and rich that comes through perfectly well even in the primitive (but acceptable for its time) recorded sound. That same depth is in Buhlig’s Bach, the “Chromatic” Fantasy and Fugue, along with one example from the “Well-Tempered Clavier.”

What Sultan seems to have gotten mainly from Buhlig is the tone, that attention to the full impact that the sound of every note can have. Otherwise, her playing is far less impulsive. In fact, she is decidedly not impulsive or sentimental at all. This is playing of utter purity. Sultan’s was not an unadventurous life--Eric Salzman tells her moving story with great eloquence in his excellent liner notes with the disc--but she clearly strives for something higher from music than emotion or adventure. Her Bach has the modernist’s attention paid to the smallest detail of sound and structure, and that is also typical of the way she plays Cage and Debussy. The feeling here is that the spirit will soar much higher if it isn’t pushed.

And the good news is that Sultan’s spirit soars still. On the mend, she was sighted at a performance of Merce Cunningham’s 90-minute dance work “Ocean” two weeks ago at Lincoln Center Festival 96. Rumor has it, as well, that she hasn’t ruled out another concert.

* “The Legacy of Grete Sultan, Vol. 1,” Concord Concerto CCD-42030, P.O. Box 845, Concord, Ca 94522. “Richard Buhlig,” Dante HPC015, 7 Rue Gaudray, 92170 Vanves, France. 011-33-1-46-38-30-22. 011-33-1-46-38-37-03 (fax)