THE CURZON COLLECTION

O. W. NEIGHBOUR

T H R O U G H the generosity of Dr Peter Curzon and Mr Fritz Curzon the British Libraryhas recently acquired an extensive collection of annotated scores, notebooks, and otherpapers ofthe late Sir Clifford Curzon.^ The working scores amount to some 300 items.Nearly all are printed editions, but there are a few manuscripts as well, includingautographs of William Alwyn and Sir Lennox Berkeley. Seventy-eight composers arerepresented, the standard ones naturally very liberally, many others by only one or twopieces. There are works with orchestra in either full score or two-piano reduction (andsometimes in both), great quantities of solo pieces, and a substantial amount of chambermusic. Although this is not Curzon's complete library it includes everything that could befound with his markings and thus nearly everything that he played in public or worked on.

Every musician needs working texts, but there can be few who have attached so muchimportance to them as Curzon. For him they became the record of a lifetime of musicalthought and endeavour. The copies of the works he performed most frequently arecovered with many layers of markings which in extreme cases can scarcely bedisentangled, despite his frequent use of more than one colour. Works with orchestracontain complete lists, numbered and dated, of all performances given, with details oftheorchestra and conductor; chamber works are similarly documented with the names of tbeother players. The most used copies are extremely fragile, with corners worn right awaythrough rapid turning.

Whatever the obscurities of certain heavily marked scores, the collection as a wholesheds a great deal of light on the development of Curzon's ideas and the discipline tbatwent into his meticulous but wonderfully poetic playing. He first appears as a rather self-conscious teenager at the Royal Academy of Music, to which he had been admitted at theage of twelve in 1919. 'Aged 16, Oct. 8th 1923' he notes on the Op. 2 Piano Sonata of AlanBush, who had left the Academy the previous year, and again 'aged 16 & 9 months' onsome Blumenfeld preludes. In the early days the music is only lightly marked, withfingering and extra dynamics, but a striking feature is his occasional addition of literaryquotations to reinforce the mood of the music. Keats and Shelley find their way intoChopin, Goethe (in translation) into Schubert's 'Wanderer' Fantasy, William Morris intoArthur Hinton (the husband of Katharine Goodson, one of Curzon's teachers),unattributed effusions into Bax's first two sonatas, Tagore into Germaine Tailleferre's

60

o

N

U

JZanbDOo

cjCX

C

bDC

I

Ballade for piano and orchestra, which Curzon introduced to London at a Prom in 1926.To this period belong a few manuscript songs and piano pieces of his own composition.

After a spell as professor at the Academy Curzon went to study with Artur Schnabel inBerlin from 1928 to 1930, and then with Wanda Landowska and Nadia Boulanger in Paris.Special notebooks record his early sessions with Schnabel and Landowska, with both ofwhom he continued to take occasional lessons until they died. To quote his own words inan interview given over forty years later,^ Schnabel 'revealed musical horizons far beyondwhat I could possibly have imagined without him', and 'widened and deepened my wholeapproach to music and to piano playing for the rest of my life'. Schnabel's analytical tumof mind operated at every level, from minute questions of stress, scansion, and the tonalbalance within a chord or between parts, to larger questions of structure, though always inthe interests of realizing his 'insight into what lies behind and between the written notes'.

The extent to which Curzon, by nature a perfectionist, absorbed and built upon thispattern of thought is very fully documented in his working copies. Even the purelytechnical matter of fingering is supplemented by comments on hand action and armweight. Innumerable individual notes within the keyboard texture are encircled, somemerely to give warning of octave sonorities requiring special care, others to stress theirimportance for the harmonic or contrapuntal direction of the passage. Indeed, his chiefcare lies in the structural goals ofthe music, local or more distant. Underlying harmonicprogressions and tonal schemes are spelt out and salient rhythmic features emphasized,and he regularly adopts Schnabel's procedure in his edition of Beethoven's sonatas ofsubdividing the music into short constituent phrases or paragraphs and numbering thebars within them in order to maintain a clear sense of the short-term musical progress.There are constant reminders to 'think' and 'hear' corresponding phrases or passageselsewhere in a movement while playing; this is the main means by which the broaderstructure is kept in view. Curzon's concern for the music itself rather than his own virtuosorole is well illustrated by warnings in chamber and orchestral works to play down wherea risk might arise of covering an important entry in some other instrumental part. In allthis listeners familiar with his playing will recognize his hand. As late as 1981, when helearned and gave a single performance of Elgar's Piano Quintet, he prepared the score withthe same care and made a list of background reading about the composer, who was new tohis repertory.

The scores are by definition powerless to document what lies behind the musical notes:that can only emerge in performance. But there are pointers. When Curzon gave the firstperformance of Ireland's set of piano pieces Sarnia in 1941, the composer sent him anextremely revealing account ofthe ideas and landscapes that he felt he had captured in it.Although he knew that the detail of such concepts could find no place in the music, for himthe spirit was something extraordinarily precise that he expected the interpreter tocommunicate to the listener. In a general sense Curzon's early attempts to find poetry tomatch the music he was playing reflect a similar attitude. Schnabel, though of Ireland'sgeneration, shows a more modern sensibility: the meaning of music was no less precise forhim, but far less close to anything specific. The adult Curzon shared his view. He does not

62

try to set down what only music can say, let alone anything extraneous to it, but confineshimself to modest, though often remarkably suggestive jottings against particularpassages: 'important answer', 'stealthily', 'menacing', 'conversational' (all in Mozart);'hysterical modulations' (in the first movement development of Schubert's D majorsonata); 'gradually calling up the orchestra' (in the approach to the first movement coda inBrahms's D minor concerto). The collection contains one or two programme notes indraft, and various unsigned ones extracted from Curzon's concert programmes which areprobably also by him. These are often hard to date, but they seem to show the samemovement away from the over-explicit.

Though a turning-point in his career, Curzon's encounter with Schnabel in no wayalienated him from his artistic roots, as his papers demonstrate in a number of ways. Someofthe editions ofthe standard repertory which he acquired as a student give very poortexts, yet once he had begun using a particular copy he preferred to keep to it as a completerecord of the evolution of his view of the music. In later years he would sometimesannotate it with readings from the kind of critical edition he was by then using whenlearning a new piece, but would rarely replace it. From the time of his lessons withSchnabel he never ceased to invite comments about his playing from other musicians,including various friends of much longer standing. For the most part he simply noted suchcomments down with page or bar references on odd sheets or scraps of paper. Goodintentions to transcribe them into notebooks devoted to individual composers soon flagged(other notebooks, containing aphorisms about life and music, Hsts of books, andcomparisons of recordings tended to suffer a similar fate).

Each sheet of notes is carefully headed with an indication of their originator, usually inthe form of initials, and the date. Naturally Schnabel bulks large; sometimes his commentsalso contribute a layer of markings in the scores themselves; those about a number of workswere obtained from another Schnabel pupil, William Glock. Norman Franklin, a near-contemporary of Curzon's at the Academy, appears up to the fifties, as does KatharineGoodson, whose judgement he always particularly valued (there are notes of hers onindividual pieces dating from his first lessons with her). Nadia Boulanger is present duringthe 1930s; on one occasion in 1934 he played to Alfred Cortot. In the post-war period NinaMilkina and Hans Gal appear frequently, and there is correspondence with Paul Badura-Skoda. Among many who crop up only once or twice, Myra Hess and Edward Sackville-West may be mentioned. Further notes derive from rehearsals with conductors: Barbirolh,Walter, Krips, Knappertsbusch, Menges, Szell, Barenboim. Most important of all isCurzon's wife, the harpsichordist Lucille Wallace, who almost invariably appears in herprofessional guise as 'L.W.' (fig. 2). She studied with Landowska and Boulanger in thetwenties, and also had lessons with Schnabel, so that by the time of their marriage in 1931their natural musical affinity was reinforced by their shared experience of formativetuition. She clearly had very deep understanding of his artistic ideals, which she mayindeed have helped to shape. Whereas other musicians were naturally called on only asoccasion offered and usually heard him play large scale works, she kept him company in hisstudy not only of these, but of everything he played, down to the smallest pieces.

63

Fig. 2. Clifford Curzon with Lucille Wallace Curzon, 1947. Photograph by John Vickers.Reproduced by courtesy of Mr Fritz Curzon

special interest attaches to Curzon's association with Britten, which was particularlyclose in the years following Britten's return from the United States in 1942, and continuedthrough performances at successive Aldeburgh festivals. Britten commented on hisperformances both as listener and conductor, and they collaborated in Mozart's concertoand sonata for two pianos and Britten's own two-piano works. Curzon played nearly allBritten's piano music, and among the notes about it are some for the Holiday Diary by thecomposer himself. The title-page of the Introduction and Rondo alia burlesca bears agrateful inscription from the composer, who also brought him from Paris in March 1945some Faure pieces which had been unobtainable in England during the war. The two ofthem played two Debussy works for piano duet at Aldeburgh in June 1946, and the copiescontain Britten's markings in the bass parts; Curzon gave a repeat performance atFontainebleau in July with Boulanger. The National Sound Archive has, among a numberof non-commercial Curzon recordings, two of works that he never recorded commercially:Mozart's two-piano sonata, in which he is partnered by Britten, and Haydn's F minorvariations.

In the latter part of his career Curzon restricted his performances very largely to theViennese classics. This may seem to emphasize his connection with Schnabel, but in facthis repertory differed considerably from his master's. He found the preparation of a newwork a slow and painstaking process and played only a limited number of works evenamong those most sympathetic to him, so that he never undertook, for instance, a completecycle of Beethoven sonatas as Schnabel did. Through his middle years he maintained themore catholic tastes that he had developed at the Academy, playing popular late romanticworks and contemporary music, mostly by English composers. Since he does not usuallylist performances of solo music, and there is little chamber music later than Brahms andthe piano quintets of Schumann, Franck, and Dvorak, the pattern emerges most clearly inthe works with orchestra.

His interest in English music belongs largely to the thirties and forties. He played theDelius concerto (19 performances in all) only once later, and the Ireland concerto (22performances) not at all. Rawsthorne's Second Concerto (19) is an exception, since it wasspecially written for him in 1951 and he played it till 1957. Solo music, which includedBerkeley's sonata, composed for him in 1945, seems to have taken a similar course. Oftheromantic repertory Rakhmaninov's Second Concerto (23) got left behind at much thesame time, together with Liszt's arrangement of Schubert's 'Wanderer' Fantasy (27) andFranck's Symphonic Variations (19—Boulanger wrote a charming letter about hisrecording of this work). Chaikovsky's First Concerto (85), the Grieg concerto (50), andFalla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain (27) survived for another decade to about i960.Against this general trend Curzon rather surprisingly took up Liszt's Second Concerto in1963, perhaps in response to the post-war cultivation of the composer, and played ittwenty-five times before dropping it again about ten years later. Thereafter, apart from theoccasional revival, he concentrated on long-standing favourites which reached corres-pondingly high scores: Mozart's concertos K 488 in A (143 performances), K 491 inC minor (129) and K 595 in B flat (174); Beethoven's No. 4 (169) and 5 (203); Brahms's

65

No. I (103) and 2 (124). Two other Mozart concertos accompanied him into his lastdecade, K 466 in D minor (19) and K 537 in D (44), whilst K 467 in C, which he embarkedon as late as 1974, nevertheless reached twenty-nine performances.

Curzon's increasing preference for music ofthe classical period or at least of a classicalpersuasion was very much in tune with an important strand in the thought and sensibilityof the time. During the thirty years or so following the First World War, leadingcontinental composers turned away from anything that seemed to them too broad orimprecise in favour of greater concentration, exactitude, and intellectual control. Curzonseldom played their music and may not have felt much drawn to it, but the qualities thatinformed his playing and gradually winnowed out his later repertory were the very onesthat they most valued in their own sphere. As with most artists of real stature there was arepresentative aspect to his individuality. Thus the extraordinary interest of his writtenlegacy lies not only in the insight it gives into his ideals and the working methods by whichhe realized them, but in the responses to his playing from the wide range of musicians withwhom in one respect or another he felt some affinity. Evidence of this kind about aninterpretative artist is highly unusual; it clearly demands the same caution from its owninterpreter as a composer's sketches, but offers returns of a comparable nature. TheBritish Library is fortunate to have acquired such a remarkable archive.

I The collection, at present in course of arrange- 2 'Artur Schnabel, Pianist and Teacher. Cliffordment in the Department of Manuscripts, will Curzon talks to Alan Blyth', The Listener, xcibecome available after necessary conservation (25 Apr, 1974), pp. 544-6-work.

66