Артур Шнабель: Жизнь и творчество австрийского пианиста.

Austrian pianist
the pianist

Artur Schnabel (17 April 1882 – 15 August 1951) was an Austrian American classical pianist, composer and pedagogue. Schnabel was known for his intellectual seriousness as a musician, avoiding pure technical bravura. Among the 20th century's most respected and important pianists, his playing displayed marked vitality, profundity and spirituality in the Austro German classics, particularly the works of Beethoven and Schubert. Music critic Harold C. Schonberg described Schnabel as "the man who invented Beethoven". Between 1932 and 1935, he produced the first recording of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas. In 2018, the Library of Congress selected this recording to be placed in the National Recording Registry for its historical significance.

Born Aaron Schnabel in Lipnik (Kunzendorf) near Bielsko Biała, Austro Hungarian Empire (today a part of Poland), he was the youngest of three children born to Isidor Schnabel, a textile merchant, and his wife, Ernestine Taube (née Labin). He had two sisters, Clara and Frieda. His family was Jewish. When the boy was two, Schnabel's parents moved the family to Vienna in 1884 for the benefit of young Schnabel whom his mother recalls as showing a natural gift for music. Schnabel began learning the piano at the age of four, when he took a spontaneous interest in his eldest sister Clara's piano lessons. At the age of six, he began piano lessons under Professor Hans Schmitt of the Vienna Conservatorium (today the University of Music and Performing Arts, Vienna). Three years later he began studying under Theodor Leschetizky. The teacher once said to him, "You will never be a pianist; you are a musician." He allowed Schnabel to leave Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies and concentrate instead on Schubert's sonatas, which had been widely neglected up to that point.

Schnabel studied under Leschetizky's tutelage for seven years, between 1891 and 1897. Co students of Leschetizky during that period included Ossip Gabrilowitsch, Mark Hambourg, and Ignaz Friedman. Initially, for his first year under Leschetizky, Schnabel was given rigorous preparatory technical tuition from Anna Yesipova (Leschetizky's second wife and a famous pianist in her own right) and also from Malwine Bree, who was Leschetizky's assistant.

In 1899, when Schnabel was 17, his daughter Elizabeth Rostra was born in the Czech city of Brno. The offspring from a youthful love affair, Elizabeth became a pianist and piano pedagogue, was married to a psychoanalyst and died in Switzerland in 1995. In 1905, Artur Schnabel married the contralto and Lieder singer Therese Behr (1876 1959). They had two sons, Karl Ulrich Schnabel (1909–2001) who also became a classical pianist and renowned piano teacher, and Stefan Schnabel (1912–1999), who became a well regarded actor. The Schnabel family kept a lifelong, close relationship with Artur Schnabel's daughter from his teenage relationship, Elizabeth Rostra. His wife, son Karl Ulrich and his wife Helen, née Fogel (1911–1974), a pianist from the US, and their grandson Claude Alain Mottier (1972 2002), who was a pianist as well and died as the innocent victim of a traffic accident, were buried in Artur's grave as well. In 2006, the municipality of the town of Schwyz declared the tomb a monument. This exempts the grave site from the regulations that stipulate the removal of the remains after a certain period.

Schnabel was best known for his devotion to the core German composers, especially the Viennese classics of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. He was also renowned for his playing of works by Brahms and Schumann, and he played and recorded works by Bach. However, his repertoire was wider than that. During his young virtuosic years in Berlin, he played works by other composers including Liszt, Chopin and Weber. On his early American tours, he programmed works such as the Chopin Preludes and Schumann's Fantasie in C. Among other works that he played, as recalled by those such as Claudio Arrau and Vladimir Horowitz, who had heard Schnabel in the 1920s, were Chopin's E minor Piano Concerto and the Piano Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor, and Weber's Konzertstück in F minor, Piano Sonata No. 2, and Invitation to the Dance. Schnabel himself mentioned that he had played the Liszt Sonata in B minor "very often", as well as the Liszt E flat Piano Concerto. Schnabel was known for championing the then neglected sonatas of Schubert and, even more so, Beethoven, including his more challenging late works. While on a tour of Spain, Schnabel wrote to his wife saying that during a performance of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations he had begun to feel sorry for the audience. "I am the only person here who is enjoying this, and I get the money; they pay and have to suffer," he wrote Schnabel did much to popularize Beethoven's piano music, making the first complete recording of the sonatas, completing the set for the British label HMV in 1935. In March 2018, it was one of 25 recordings that the Library of Congress selected to be placed in the National Recording Registry, for its cultural and historical significance. He also recorded all the Beethoven piano concertos.

Schnabel was a pragmatic performer. As an example, Schnabel never played encores, believing they would cheapen the performance. He is quoted saying, "I have always considered applause to be a receipt, not a bill.") and five string quartets, amongst various smaller works. In recent years, a number of his compositions (notably championed by the violinist Paul Zukofsky) have been recorded and made available on CD, including three of his string quartets, the three symphonies, a rhapsody for orchestra, and four solo piano works: his Sonata, Dance Suite, Piece in Seven Movements (1935–37) and Seven Pieces (1947). Pianist Jenny Lin released a recording of Schnabel's complete keyboard music for the Steinway and Sons label in 2019.

Artur Schnabel compositions are published by Peermusic Classical and distributed by Hal Leonard Artur Schnabel scores.

Ten Early Songs, Op. 11 (1901) (Frühe Lieder), medium voice and piano
Seven Early Songs, Op. 14 (1899 1902) (Frühe Lieder), medium voice and piano
Notturno, Op. 16 (prob. 1910), medium voice

My Life and Music. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Reprinted 1988. Transcripts of the twelve lectures held by Schnabel at the University of Chicago in 1945. Music, Wit, and Wisdom. Ed. Werner Grünzweig and Lynn Matheson. Hofheim: Wolke, 2009. New edition of My Life and Music, revised according to the sources held at the Music Archive of the Akademie der Künste, Berlin. Music and the Line of Most Resistance. Rev. and ed. edition. Ed. Lynn Matheson and Ann Schnabel Mottier. Hofheim: Wolke, 2007. First published Princeton University Press, 1942. Transcripts of lectures that Schnabel gave at Harvard University and at the University of Chicago.

On September 11, 2016, a major international revival of Schnabel's compositions began with a concert at the Großer Sendesaal des rbb im Haus des Rundfunks, presented as part of the Musikfest Berlin. The program featured pianist Markus Pawlik (who also curated), the Szymanowski String Quartet, baritone Dietrich Henschel, and film projections by Matthew Mishory. German actor Udo Samel read a selection of Artur Schnabel's letters to Mary Virginia Foreman. The program was repeated Wednesday, 14 September 2016, at the RadioKulturhaus in Vienna and again on Thursday, 30 August 2018, at the Salle des congrès in Megève, France, with further performances planned. The 2016 Berlin concert was broadcast in its entirety on Rundfunk Berlin Brandenburg radio and filmed for the Arte documentary Artur Schnabel: No Place of Exile, directed by Matthew Mishory. The film premiered on Arte on 4 February 2018. The film was shot in Switzerland, Italy, Vienna, and Berlin, utilizing unexpected textures (super8, drone footage, back projection) and the actor Udo Samel to chart Schnabel's course through the emotional and physical landscapes of the European 20th century. It also features the performances from the 2016 Haus des Rundfunks concert. In May 2019, Steinway & Sons label released the first complete piano works with pianist Jenny Lin. In November 2019, an LA premiere of the film was held at the Villa Aurora in Pacific Palisades. The Villa had served as an important venue for German Jewish intellectuals and artists during and after WWII.