Clifford Curzon: Donald Brook’s Pen-Portrait from ‘Masters of the Keyboard' Part I

Donald Brook wrote a series of books presenting attractive short studies or pen-portraits of a wide variety of musicians and authors. Clearly, he had met these people and had a chance to speak to them about their achievements and interests. The present sketch is taken from Masters of the Keyboard, Rockliff, London, 1941.

It should be remembered that Clifford Curzon lived for another 41 years, dying in 1982. Between 1941 and his death, Curzon’s career settled into the pattern that defined his mature reputation. After registering as a conscientious objector during the Second World War, he resumed an active post‑war career, touring widely in Europe and the United States. He became especially associated with Mozart and Schubert, while remaining famously self‑critical, often withholding recordings he judged imperfect. He and his wife Lucille adopted the two sons of soprano Maria Cebotari in 1949. Curzon was appointed CBE in 1953, knighted in 1977, and awarded the Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal in 1980. He died in London in 1982 and is buried at Patterdale.

Paderewski gave his “farewell” recital in a concert hall in New York one afternoon in the early spring of 1939. Immediately afterwards, in the same hall, a young English pianist, Clifford Curzon, made his American debut [1] and impressed the critics so favourably that one of them wrote “…one recital marked the twilight of a great career; the other, the dawn of what promises to be another perhaps as great in the world of pianists.” Few musical careers are more interesting to watch than Curzon’s, for he is a magnificent pianist endowed with a poetic temperament and is at the same time a thoroughly sound musician.

He is a Londoner, born in 1907. At the age of twelve he entered the Royal Academy of Music and within a few years distinguished himself by winning what must be almost a record number of scholarships and prizes, including the McFarren Gold Medal. His first professional appearance in London was made at a Queen’s Hall Promenade Concert at the age of sixteen, [2] and the fact that Sir Henry Wood invited him to play during every subsequent Promenade season is sufficient proof of the good impression he made. [3]

Two or three years of general concert work in this country made him realize the need of wider experience, so at the age of nineteen he withdrew from public life and went to Germany to study for two years with Schnabel. [4] While I was having tea with Curzon one afternoon recently, he drew a vivid picture of his student days in Germany, and in particular the sort of classes Schnabel used to hold. He was always in favour of the “class” method of teaching, for he believed that there was plenty a student could learn from the mistakes of his fellows. For four afternoons a week Schnabel would assemble all his pupils in his large music room: an impressive chamber completely lined with books he had never read and, it was said, he never intended even to look at. Apart from chairs, there was little else in it but two fine Bechstein pianos. At one of these Schnabel would sit himself while the student chosen for the afternoon’s ordeal would sit at the other. The pupils came from all over the world - England, America, Russia, France, Greece, and Spain were represented in Curzon’s day, and there were of course people from all parts of Germany and Austria. [5] Whatever his nationality, no student sat at the piano without the sympathy of the onlookers, for Schnabel was not an easy man to please!

The lesson would start soon after two o’clock and would rarely last for less than three-and-a-half hours - some of our twenty-minute piano teachers should make a special note of this. Schnabel had a habit of getting so engrossed in the music that he would completely ignore the clock, and as no student would dare to risk his displeasure by reminding him of the time, the lessons would often go on until seven or eight in the evening. Curzon remembers that on one occasion he was there from two o’clock until ten, but Schnabel could be so interesting that one rarely felt a sense of fatigue. Nobody seemed to mind going without tea.

Schnabel was very watchful of his pupil’s tempo, and any controversial matters on this subject were invariably settled with the reminder: “I swallowed a metronome as a little boy.” He never favoured the extensive use of that device, however.

Fashions and traditional interpretations of the classics made no impression upon him: he would dismiss them with the adage “Tradition is only a collection of bad habits.” And all the pupils, sitting below a portrait of Leschetizky [6] inscribed “with memories of beautiful and difficult hours” would nod appreciatively whether they believed it or not.

After completing his course with Schnabel and shorter periods of study with other distinguished musicians in France and Germany, Clifford Curzon made his debut in Berlin and then toured in Austria, playing in Vienna before his return to this country. Although in recent years he has spent most of his time in England, the years preceding the Second World War were to a great extent given up to establishing himself in various foreign capitals and in America. This perhaps accounts for his rapid rise to eminence, for he was barely out of his twenties when the foreign critics were acclaiming him as “a master of the pianoforte.”

One of his Berlin recitals produced this notice from the critic of the Allgemeine Musikzeitung: “His technical mastery resulting in extraordinary purity of phrasing, harmonically and architecturally, his ‘ purling ’ scales and beautiful eloquence in declaiming ornamentation, together with an ascetically charming concentration on the spiritual content, occupied the foreground in the Beethoven Sonata, while poetry, the most essential quality of all, was shown in the positively enchanting treatment of the Schubert Moments Musicaux, and in the transporting rendering of Liszt’s B-minor Sonata, which has seldom so enslaved me. The young pianist was forced to give repeated encores to a clamouring audience.”

The years Curzon spent in building up a large concerto repertoire have been well rewarded. He is as ready to play Dohnanyi, Bloch, Prokofiev or D’Indy concertos as the better-known works of Beethoven, Brahms, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, or Schumann.

To be continued…

Notes:

[1] Polish pianist Ignace Jan  Paderewski had given a broadcast recital at the Studio 8-H in Radio City, “before a visible audience of a few hundred and a radio audience estimated at 50,000,000, which listened from near and far over the continents and the oceans of the world.”  Clifford Curzon made his debut at the Town Hall on 123 West 43rd Street, between Broadway and Sixth Avenue near Times Square, on 26 February 1939. His recital included Schubert’s Impromptu in E flat major, Funérailles, Petrarch Sonnet, No. 104, and Mephisto Waltz by Liszt, Beethoven variations, op. 35, on a theme from his ballet Prometheus, known as the "Eroica" variations though written before the symphony of that name and finally the Schumann's Sonata in G minor

[2] His first Promenade Concert appearance was on 3 October 1924, playing the Concerto for Three Keyboards in D minor, BWV 1063 under Sir Henry Wood, aged only seventeen.

[3] Brook was a little over-enthusiastic about Curzon’s Promenade Concert career. He did not appear during the years 1927, 1929 and 1930.

[4] Artur Schnabel (1882–1951) was born in Lipnik, then in Austrian Silesia, and trained in Vienna under Theodor Leschetizky, who quickly recognised his exceptional musical intellect. After early success in Berlin, he built a career centred on Beethoven, Schubert, and chamber music, becoming one of the 20th century’s most influential pianists and teachers.

[5] Artur Schnabel taught an unusually distinguished roster of pianists. Documented pupils include Alan Bush, Rudolf Firkušný, Leon Fleisher, Lili Kraus, Noel Mewton‑Wood, Dika Newlin, Eunice Norton, Leonard Shure, Jascha Spivakovsky, Nancy Weir, Konrad Wolff, Carlo Zecchi.

[6] Theodor Leschetizky (1830–1915) was a Polish‑Austrian pianist, pedagogue, and composer whose Vienna studio shaped a generation of major performers. A pupil of Czerny and thus a musical grandson of Beethoven, he combined technical discipline with expressive freedom. His students, including Artur Schnabel, Ignaz Friedman, Benno Moiseiwitsch, and Ignace Jan Paderewski, spread his influence worldwide, securing his reputation as one of history’s most formative piano teachers.