Barbara Nissman
" ...one of the last pianists in the grand romantic tradition of Liszt, Rachmaninoff, and Rubinstein "
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Bartók and the Piano: A Performer’s View
by Barbara Nissman
Published by Scarecrow Press with CD insert
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"Barbara Nissman’s study and research translate into one of the most thorough examinations of one performer to another. This is an invaluable aid for professional, teacher and student alike." Leonard Slatkin
"Barbara Nissman's extraordinary pianistic and musical gifts coupled with her astute analytical perception of Bartók's creative art makes for ideal authoritative equipment for the guidance of pianists in the study of Bartók’s great music." Rosalyn Tureck
"I highly recommend this book. It is an important addition to the Bartók literature, and pianists will find it indispensable."
David Dubal
"In its finest case studies this book is brilliant. Nissman's book is...a triumph. It is well produced, with lavish musical examples, and a generally high level of accuracy."
Malcolm Gillies
"Barbara Nissman’s thorough and perceptive survey of the Bartók piano repertoire fills a real need, thanks to her unswerving focus on the problems and elements that confront all serious interpreters of this music."
Donald Manildi, Curator,
International Piano Archives at Maryland
All rights reserved. Barbara Nissman, 2001
PIANO Review
In this book, the pianist Barbara Nissman, herself an esteemed Bartókian at the keyboard, travels the same route as Dr. Yeomans (though embracing, as well, the concertos and chamber music), but from a different, more detailed, more penetrating, more intimate vantage-point. She is, by her own confession, neither a music theorist, nor an historian, nor a musicologist. Thus she starts her entirely artistic exploration of Bartók's piano music with three strikes in her favour. One of the most valuable features of this book is the insight it gives into the way a performing artist thinks. It is not the only way. Others achieve great things by many other means. But an artist, a performer, an interpreter is almost by definition an asker of questions, a seeker after truth. One of the great fascinations of art, as in religion, is the way in which different individuals by asking the same questions arrive at very different truths. It is one of Nissman's many virtues as an artist-author that she eschews dogmatism. She is not out to convert or instruct us, but possibly, through sharing with us her own journey, to ease or enhance our own searches (the book is clearly addressed to the advanced pianist) on the road to quite other discoveries.
Perhaps that is it. An artist is a discoverer which ironically is not the same, necessarily, as an explorer. Some explore without discovering. Some discover by pure chance. The successful artist does both. Bartók himself said as much, or anyway implied it, in the quotation which heads Nissman's Introduction: "I must state that all my music is determined by instinct and sensibility; no one need ask me why I wrote this or that or did something in this rather than in that way. I could not give any explanation other than I felt this way, or I wrote it down this way. I never created new theories in advance. This attitude does not mean that I composed without set plans and without sufficient control. The plans were concerned with the spirit of the new work and with technical problems (for instance formal structure involved by the spirit of the work) all more or less instinctively felt." (And then there was Stravinsky: "I was guided by no system whatever in The Rite of Spring. I had only my ear to help me. I heard, and I wrote what I heard. I am the vessel through which The Rite passed.")
By starting with that particular Bartók quotation, Nissman reveals at the outset, whether by design or not, that this is going to be more than a book about Bartók. The search is fascinating, her conclusions mostly stimulating and sometimes revelatory, and the portrait that emerges of Bartók the musician (he was as much a performer as a composer, and she converses with both) is both intriguing and compelling. Her treatment is neither as comprehensive nor as consistent as Yeomans (his book has different aims). Nor does it proceed chronologically. Her principal focus is on the major works, allotting a chapter each to Out of Doors, the Sonata (1926) and the three concertos. But each chapter also includes an overview and more general discussion of related minor works. Like Yeomans, but more extensively, she offers valuable guidance to the reader/learner/performer (interesting that her suggestions of additional repertoire to explore, at the end of the Out of Doors chapter include specific works by Couperin, Rameau, Scarlatti, Ravel and Debussy) and writes about Bartók's recordings with characteristic perception. In one vital respect, however, the book's production falls below the standard set by its author. The print quality in the many valuable musical illustrations is often barely more than adequate, and sometimes barely that. In a book with so much class, such sloppiness looks like sheer bad manners. On the other hand, the inclusion of a generously stocked CD of Nissman playing Bartók, superbly, more than compensates. But still.
PIANO (UK) May 2006
MUSIC AND VISION Review
INSPIRING CONFIDENCE
DAVID THOMPSON is motivated by
Barbara Nissman's book
'Bartók and the Piano'
CLICK HERE TO READ THE REVIEW!
INTERNATIONAL PIANO Review
Bartok and the Piano: A Performers View by Barbara Nissman Scarecrow Press, 319 p. $49.50 USD, includes CD with performances of Bartok by the author. ISBN: 0810843013
Our understanding of the complexities and nuances of the piano music of Bela Bartok (1881-1945) has been advanced in past years by such keyboard artists as Peter Frankl, Rudolf Serkin, and Lili Kraus, while recently books like Judit Frigyesi's Bela Bartok and Turn of-the-Century Budapest (University of California Press) and Benjamin Suchoff's Bela Bartok: Life and Work (Scarecrow) offer welcome details about the great Hungarian composer and pianist. Indeed, the once-fashionably, aggressive hammered-out performances of Bartok works -as if he saw the piano exclusively as a percussion instrument -seems as absurd as to reduce Beethoven's achievement to the so-called 'Fate Knocking on the Door' theme from the Fifth Symphony. In fact, Bartok was a passionate lyric, with a robust sense of humour, who truly loved, empathized with, and understood folk music in a way approached, but rarely matched, by any other great composer in history. The American pianist Barbara Nissman, a student of Bartok's pupil Gyorgy Sandor, is especially identified with the music of Bartok, Prokofiev, and Ginastera. A clean, economical, and evocative performer, Nissman conveys these virtues in her book, a welcome mix of sometimes joshing exhortations to students, observations aimed at listeners and piano fans, and glimpses at autobiography.
Mostly chronological in arrangement, the book reasonably groups related piano works together. The eleven chapters bear titles like The Traditionalist (for works like the early Two Elegies), A New Piano Style (for Fourteen Bagatelles and Ten Easy Pieces) and Bravura, Virtuosity, and Pianism (for Two Rumanian Dances and Allegro Barbaro). There is also a very short annotated bibliography and a sympathetically performed CD, produced by the veteran Dennis Rooney, with David Barr as Steinway concert technician and Joe Patrych as music editor. Nissman rarely mentions her teacher Sandor in this book, but does find room to dismiss his 1977 transcription of the Tempo di Ciaconna and Fuga movements of Bartok's Sonata for solo violin as 'not pianistic', Sandor's views on Bartok are abundantly available in his own recorded performances and interviews, and Nissman's book thereby avoids the contact-with- the-master tone of often disappointingly unhelpful precedents like Marguerite Long. Instead, these are very much Nissman's reflections, much as her playing is her own. She cheers on potential performers with comments like: 'The Rhapsody Op.1 is a genuine piece of bravura and must be performed with unabashed virtuosity: no apologies needed for having fun and showing off at the piano!' Or, a propos of the Dance Suite: 'When I am relearning a piece. I find it useful to pull out the metronome and check tempi; it's helpful for future performances to know if youre prone to exceeding the speed limit or if you can afford to go heavier with that gas pedal.' Other observations are less directly practical and more evocative, such as the notion that the last of the Fourteen Bagatelles 'has the irony and dazed hysteria that one might encounter in a Fellini film.' One can imagine the dazed hysteria of a masterclass full of students if a teacher ordered. 'Play that more like Fellini! Some of Nissman's personal comments are charmingly candid, such as when she confesses that her own hand is small and doesnt reach beyond a ninth, explaining her fingering choices. She mentions at least twice that she lives on a farm in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia. She states, 'Sometimes I sit out on the porch and can hear the night. The buzzing sounds of the crickets and cicadas are constant.Bartok was trying to recreate a similar evening of haunting night music in the great Musiques Nocturnes movement of his suite Out of Doors (1926).' As pleasant as this is to read about, students who live between cramped lodgings, subways, and practice rooms might be baffled at how to profit from these reflections.
On the few occasions when Nissman stretches to express Bartok's wider cultural resonance, she mentions Stravinsky, which is understandable, and also Picasso, less so because of the painter's taste for the wilfully ugly, very un-Bartokian. About the piano concertos she sensibly suggests that more 'rhythmic lightness' and 'lilting quality' along with humour would be welcome, instead of the grim hammering to be heard on too many recordings. She is also droll on Allegro Barbaro, saying that 'this composition has greatly contributed to Bartok's stereotype as the twentieth century's pianist barbaroso.' There are a couple of typographical bloopers, such as when the violinist Jelly d'Aranyi is identified as Aranyi and some iffy judgments on historical recordings, overpraising Bartok's own recording of Contrasts with clarinetist Benny Goodman as 'definitive', whereas the composer himself disliked it. But these minor quibbles apart, this is a friendly and thought-provoking volume that should provide pleasure and enlightenment to readers ready to delve deeper into the achievement of one of the greatest humanists and musical creators of the 20th century.
Benjamin Ivry, July/August 2003 issue of International Piano
More Reviews
"Barbara Nissman gets very close to the music and to the attentive reader- hers is very much the performer's viewpoint and Bartók is seen and heard throughout from the piano keyboard. This book is clearly the fruit of long and intensive study of the music but she has also steeped herself in Bartók's voluminous writings. Richly detailed...welcome features include a CD on which the author gives some spruce performances of 80 minutes of the music she discusses so eloquently."
MUSICAL OPINION
"[Nissman] offers the sort of insight that can only come from repeated performances of the music...Bartók and the Piano will undoubtedly find its main readership among pianists preparing this demanding but important repertoire for performance and teachers responsible for guiding students through it, but it also has much to offer to those interested more generally in Bartók. It undoubtedly deserves to become the standard work on its subject."
MUSIC TEACHER
"An excellent addition to the pianist's library."
AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE
"Whether you are a pianist who performs and teaches Béla Bartok's music or simply a lover of piano music, you will find this book a valuable new resource. What makes this book such a treasure-trove are Nissman's insights into the music from a performer's point of view. This book would be an outstanding acquisition for music libraries and is worthy of inclusion in pianists' personal resource collections."
AMERICAN MUSIC TEACHER
"An admirable volume...It is heartwarming to see an accomplished, virtuoso performer such as Barbara Nissman equally at home in the scholarly activity of writing a book. There is an engaging quality to her writing, at times refreshingly colloquial, that will certainly appeal to the proper audience- that is, to pianists in practice rooms around the world ."
NOTES
" Bartók and the Piano is a well-researched edition by pianist Barbara Nissman who presents the composer's music in an engaging and informative style."
CLAVIER
"The book teems with music examples .The accompanying CD offers admirable performances by Nissman of 16 titles of interest to pianists at the learning and teaching levels."
CHOICE
"It always lends a definitive veracity to a book when it is written by an internationally acclaimed concert pianist like Barbara Nissman who's been there, done it; moreso when it shows a keen analytic mind on matters of style, form and structure of Bartók's music. Barbara Nissman's credentials as a Bartók pianist are pedigree. She studied under Hungarian pianist György Sandor, himself a pupil of Bartók. The books sub-title A Performers View, reveals its original purpose as a manual for pianists on how to tackle technical and interpretative aspects of Bartóks piano music. For that purpose the accompanying CD of excerpts played splendidly by Nissman herself is a crucial extra. But what's in it for the music lover? Plenty, provided you can read music, as Nissman's book has copious music examples. For a book covering all Bartók's works and life, my well thumbed Halsey Stevens classic The Life and Music of Béla Bartók is the one I keep returning to. However Nissman's more specialised monograph delves deeper and more thoroughly into some of the piano works. Her coverage is wider and includes the unpublished Piano Sonata of 1898. Also her chapter 11 on Bartók the pianist includes all the piano recordings he made, much of it now restored to CD. This all makes Nissman's book a very different proposition to the Stevens one. As a guide to the piano repertoire it's as thorough as one could hope for. Naturally it includes all solo piano works, and all the piano concertos including Bartók's transcription of his Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion into Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (I heard it performed here by the Kontarsky brothers with the NZSO. It works well). She even fits in little known arrangements such as his piano version of the orchestral Dance Suite. She has briefer notes on all chamber works with piano such as Contrasts and the two sonatas for violin and piano. Rather than discussing works in strict chronological order, she offers a better semi-chronological alternative of grouping them into related chapters. That's in line with her approach which is not just about fingers, but embraces heart and intellect to guide pianists deeply into the core of each piece. The Mikrokosmos works for instance, you'll find tucked into the chapter Bartók as Teacher. Most of his folk-inspired works are in Folk Music, thePerfect Union. That's the chapter I'd kick off with if teaching pianists. Nissman's thorough description of all those tiny key points such as modes, rhythmic patterns, meter, and intervals graphically show pianists and listeners Bartok's essentially East European dialect. Then the next chapter Form and the Sonata shows how the microcosm of Bartók's language is synthesized into the macrocosm of West European form and counterpoint that East-West fusion which makes him the greatest nationalist composer of all time. These sorts of insights reveal the quality of this ebulliently written book and its worth for pianists and music lovers alike."
Ian Dando, New Zealand Listener.
"Her imposing book on Bartók's piano music confirms Barbara Nissman's communicative skills in words as at the keyboard (the book includes a CD to illustrate the text). There are insights on every page and it is notable for its practical perspective by a pianist who has studied and performed the whole corpus of this great composer's piano music. To sample it, look at the thorough analysis of Mikrokosmos, the teaching pieces begun for Bartók's son Peter, and often composed quickly during his lessons. We can all manage at least some pieces from the earlier books, designed to cover progressively the succession of musical and technical pianistic problems faced by the beginning student."
www.musicalpointers.co.uk
Introduction
Excerpt from Bartók and the Piano: A Performers View
"I must state that all my music is determined by instinct and sensibility; no one need ask me why I wrote this or that or did something in this rather than in that way. I could not give any explanation other than I felt this way, or I wrote it down this way. I never created new theories in advance. This attitude does not mean that I composed without set plans and without sufficient control. The plans were concerned with the spirit of the new work and with technical problems (for instance formal structure involved by the spirit of the work) all more or less instinctively felt." 1
Béla Bartók
Bartók never believed in theories or trusted theorists, and he had good reason, for his music defies pigeonholing. The more deeply one explores his piano music, the more it resists categorization. In other words, there are no easy solutions to tackling Bartók's piano music. There are no sets of prescribed rules or formulas to follow when studying each work. The performer must find and follow the path the composer walked, discarding all preconceptions. Bartók forces the pianist to approach his music with an open mind, a flexible soul, and very good ears.
I am neither a music theorist, a historian, nor a musicologist. I am a pianist and a performer. I did not set out to write a book about Bartók's piano music. It would be more accurate for me to say that the book found me. While preparing Bartók's piano music for recording, I started exploring a wide range of literature written about this difficult repertoire in hopes of clarifying my task at the keyboard. (See the annotated bibliography at the conclusion of the book.) I was looking for material from the Bartók scholars, expert advice I could use to benefit my interpretations at the piano. From some Bartók specialists, I gained an increased understanding of his harmonic language; from others, a heightened awareness of his ethnomusicological frame of reference. But it was the performer's viewpoint I craved. I wanted to know how Bartók, the pianist/performer, approached his music.
I was stunned to discover that Bartók's piano output-- a total of over 300 works, including the 153 pieces from Mikrokosmos-- had never been discussed in print primarily from the place where the music had been conceived, at the piano and from the point of view of the performer. Himself a student of a Liszt pupil, Bartók was primarily a pianist; he played, performed, and edited most of the standard and early keyboard literature.2 Although he became well known as an ethnomusicologist, Bartók never labeled himself a theorist or musicologist. A formidable pianist, he was probably at his most adventurous and most natural self when composing for the keyboard.
What I gained from this exploration strengthened my determination to return to the piano, to the printed score and the words of the composer. In retrospect, I am delighted to have approached Bartók's piano music without preconceptions, including those of my teacher, pianist György Sándor, who was a pupil of Bartók. The discipline I imposed on myself was to start with the music, a fresh score without any pencil markings. As I studied this repertoire, I became more comfortable with its new language. I began to discover, and then I began to hear. Fortunately, Bartók has left a vast pianistic legacy with detailed indications and keen observations entered in the scores. The real authority on Bartók's piano music remains Bartók, and the principal source materials are his music and his words.
In trying to extract the composer's intent a performer must find the way through vast amounts of instruction. Without musical compromise, the performer must then reinterpret, using his or her own voice at the piano and communicating as convincingly as possible a personal interpretation of the composer's wishes. Any one page of Bartók's piano writing is filled with meticulous dynamic, articulation, and metronome markings, and timings calculated to the exact second. This complex music requires intelligence and effort. The brain must first decipher it and organize it; only then can the task of learning begin. Bartók makes pianists learn another language-- his language-- and demands that they speak it as if it were their mother tongue.
I have waded through the mass of details in each of Bartók's scores and wrestled with each work's technical problems and musical difficulties. Perhaps my observations will be helpful in guiding the eye and ear during the initial learning process. At the very least, my conclusions will provide a catalyst for discussion and exchange of ideas. Isn't that why we want to hear different interpretations of the same musical work and also want to hear the same work performed by interesting artists more than once? A phrase in the hands of one pianist sparks an idea, which is absorbed and digested in a different manner by another. I have written this book not to instruct but to give enabling guidelines to further an understanding of Bartók's piano music.
My concentration is on the major piano works in the repertoire, with separate chapters devoted to the most difficult and challenging masterworks: the Out of Doors suite, the Sonata (1926), and the three piano concertos. Each chapter also includes an overview and more general discussion of Bartók's related minor works. The decision to focus on the standard repertory of the advanced pianist precluded my writing in depth about more than a selection of pieces from Mikrokosmos.
I originally conceived this book chronologically, but I found that the exploration of roots and influences necessary to an understanding of Bartók's pianism did not always follow a chronological order. Chapter I progresses from the youthful unpublished 1898 Sonata to the transitional Elegies, works difficult to pigeonhole because of their combination of romantic pianism and new minimalism. This minimalism was further developed in the Bagatelles, a revolutionary work that reflects Bartók's succinct new style, discussed in Chapter II. The Ten Easy Pieces, written as a complement to the Bagatelles, contain some early folk transcriptions; the Csík songs were also part of this new approach to the piano. The Seven Sketches, according to the composer, are more or less written in the same style as the Bagatelles [except for no. 4, which could have been included in a discussion of the romantic pianism of Chapter l].
Because this is a book written by a pianist for other performing pianists or lovers of the piano, a chapter on Bartók's pianism and virtuosic music became a necessity, prompted by my learning the difficult Etudes. The Rumanian Dances and Allegro Barbaro also qualified as bravura compositions to be included in Chapter III. In the chapter on folk music, I tried to show the composer's progression from a simple transcription of a folk tune to paraphrases using folk music, culminating with the Improvisations, inspired by the folk song tradition but written in a completely original language.
For me as a pianist, form and structure are the most important ingredients in interpretation; the discussion of form in Chapter V focuses on two major works: the 1926 Sonata and the Sonata for two pianos and percussion. In Chapter VI, Bartók's piano masterwork, the Out of Doors suite, is analyzed pianistically and musically. Here I have tried to share with the reader what I discovered as I prepared this work for performance.
The following chapter features the suite and explores Bartók's relationship with the past. The oddly titled Chapter VIII, Ten Plus Nine Plus Two Plusincludes many other Bartók works pianists love to play. The rest of the book is devoted to a discussion of Bartók's pedagogical works, including Mikrokosmos; an analysis of his three piano concertos; and a survey of the piano/chamber repertoire. Finally, going full circle, the book concludes where it began, with the composer at the piano playing his own music. I believe that this progression presents a logical picture for the pianist's enhanced understanding of a unique composer.
A brief note about Bartók's relationship to detail: Bartók was meticulous in all of his markings; even metronomic markings and timings have been accurately noted. As an editor of other composers' keyboard music, Bartók was very aware of the problem of authenticity within editions, and the inclusion in many editions of "arbitrary performing indications by unscrupulous editors."3 As in Beethoven's works, the authority for Bartók's music rests with his own manuscript. Whatever is indicated in the score reveals "precisely his intentions,"4 unless there might have been copyist errors in the publication process. While preparing this book, in addition to studying Bartók's published scores, I have gone back whenever possible to autograph sources to further confirm what appeared to be errors. (Note: Currently in preparation by László Somfai at the Budapest Bartók Archives is the forty-eight volume Béla Bartók Complete Critical Edition. Several new editions whose revisions benefit from the manuscripts in Peter Bartók's possession have recently been issued by Boosey & Hawkes and Universal and are discussed in the appropriate chapters.)
Bartók's piano music defies categorization. Like Picasso, he developed his own language while retaining traditional formal structures. Bartók built upon the foundations of romantic pianism, allowing each piece to dictate its own form and style. What remains constant, however, is the way any performer should approach each composition. All elements-- tempos, rhythm, melodic line, dynamics, mood, touch, color, technical demands, compositional technique, harmonic language-- must be analyzed, evaluated, and then viewed within the larger structure. Yet ultimately it is the individual pianist/performer who must bring to all of Bartók's indications his or her own intelligence and imagination. I wish you an interesting and challenging voyage.
Lewisburg, West Virginia
Notes
1. Béla Bartók, "Harvard Lectures" (1943) in Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1976), 376.
2. Bartók was responsible for editions of Scarlatti Sonatas; works of Couperin; The Well-Tempered Clavier and other works of J.S. Bach; 19 Haydn Sonatas; 27 Beethoven Sonatas and other miscellaneous works; 20 Mozart Sonatas, plus various pieces by Schubert, Schumann, and Chopin among others; in addition to his piano transcriptions from early Baroque keyboard music. (See Chapter VIII.)
3. Béla Bartók, "Motion in the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations" (1932) in Béla Bartók Essays, 499.
4. Bartók, "Motion in the Committee of Intellectual Co-operation of the League of Nations," 499.
