How to play the piano

It’s unfashionable these days to play Bach on the piano. This, plus the fact that the authentic piano repertoire is Classical and Romantic, makes it easy for us to forget that the piano is above all a polyphonic instrument. No other keyboard instrument permits such subtle differentiation of parts (voice-leading, as it is called) through variation in the intensity and tone colour separately allotted to them. Yet it was possible for Alfred Brendel to remark in 1976: ‘pianists are about to lose the skill of “polyphonic playing”, once held in high esteem, a loss that makes itself felt not only in Bach, and not only in dense contrapuntal structures.’ He was discussing ‘Bach and the Piano’ in a dialogue reprinted, with a short reflective coda written in 1989, in his most recent collection of essays, Music Sounded Out. It is typical of the slightly unfocused nature of Brendel’s thinking that he should make the telling observation that pianists are about to lose the skill of polyphonic playing, and then fail to register its true, indeed its devastating significance, allowing it to be a matter of taste (‘once held in high esteem’) and of only slight or partial misfortune (‘a loss that makes itself felt’). For if in 1976 pianists really were about to lose the skill of polyphonic piano-playing, then to all intents and purposes the skill of playing the piano was at an end.

Beneath the ambling civilities of ‘Bach and the Piano’ there lurks a surprising and troubling absence. Nowhere in these reflections does Brendel once mention Glenn Gould, whose creative life was devoted to the cause of polyphony on the piano. Not to mention Gould in an article about Bach and the piano written in 1976 is a considerable feat of omission. He was then at the height of his recording career and indisputably the most famous living interpreter of Bach on the piano, as he had been for the previous twenty years and was to remain until his tragically early death from a stroke in 1982 at the age of 50.

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