Schubert
It is surprising how little known were Schubert’s piano compositions before the middle of the twentieth century. James Methuen-Campbell’s discography of pianists born up to 1872 lists only six records: Paderewski playing Impromptus 2 and 3 of D935, d’Albert numbers 3 and 4 of the same set, and Grünfeld D899 No 2 and Moment musical No 4. The World Encyclopaedia of Recorded Music, mainly listing electrically recorded 78s up to 1950, charts an increasing awareness of this repertoire, but coverage is still thin. Apart from complete sets such as those on the present CDs, we find only one or two individual records of several of the Impromptus and Moments musicaux, and none of the first Impromptu of D899 or Moment musical No 1. This at once shows the importance of HMV’s enlightened policy of recording such collections in their entirety.

Fischer was thus one of the first generation of pianists for whom these pieces were relatively familiar. Not all were in his recital repertoire; he usually programmed Impromptus 2 and 3 of D899 (still called ‘Op 90’, before Deutsch’s thematic catalogue was published in 1951) and D935 (Op 142) No 4 in mixed recitals, though he sometimes played D935 in full. The Moments musicaux, given complete, appeared less often, but he included them in recitals around 1950, when he recorded them for HMV. All three sets display Fischer’s characteristic energy, richly nuanced piano tone and long-breathed legato phrasing, and also his appreciation of the expressive com plexity and ambiguities of these master pieces.

On record, and evidently also in recital, he played D899/3 in the inauthentic but then-customary transposition from G flat to G, though his later student and assistant Paul Badura-Skoda has confirmed that he played it in G flat in his post-war masterclasses.

Fischer played the more outwardly assertive and sonata-like ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy throughout his career, and in the 1920s also undertook the Liszt arrangement with orch estra. In his 1934 recording of the piece in its original form, one of only five on 78s, we hear something of the power and urgency of his Beethoven sonata recordings from these years.

Intriguingly, in the late 1930s and early ’40s Fischer also played Schubert’s sonatas D784 and D845. His friend and contemporary Artur Schnabel went further in bringing these then-forgotten masterpieces to audiences and records, but in later years Fischer’s students Alfred Brendel and Paul Badura-Skoda would play a vital role in establishing them as part of the standard repertoire.

Schumann
‘To him, above all, belongs my heart, I love him like an honoured friend, to him I owe my most beautiful hours – I lament for him too, for the shadows of sadness, the sorrow we feel in his songs, fell ever more thickly upon him, long before he was completely shrouded in darkness … And for us pianists, the triptych of the C major Fantasia becomes a symbol of the soul of the piano.’

So wrote Fischer in his essay on Schumann, published in Reflections on Music, testimony to his philosophical roots in Romanticism and his love of a repertoire barely represented in his discography. The Fantasy was his only Schumann venture in the studio (he also played the Fantasiestücke, Op 12, and in earlier times Carnaval and the Symphonic Etudes), and nothing is known to survive of his life-long performances of Chopin.

The original issues of the Fantasy on 78s and LP comprised first takes of all six sides except side 5, but several reissues in the 1980s substituted the second takes of sides 4 and 6. We can see no musical or technical reason for these changes, and this reissue returns to the original takes approved by Fischer.

Brahms
In Fischer’s time Brahms’s music for solo piano was almost as unfamiliar as that of Schubert, and here again he was a pioneer in recital hall and studio. His version of Sonata No 3 followed those of Percy Grainger (1926) and Harold Bauer (1939), while Arthur Rubinstein recorded it two weeks after Fischer. He programmed this piece throughout his life, and more surprisingly also played Sonata No 1 in the 1920s and No 2 in later years, works rarely heard even today. He made a Duo-Art piano roll of the third Sonata in 1921, and there is also a live version which unfortunately finds him at his most vulnerable. The HMV record, made on tape but first issued on 78s, has moments of technical awkwardness but is powerfully characterized, and the second movement Andante is particularly beautiful.

Fischer played only a few short pieces other than those included here, occasionally giving the Op 118/6 Intermezzo and Op 119/4 Rhapsody. In his later years he programmed the Op 117/2 Intermezzo, Op 118/3 Ballade, and Op 117/1 Intermezzo—always in that order, which we have followed in this issue, with the Op 79/2 Rhapsody to end the sequence. These four pieces, exquisitely played, were all set down on 21 February 1947 on his first post-war visit to London; their subsequent neglect is inexplicable.

Fischer was active in chamber music throughout his career, most notably with his trio, and he recorded the Brahms Violin Sonatas 1 and 3 with Gioconda de Vito in 1954, but his sole commercial recording with a chamber group is the Brahms Quartet for piano and strings No 1 in G minor, Op 25, presented here. Made six days after the outbreak of World War II, the discs were issued only in Germany and have since made only short-lived appearances in transfers to LP and CD. The string players were members of his Chamber Orchestra, and of their own group, the Breronel String Quartet, named after its first violinist and violist (they recorded Brahms’s C minor quartet, Op 51/1, for Polydor). Fischer also recorded Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor, K478, with the same team; this has never been issued, but test pressings survive.

Fischer’s colleagues were not solo players of his own stature, but then all-star ensembles are seldom ideal in such repertoire. Here all four musicians are on equal terms in a real chamber performance, and give an idiomatic reading of this predominantly dark-toned and introspective quartet. They are particularly effective in the ghostly atmosphere of the Intermezzo and, in profound contrast, thrilling in the abandoned dance of the ‘Hungarian’ finale. This was Fischer at the height of his powers.
Roger Smithson © 2022

Edwin Fischer: A personal reminiscence
It was as an interpreter of the classical masters that Edwin Fischer won his very considerable reputation. He began his studies at Basle (where he was born in 1886) under Hans Huber and continued them in Berlin with the Liszt pupil Martin Krause at the Stern’sches Konservatorium, subsequently becoming a teacher there. The two pianistic giants of that time were Busoni and Eugen d’Albert and it was they who made the greatest impression on the young Edwin Fischer. By 1920 Fischer was one of Europe’s leading pianists, appearing as soloist with all the greatest conductors as well as giving numerous recitals each season. He later formed a celebrated trio with the violinist Georg Kulenkampff—later replaced by Wolfgang Schneiderhan—and the cellist Enrico Mainardi.

He was also active as a conductor, directing the Munich Bachverein and Lübeck Musikverein in the 1920s. During this period he began performing with chamber orchestras and was one of the first to revive the eighteenth-century practice of directing concertos from the keyboard; by 1930 he had founded his own chamber orchestra and conducted them in works by Bach, Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven. His orchestra was highly regarded, undertaking European tours and playing an important part in the 1935 Leipzig Festival which celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of Bach.

Furthermore, Fischer’s knowledge of the orchestral repertoire was vast. He conducted Bruckner and Tchaikovsky symphonies and could strum out Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring on the piano from any point in the score. When he conducted concertos by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven from the keyboard, he was certainly no passive director as is often the case today. Fischer actually stood and conducted during tuttis, discreetly filling in with chords where required and fusing the piano and orchestra together with identical phrasing and nuance. The result was pure chamber music with a real personality in charge, and this can be heard particularly in his recordings of Beethoven’s Third and Fourth Concertos.

Fischer’s repertoire was far more extensive than his recordings suggest. During the time I studied with him it was apparent that the range of music he knew and played was phenomenal. Debussy, Chopin, Hindemith, Stravinsky and Scriabin are just a few composers that come to mind and I particularly remember Nicolas Medtner telling me in 1950 that one of the best performances he had heard of his great ‘Night Wind’ E minor Piano Sonata was that given by Fischer in Paris in the 1920s. When I questioned Fischer later in Lucerne about this performance, he shrugged it off modestly, saying he had included the work as a tribute to Medtner who was living in Paris at that time. Subsequently on Fischer’s last London visit in October 1954, I arranged a reunion with Medtner’s widow Anna at the Royal Festival Hall after he had played Mozart’s E flat major Concerto (K482) with Herbert von Karajan and the Philharmonia Orchestra. It was incredibly moving to see these two old friends embracing in the Green Room after 30 years.

Towards the end of 1953 I had the opportunity to play for Edwin Fischer, and he invited me to study with him in Lucerne the following year. His classes were held in August and September around the time of the Lucerne Festival, together with those of Wolfgang Schneiderhan and Enrico Mainardi. All students were expected to attend rehearsals for the symphony concerts and the Philharmonia Orchestra had been engaged to play for the complete 1954 festival. Fischer was also one of the conductors, with Karajan, Kubelik, Fricsay, Cluytens and Furtwängler, the latter in three concerts including his unforgettable performances of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Soloists included Walter Gieseking, Clara Haskil, Pierre Fournier, Gioconda de Vito and Igor Oistrakh, with Schneiderhan and Mainardi as the soloists in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto conducted from the keyboard by Edwin Fischer.

The classes of Fischer, Schneiderhan and Mainardi were all held at the Lucerne Conservatory in Dreilinden, just outside of the town. But these were nothing like the public masterclasses one encounters today. The cellist Joan Dickson—a pupil of Mainardi—felt that masterclasses in public tended to be something of a compromise, once remarking in a BBC talk that ‘England was the land of masterclasses without, apparently, producing any masters …’

Edwin Fischer’s classes could not have been more different and were held behind closed doors without any audience or distractions whatsoever. Usually they started at 09.00h and went on, with a short interval, until lunchtime. Resuming at about 15.30h, they sometimes continued until late into the evening after which, on one or two occasions, Fischer and Mainardi would meet and invite their students to join them for a convivial meal at a local Italian restaurant.

An inspiring teacher with infinite patience, Fischer urged his pupils above all to ‘breathe life into a masterpiece without damaging it’. He would seek to convey not only the logic and structure of a work, but its spiritual content as well, and his greatest strength was his ability to communicate to his students and others his love for and his absolute belief in the music. The Urtext was of course vital, but it was the Urspirit (Lipatti’s word) that he felt was essential to bring the piece to life. I remember how he made one of his students repeat the fourth bar of the Andante of Schubert’s A minor Sonata D784 at length until the right ‘atmosphere’ had been achieved. This was more important to him than the mere mechanical process of playing the correct notes, though of course he expected his pupils to be highly proficient technically before they came to him. On one occasion I played a Chopin Polonaise in a manner which he thought was perhaps too ‘classical’ in style. Seeing my rather crestfallen expression, Fischer smiled mischievously and commented in his quaint English: ‘Chopin sounding like Beethoven – now that is an event!’

Fischer’s very presence in the class would usually make the student excel himself, and an anecdote or musical comparison would suggest much more than an academic dissection of a piece. He always stressed the importance of feeling the right tempo before playing the first note of a work and strove for continuity and line to prevent it from falling into a series of episodes. His most hushed pianissimo had real fullness and warmth and there was never a trace of harshness in his fortissimo. One of Fischer’s great contributions to music was his instinctive and infallible feeling for the shape and design of a work. Again and again he would call out ‘einfach, einfach’ (‘simple, simple’) to a self-aware student if he felt that the piece was being overloaded with false sentiment; however he always tried to help his pupils find their own compromise between self-expression and a faithful reading of the score. He would sometimes gesticulate and sing whilst a student was playing and a conducting gesture could magically give the piece a new dimension.

I vividly remember Fischer coaxing a pupil to make the trills at the end of the second movement of Brahms’ D minor Concerto sound as if ‘from another world’. He sat down at the piano countless times to demonstrate these few bars until finally their meaning became clear. It was around 22.00h and we were all mentally exhausted. Then, out of the blue, Fischer casually asked us if we would like to stay and hear him play the whole concerto, as he had not performed it for some time. With Paul Badura-Skoda re-creating the orchestral part (at sight!) on the second piano and Fischer at his most relaxed, it was an incredible and unforgettable experience.

Walter Legge described Edwin Fischer’s touch on the piano as having ‘the strength and softness of a lion’s velvet paw’, but Fischer’s humility made him rarely satisfied with his own performances. He once remarked that if only he had had the knowledge and experience of life in his twenties that he had in his sixties, he could have spent the rest of his time turning himself into a ‘respectable’ pianist. But that would have been our loss!

Gerald Kingsley © 2022