After studies at the Leipzig Conservatory, a young German pianist named Wilhelm Backhaus went to Frankfurt am Main in 1898 for private lessons with Eugen d’Albert. Although at that time d’Albert refused to take pupils, the precocious Backhaus “forced the door open. “How did I dare to do it?,” he later pondered during an interview. “D’Albert didn’t even give lessons, his time was very precious and he was determined not to waste it! By a miracle, however, I found favor in his eyes. At any rate he didn’t begrudge me his attention for in that year (1898) he let me play to him more than twenty-five times!” Backhaus returned to London two years later to embark on a solo concert career, and in 1902 performed Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto with the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Hans Richter after the scheduled pianist fell ill. The music he quotes in this autograph is from the slow movement the Fourth Concerto, under which Backhaus added the caption “Orpheus in the Underworld.” It was d’Albert’s teacher Franz Liszt who first attached the description of Orpheus taming the Furies in Hades with his lyre to the second movement of Beethoven’s concerto.
Backhaus was one of the earliest concert pianists to make recordings. In the early 20th century, technology for recording on phonograph records was still in its infancy. However, at the end of the nineteenth century several piano makers had developed piano roll technology to reproduce performances on a pianola, or player piano. The piano roll consists of a roll of paper with punched holes. Each hole represents the position and length of the note played on a piano. As the role moves over a tracker bar in a player piano, the note sounds. As early as 1904, the Welte-Mignon firm in Germany began using this technology to record famous pianists/composers such as Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss. The following year, the rival company of Ludwig Hupfeld in Leipzig began producing his own series of Künsterlermusikrollen (Artist’s Music Rolls) that could be played on his Phonola pianos. The website of the Pianola Institute describes the recording process:
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Pianists visited the Hupfeld studios in central Leipzig, in similar fashion to those who were recording for the Welte-Mignon, at the Popper salon a few streets away. Although the resulting hand-played rolls were immediately available for the Phonola, with printed dynamic markings for the player to follow, they were also designed with Hupfeld’s recent Phonoliszt in mind, an expression piano powered by an electric suction pump, with three levels of automatic dynamics, and variable speed crescendos between the levels. The grand piano used for recording was linked pneumatically to the machine that marked the master rolls, and an additional five tubes allowed for limited dynamic information to be recorded in real time. It is not yet clear whether there were separate sets of dynamic tubes for the treble and bass, since the Phonola had a divided mechanism, whereas the Phonoliszt did not.
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Backhaus contributed to Hupfeld’s catalog by recording works by Grieg. However, this performance of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier, which could be played using Hupfeld’s patented “Soladant” system, appears to be unknown in the discography of Backhaus’s recordings. The paper of this piano roll contains the “Phonola” watermark and the date 1911. In the 1950’s, when long-playing records were being produced, Backhaus recorded all of the Beethoven piano sonatas for the London label. His project to re-record the sonatas in the 1960’s was unfortunately unfinished at the time of his death.
After Backhaus won the Anton Rubinstein competition in 1905, his touring took him frequently to North and South America. This program was for one of eight concerts in Buenos Aires featuring the complete cycle of Beethoven’s 32 piano sonatas and other works. The program contains a slight misprint: the Sonata no. 25 is Opus 79, not Opus 69 as printed here. By the 1950s Backhaus was regarded as a Beethoven interpreter with few rivals, and his series of Beethoven recitals at Carnegie Hall received wide acclaim.
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