Pianist Paul Lewis’s 2011 was a dream year. In addition to a heavy concert schedule he released three major recordings for the Harmonia Mundi label. Lewis capped a magnificent Beethoven cycle with a critically lauded recording of the Diabelli Variations, wrapped up his Schubert lieder cycle with Schwanengesang (featuring tenor Mark Padmore) and continued in the dark and moody world of late-Schubert with a stunning album of keyboard works.
Ariama editor Craig Zeichner spoke with Lewis about Schubert and his last works for piano.
Ariama: Congratulations on a brilliant year.
Paul Lewis: Thank you. I consider myself extremely lucky to be able to record this repertoire that I love to play. It’s a tremendous privilege to be able to go into the studio and try to achieve a certain level of detail that you might not be able to get in the concert hall. I love the whole process of recording, I think it’s great fun.
Ariama: I’ve been enjoying the podcasts you made about late Schubert. I was especially interested in the point you made about the Klavierstücke and Schubert being a master of saying many things at once.
PL: That’s the complexity of Schubert and it happens mainly in the last six years of his life. It might be an easy point to make, but when he found out he was living with syphilis something did change in his music. At least in the way I see it his music became more multi-layered. He never smiles without sadness in the background, he never conveys terror without nostalgia and without the feeling of remembering something you can’t have anymore. That’s the multi-layered quality of it, it’s never just one thing. Conveying the balance of that in performance is the real challenge. And of course you are never done with it because you can adjust the balance and see it in a different light. That’s what is fun. It’s a constant fascination, a job that’s never finished and I feel very drawn to that.
Ariama: That elusive quality, that ever-changing feeling seems modern to me. Is there a kind of stream of consciousness at work?
PL: We can see it as modern in the sense that it’s always relevant. There’s something in it that we can all relate to, no matter what era we live in. I suppose that there’s something so fundamentally human about it that it’s constantly relevant to who we are and what we see. That’s why 200 years later the music is so incredibly powerful, just as powerful and radical as it must have been then. I’ve never particularly thought about it being modern, but I think you are absolutely right. It’s what makes it feel like it still pushes the boundaries today. We can all relate to it because we’ve all been there in one sense or another.
Ariama: There’s also a nervous energy, a sense of trying to get it all in. He’s a man at the end of his string trying to say many things at once.
PL: There’s a sense of nostalgia that pervades his later music. But as you said, there’s also this sense of wanting to pack things in and that time is limited. If you look at the C minor sonata there’s a sense of being pursued. You are being followed and there’s a real sense of urgency that comes into his later music. If you look at his pre-1822 music, and I’m not saying it lacks depth or anything like that, but it’s a different kind of thing that has less of this urgency. The late music is a volatile pot of different ingredients and that’s what makes it so unique, there’s nothing else like it.
Ariama: There’s a kind of beautiful terror in it.
PL: Yes, yes. And nowhere more so than in the later songs. There are so many parallels you can draw between the lieder and the late piano music. It’s really essential to study them and involve yourself by playing Winterreise, Die schöne Müllerin and Schwanengesang because I feel there are so many direct references between the songs and the late piano music. It’s really essential to seek out the connections. For example, the way he uses repeated notes. I realized relatively recently that there are so many instances in the songs where you just get a single repeated note and it’s a kind of an indication of fate or something that you can’t escape. There’s also plenty of instances of that in the late piano music, it’s much easier in the absence of words to see that just as an accompaniment, but in fact it’s not. He doesn’t let you get away with it, Schubert doesn’t let you dodge the issue. I think that’s really important to understand and you see it more clearly through the songs.
Ariama: There’s always talk about Schubert’s unfinished works. I trust the composer knew what he was doing and knew when to move on. You made an analogy in an interview about Michelangelo and how he drew a sculpture out of a piece of marble, going as far as he could go.
PL: I think there’s a sense of endlessness in all of Schubert’s music. It’s very different from Beethoven. With Beethoven you come to the end of one of his great works and you feel a sense of arrival or a sense of completion. There are questions that have been answered. Whereas with Schubert I’ve always felt the opposite, that even in his greatest work you never really feel that there’s a sense of resolution. Maybe a sense of acceptance, but you end up with more questions than when you started. In that sense you can say, for want of a better way of putting it, that none of his music is complete. It kind of goes along with the fact that he left so many works incomplete. Schubert had a different approach, there’s no sense of “getting there,” because there’s nowhere to “get to.” It’s all about the process and what you see along the journey. That’s what I love about Schubert, you never feel like you get anywhere with it, you just take the journey. You take that route again and see things differently the next time. For me there is always an unfinished feel about Schubert, it’s part of what makes it elusive, but also part of what makes it so rewarding.
by Craig Zeichner, Ariama Editor
