Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

Mention the little un-iced pastry known in France as une madeleine and anyone familiar with literature thinks immediately of Marcel Proust, whom the sight and taste of a madeleine dipped in tea launched on a protracted stroll down his own Memory Lane that gave the world the great multi-volume autobiographical novel for which he borrowed the title A la recherche des temps perdus, from the French translation of the Shakespeare sonnet that begins

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past….

The effects of my own kind of madeleine this weekend confiscated my day when a friend over in exotic Albuquerque asked me a casual question about the great pianist William Kapell, whom I knew only briefly but fairly closely the year his plane bringing him back from his first tour of Australia crashed into the side of Mount San Bruno mere seconds before its scheduled landing at San Francisco airport in October 1953.

Willy and I had met only that summer at the fourth of what had become an annual international music festival focussed upon the greatest of all cellists and the No. 1 figurehead of his beloved Catalonian nation - musically a world-class event that brought music-lovers from all over the world to its preposterously improbable (and, for creature comforts, impossible) location, little Prades in France’s southwestern-most département of Pyrénées-Orientales; I’ll forever remember the Route Nationale’s highway signs as one entered the village, proclaiming its population as 4,222.  (Record labels identify the uniquely great cellist who wound up in exile there as Pablo Casals, but he himself preferred his Catalonian name, Pau.)  After Hitler’s and Mussolini’s like-minded side-kick fascist general Francisco Franco had overthrown Spain’s legally elected first democratic government, with all-out support from his far more powerful, infinitely better equipped buddies in Rome and Berlin - for instance the unprovoked bombing to smithereens of the Basque town of Guernica, which Casals’ fellow Catalan Pablo Picasso eventually turned into a permanent symbol of their treacherous villainy - Casals fled his seaside home outside Barcelona in fear of his life: Franco’s equally fascistic fellow General Quiepo de Llano had broadcast his intention, if he could capture Casals, to cut off his hands.

I attended three of those Prades festivals, the inaugural one in 1950 (the bicentennial of J. S. Bach’s death), when the Russian-born violinist Alexander Schneider, who had long exerted himself, without the least success, to persuade Casals to return to concertizing, turned around by suggesting that if Casals wouldn’t come back to the world at large, how would he feel if at least part of the world came to him? 

Thus came into existence possibly the most wildly improbable major festival in all musical history.  I then lived in New York, but as soon as I heard that a local travel agency (run by a music-loving Jewish refugee from Germany) had chartered an entire Air France flight and offered seats at an irresistibly tempting price, I swiftly rounded up enough piddling little assignments (most importantly from the monthly magazine Theatre Arts) to make it possible for me to go.  (That charter deal, incidentally, permitted a return flight from Paris to New York at any time within the following year.  Arriving back up in Paris after the festival, I learned that Moscow-dominated North Korea had just invaded South Korea, launching what Washington euphemistically called the Korean “conflict” that had all the world wondering whether World War III had just begun.  I swallowed hard over my decision, but my early preference for the European way of life in favor of what I’d come to consider its over-estimated American equivalent had already taken such a grip on me that I cashed in my return ticket on Air France, and remained in my grungy little walk-up room in the more than modest Hôtel de Londres (at 3, rue Bonaparte, only two doors south of the Seine - long since converted into luxury apartments sold at astronomical prices).  Thus began my enthusiastic expatriation half a century plus seven years ago - and it really all began with Pau Casals.

Sasha Schneider, naturally with Casals’ approval, had hand-picked that festival’s soloists, and they included two particular favorites of Schneider’s, the great violinist Isaac Stern, already established worldwide as one of his age’s greatest, and the born American pianist Eugene Istomin, whom Stern persuaded Schneider to engage in spite of his tender age at that time: twenty-four.  That summer also brought the beginning of two lifelong friendships for me, especially with Istomin. 

In more ways than one, that Prades festival also changed my own life.  Like every American tourist, I’d arrived for my first European visit with a camera - but unlike most, when I returned a year later I’d equipped myself with two cameras, and by then I aspired to more than merely snapshot mementoes.  Back in Prades for the second time in 1953, I attempted the first real photoreportage of my life, irresistibly tempted by the fact that Istomin and Casals’ American pupil Madeline Foley had succeeded in assembling a star-studded orchestra so Casals, then 77, could once again conduct - an activity he’d made a major attraction in pre-war Barcelona with the symphony orchestra that bore his name.  By that time I’d settled in Munich, where Eugene and Madeline bombarded me with entreaties to come.  To my response that I would if Casals would give me special photographic consideration, Eugene wired back: CASALS D’ACCORD COME ALREADY - so of course I did.

That photographic coverage of mine, completed, attracted the attention of the Hungarian-born World War II star photographer for Life, Robert Capa, who with three equally distinguished colleagues - France’s Henri Cartier-Bresson, Polish-born David Seymour, and the English gentleman George Rodgers - had founded what swiftly became the world’s unrivalled premier photographic agency, Magnum Photos.  Bob Capa, who had a thoroughly deserved reputation for figuratively chewing up and spitting out aspiring neophyte photographers seeking Magnum’s sponsorship, struck me dumb not only by ponouncing my Prades coverage “more than sensitive” but also taking me into Magnum’s humblest of three categories, the “Correspondents”, for whom Magnum recognized no obligation but did try to help with whatever assignments came up in our respective geographical areas. 

Please do not expect me not to mention that several years ago, when Casals’ almost palatial seaside villa in San Salvador got turned into a museum, Eugene Istomin and his wife Marta (Casals’ much younger widow) invited me to fly down from Berlin as their guest because, in their opinion, I had in 1953 done the best of all photographic coverages of that almost uniquely great musician, which they gave lavish display at the inauguration of that new museum.  (As I mentioned in a previous bloggery occasioned here not long ago by the death of Mstislav Rostropovich, I last saw Slava there when he and Eugene teamed up for the Rachmaninoff sonata.)

With Casals once again conducting at that 1953 festival, it also featured a number of major soloists - to name only one at this moment, the California-born world-famous violinist Yehudi Menuhin. 

(En passant: I’d heard so many musicians pronounce his surname not MEN-you-in, as prevalent in his native country, but Me-NYOO-in, reflecting the Russian original Me-NOO-khin, so in Prades I seized the opportunity to get a horse’s-mouth answer.  As Menuhin himself told me, he himself compromised midway on Me-NYOO-in - with which I triumphantly one-upped a New York CBS Newsroom editor during a telephone feed from Berlin when he tried to “correct” my pronunciation .  See the unexpected bits of enlightenment you can pick up in this playpen…?) 

By the time of that 1953 festival, Istomin had long since virtually become an adopted son of Casals, who had no children of his own, and Eugene successfully made a strong pitch to engage for that festival a fellow American contemporary he held in especially high regard - and thus we finally come back now to Willy Kapell, who had flashed across the pianistic firmament less than a decade earlier with such virtuoso barn-burners as the colorful but rather meretricious piano concerto by Soviet Armenia’s Aram Khachaturian and the even flashier Rachmaninoff Third, technically one of the most horrendously demanding concertos ever written.  By the time Willy came to Prades that year, he’d wearied of that sort of pianistic tinsel and turned all the way around to such musical basics as Mozart.  In a concert of chamber music in Prades that summer he played a Mozart piano quartet - certainly no challenge whatever for his blazing technique, but I can still see and hear his earnestness when he described it to me as “a very difficult piece!” - musically for sure, and by that time Willy concentrated on the music per se.

Willy almost invariably played like an angel, but in personal appearance he most strongly evoked what Americans in those days called Dead-End kids, after Manhattan’s little lower east-side thugs assembled for the grittily naturalistic Broadway production Dead End.  That summer’s Prades soloists included the diminutive Hungarian-born Swiss soprano Maria Stader, and Istomin, originally scheduled to play piano for her, wiggled out as soon as he discovered he could sweet-talk Willy into taking that assignment over for him.  Willy happened to run into me immediately after his first meeting with Stader, and I can easily imagine her reaction when she viewed only the rough facial exterior of the young man from uncivilized America assigned to play Schubert and Schumann for her.  That infelicitous introduction had left Willy in a seething humor; he irately described Maria Stader to me as “a very arrogant girl!”  Once she got a rehearsal sample of Willy’s superb abilities at the keyboard, though, she of course completely melted, and from that point on all went swimmingly; I have a vague recollection of her even raising the possibility of further collaborations.  Willy told me he’d never before played for a singer, but he emerged from that recital (with Schumann’s great Frauenliebe und -Leben cycle its highpoint) figuratively smelling like a rose, in spite of a minuscule curve Stader inadvertently threw him in Schubert’s Gretchen am Spinnrade, which forced him to cover it up right in the middle of the uninterrupted, almost uninterruptable rippling accompaniment figure in the right hand.

Istomin’s musical and filial adoration of Casals had moved him actually to maintain a year-round furnished apartment in Prades, occupying the ground floor of a sizable private home.  When Eugene and I had said goodbye at the inaugural 1950 festival, he’d lamented to me Casals’ predicament at that point - “stuck down here up in the Pyrenees, with nobody even to play the piano for him.  You just can’t let things like that happen to him!”  My 1953 return to Prades for my second sojourn found me financially absolutely on my uppers, but the spacious kitchen in Eugene’s apartment contained a narrow sort of sofa, with only a thin pad to sleep on and not quite but almost long enough for a really tired person, and Eugene kindly permitted me to crash there, starting with the arrival of the orchestra members, well before the festival itself began.  By placing a straight chair alongside the end where my feet protruded, and sleeping on my side without ever turning over, I somehow managed to survive that nightly ordeal.

Eugene, profligate as always, had also had Steinway’s Paris office ship a good medium-sized grand piano down to Prades, and that automatically turned his apartment into the only available real practice facility in town for all those big-shot soloists, who democratically scheduled their time at Eugene’s piano in shifts.  With that wretched sofa temporarily my home away from home, that situation brought me into at least fleeting contact with such stars not already mentioned here as the great pianist Rudolf Serkin, one of Istomin’s teachers at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music.  Thus I got to know not only Willy Kapell but also his wife Anna Lou and their little girl, whose name I repress for reasons easily understood in retrospect.

In time, Anna Lou became a psychotherapist, but even then she already showed an affinity for what Germany’s 1960s revolutionary student movement called “anti-authoritarian” child-rearing; those young Germans (and possibly also Anna Lou) had become profoundly impressed by the book Summerhill, named after the unprecedentedly progressive school for “problem” children founded in England by A. S. Neill, a disciple of the early maverick Communist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, today best remembered for one of his books with the unforgettable title The Function of the Orgasm.  While Willy practised, Anna Lou and their rather less than dainty little daughter would bask in the sizable garden behind the house.  Other soloists who came to practise took violent exception to the fact that the little tad’s ultra-permissive toilet-training permitted her to drop her underwear and squat down to do what came naturally whenever and wherever the moment happened to find her, and some of them raised holy hell over what in that garden they’d unexpectedly stepped into - complaints that both Anna Lou and Willy took with placid parental equanimity.

To this day I have one auditory recollection from a personal incident of my own.  In accord with the custom of the country, I’d crashed one afternoon on that abominable sofa for what had become (and today remains) my daily siesta when unmistakable, aurally salacious sucking sounds waked me.  My eyes opened to behold, only a few yards away from me, Willy’s and Anna Lou’s young ‘un having at a tube of sweetened condensed milk she’d joyously discovered in that kitchen and uncapped, with the tubs sucked almost flat by the time she woke me. 

Madeline Foley told me about the little Kapell family’s introductory visit to the unpretentious gate-keeper’s lodge that had become Casals’ home in exile, when the proud parents had merely looked on when their little girl not only clambered all over Casals’ bed but also, evoking associations I need not mention, actually sat on the pillow he slept on.  Casals’ jaw tended to go prognathous whenever something displeased him, and Madeline told me she saw it jut farther and farther out the more his youngest guest continued her bed-top clambering. 

Casals’ less than enchanted septuagenarian reaction to that did not escape Willy’s attention.  Istomin gave me his own eye-witness account and expressed regret over Willy’s reaction, classifiable as a kind of minor-league culture shock; in essence he said that even the saintly musical giant Casals has his blemishes of character: “He doesn’t like children.”

Margo Shore, the San Francisco character who ran Magnum Photos’ Paris office and had tentatively taken me under her photographic wing a while before my pivotal talk with Capa in the bistrot of that office building’s ground floor, where all the Magnum gang hung out, had specifically requested me to shoot what she called a side-story on Kapell, so I made an unusual number of photographs of him, the best of them showing him rehearsing the second Beethoven concerto with Casals conducting.  They show Willy with a cigarette characteristically dangling from his lower lip even while playing.  Those several photographic sessions certainly furthered the spontaneous reciprocal friendship that developed between Willy and me.

I’ll forever treasure a nine-CD set his RCA Red Seal / BMG record-label brought out several years ago, covering his tragically truncated career from its recorded beginning in 1944 until his death only nine years later, and I enthusiastically recommend that to all who appreciate great pianism.  Let me take affectionate leave of Willy here with two quotations on the back of that handsome boxed set.

From Claudia Cassidy, the testy battle-axe who for years ruled Chicago’s musical as well as theatrical roost as its most influential and frequently most savage critic: “He was this smoldering, passionate young pianist, generous, lovable, deeply gentle at heart.  I loved his playing above all other playing.”

And from the composer Virgil Thomson, at that time writing regular music criticism for the Herald-Tribune, the only New York paper - long since disappeared - mentioned in the same breath with The New York Times: “He was a great musician and a great fighter.  He did not fight for himself or for just any music.  He fought to play well and to play the best music.  Also to take part in the creative life of his time.  And he was winning, would have gone on winning.”