She and I talked about the concert. We agreed that the violinist hadn’t been at her best. Maybe she wasn’t feeling well, or had some pain in her fingers, or maybe she wasn’t happy with the hotel room she’d been provided. But no doubt something was wrong. You’re sure to run across those kinds of things when you attend concerts often enough.
We moved on to talking about the kinds of music we liked. We agreed that we both liked piano music the best. Of course we listened to opera, symphonies, and chamber music, but what we liked best was solo piano music. And strangely enough, there was a lot of overlap in our favorite pieces. Neither of us could get too enthusiastic for long about Chopin. At least it wasn’t what we wanted to hear first thing in the morning. Mozart’s piano music was beautiful, and charming, for sure, but frankly we’d grown tired of it. Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier was amazing, but a bit too long to really focus on. You had to be in good physical shape to properly appreciate it. Beethoven’s piano music sometimes struck us as overly serious, and (we believed) it had been dissected enough already, from every conceivable angle. Brahms’s piano music was lovely to listen to on occasion, but exhausting if heard all the time. Not to mention often boring. And with Debussy and Ravel you had to carefully choose the time and place you heard them in, or else you couldn’t fully appreciate their music.
Without a doubt, we decided, the pinnacle of the piano repertoire was several Schubert sonatas, and the music of Schumann. Of all those, which one would you choose?
—
Just one?
That’s right, F* said, just one. The one piano piece you would take with you to a desert island.
Not an easy question. I had to give it some serious thought.
Schumann’s Carnaval, I finally declared.
F* narrowed her eyes and gazed at me for a long time. She then rested her hands on the table, laced them together, and loudly cracked the knuckles. Exactly ten times. So loud that people at nearby tables glanced our way. It was a hard sound, like snapping a three-day-old baguette on your knee. There aren’t that many people—men or women—who can crack their knuckles that loudly. I figured it out later, but loudly cracking her knuckles ten times was her habit when she was excited and enthusiastic. I didn’t know that then, however, and wondered if something had upset her. Probably my choice of Carnaval was inappropriate. But there it was. The fact was, I’ve always loved the piece. Even if it made someone so angry that they wanted to punch me, I still wasn’t going to lie about it.
“You’re really going to go with Carnaval?” She frowned, raised one long finger, making sure of things. “As the one piece out of all piano pieces you’d take with you to a desert island?”
I felt unsure, now that she said this. In order to preserve Schumann’s incoherent piano music, beautiful as a kaleidoscope, and somehow beyond the bounds of human intellect, was I really willing to chuck Bach’s Goldberg Variations or Well-Tempered Clavier? Beethoven’s late piano sonatas, and his brave, and charming, Third Concerto?
A brief, heavy silence followed, while F* pushed her fists together hard a few times, as if checking how her hands were doing.
“You have wonderful taste,” she finally said. “And I admire your courage. I’m with you. Schumann’s Carnaval would be my choice too.”
“Seriously?”
“Seriously. I’ve always loved it. I never get tired of it, no matter how many times I hear it.”
We went on for some time discussing the piece. We ordered a bottle of Pinot Noir, and finished it as we talked. We became friends of a sort that evening. Carnaval buddies. Though this relationship only lasted about a half a year.
—
So we made our own kind of two-member-only, private Carnaval Club. There was no reason that it had to be limited to just two, but it never exceeded that number. Since we never ran across anyone else as crazy about the piece as we were.
We listened to numerous records and CDs of performances of Carnaval, and if a pianist was including the piece in his concert, we did everything we could to attend together. According to my notebook (I took copious notes on each and every performance), we went to live performances of Carnaval by three separate pianists, and listened together to forty-two CDs and records of the piece. Afterward we’d cozily exchange opinions on them. Turns out that a lot of pianists, in all times and places, have recorded the piece, which seemed to be a popular part of their repertoire. For all that, we only found a handful of performances acceptable.
A performance could be technically flawless, but if the technique was not completely in sync with the music, Carnaval collapsed into nothing more than a mechanical finger exercise, and its appeal vanished. It was, indeed, very challenging to pull off the expression just right, beyond the abilities of your run-of-the-mill pianist. I won’t name anyone, but not a few major pianists made recordings of fumbled performances, bereft of any charisma. And many other pianists avoided playing it altogether. (At least that’s the only thing I can surmise.) Vladimir Horowitz loved Schumann’s music and performed it throughout his career, but for some reason never made a proper recording of Carnaval. And the same can be said of Sviatoslav Richter. And I can’t be the only person who would one day love to hear Martha Argerich perform the piece.
—
Incidentally, almost none of Schumann’s contemporaries understood how wonderful his music was. Mendelssohn and Chopin, for instance, didn’t think much of Schumann’s piano music. Even Schumann’s widow, Clara (one of the top pianists of her time), who devotedly played his music, secretly wished that he had focused on
