Two CD editions will make piano fans happy these weeks. The “Complete Decca Recordings” Friedrich Guldas (Decca) – after the meritorious publication of the solo recitals of the SWR, the currently most extensive recording – and the more surprising: “Georges Cziffra. The Complete Studio Recordings 1956-1986 “(Erato). One can understand the two pianists as paradigmatic antipodes of the piano art of the 20th century: Friedrich Gulda, who allows his highly musical piano playing to be determined by knowing reason and reflective intellectuality, and on the other hand Georges Cziffra, the Glamor virtuoso who, on closer inspection, was a modest artist, plagued by historical strokes of fate. Born in Budapest in 1921 as György Cziffra, the son of a Hungarian Roma who played cymbals through Europe. At the age of five he was already performing in a traveling circus where he improvised on topics called out to him from the audience.
He cultivated the skill of artful improvisation all his life and practically perfected it. He began studying the piano at the age of nine and toured Europe at the age of 16. To make it short: in 1942 he was drafted into the Hungarian army, played in front of enthusiastic German officers, fled by means of a train that happened to be waiting and ended up in a Russian gulag. In 1946 he was released to Hungary, after trying to escape he ended up in prison again before escaping to Vienna with his wife and child and finally settling in Paris.
Cziffra has to convince herself of the certainty with ease
You don’t have to know that to feel just from the play of Cziffras what deep sorrow lived in this artist. And what an unshakable hope. In the first bars of Ludwig van Beethoven’s “Pathétique” a little of this despair comes to light, in the delays, in the unusually long holding of the chords, the listening in, the sheer pausing. It can be seen that this does not come from a poor sense of rhythm, this is extremely pronounced with Cziffra. With Friedrich Gulda, this sonata sounds much more determined, more gripping, more confident. Cziffra has to constantly persuade himself of this certainty and watch out that he doesn’t slide into melancholy again and again.
Of course, if it were only about Beethoven sonatas, Gulda would be preferred to Cziffra; with Chopin it would be the other way around every now and then. Hardly any Beethoven sonata recording comes close to Gulda, least of all by living pianists. But the fact that Cziffra is not even considered here may also have reasons unrelated to the music. He was disregarded in Germany as a keyboard man, just as one denied the musical “depth” of all those who were technically superior. This general judgment needs urgent revision. Cziffra is not only the most virtuoso pianist of the 20th century. In his musical goals and ambitions, too, he is closely connected to Franz Liszt, the first great virtuoso at the piano from the 19th century. Cziffra’s own arrangements and improvisations suggest this point of view. He plays around themes and melodies in a similar way to Liszt, enriches them with broken chords, breaks them through with rushing runs across the entire keyboard, shifts timbres to the upper treble range, divides the timbres, sets them apart more sharply and gives the piece a sharper one Profile.
The creative appropriation also works the other way round
This is not only a keyboard circus, but also a musical brain teaser. In spite of all the pleasurable finger acrobatics, that seems to have been Cziffra’s actual artistic pleasure in the end: the enrichment of the existing by thinking it further in all directions, in the smallest motivic detail as in the overarching narrative. It doesn’t just go in one direction, from simple to high virtuoso, but this type of creative appropriation often has an even stronger effect on the other hand: when Cziffra suddenly slows down the racing scales to normal playing and listening level. This is where a very peculiar melancholy comes into play, which seems as close to the romantic Liszt salons as it is to the great cultural and human farewells of modernity. The paraphrase about “The Blue Danube” by Johann Strauss II grows to symphonic size – not only quantitatively. The way he takes a Hungarian dance by Johannes Brahms, who created complex art music from simple folk melodies, even further to extremes, is impressive from a purely compositional point of view, apart from the technical skills required. Most attempts to re-enact this are likely to end miserably.
Apparently, Cziffra still plays on an older grand piano model with a less voluminous tone, with a lower attack depth, and an easier-to-move mechanism that enables such frenzied speeds. However, Cziffra does not celebrate itself, but also opens up the space of experience for the musically circus, which has been frowned upon since Wagner and Toscanini. But that has always fascinated people, including those who consider music to be a purely intellectual art or who want to hermetically claim it as such. What if you just want to be inspired by great piano art? Then you are correct with both. It doesn’t have to be the massive warhorses. A Beethoven bagatelle with Friedrich Gulda or Couperin’s colorful fluttering “papillons” with Georges Cziffra are equally impressive.