For some she is the most boring pianist of the century, for others the gold standard of fidelity to the work, especially when it comes to Mozart’s piano music. Ingrid Haebler, born in Vienna in 1929 into a former aristocratic family, received piano lessons from her mother, moved to Salzburg with her family when the war broke out, studied in Geneva with Nikita Magaloff, in Vienna with Paul Weingarten, and finally at the Salzburg Mozarteum, where she later studied taught as a professor. And this life, which was thoroughly ordered during the greatest turmoil of the Second World War, is also reflected in her artistic personality. This is shown by the now published CD edition (Decca) very clearly.
An unencumbered art is often also a castrated one
She seeks, if not for the innocent, at least for the carefree, perhaps also for the unencumbered by the Nazi appropriation of art. But an unencumbered art is often one that has been robbed of its artistic core. Unfortunately, you can hear that all too clearly where you might not be looking for it first and foremost: in the recordings of the piano works by Johann Christian Bach, the Milanese or Londoner Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach and the most important point of reference for Mozart when it comes to piano music. Johann Christian, who is also credited as the inventor of Viennese Classicism, often appears with Haebler only as a pleasing rococo entertainer, who perhaps plays in the salons at five o’clock tea and is otherwise of no importance.
No wonder that Haebler’s numerous recordings of works by this composer, among which there are also interesting and musically more committed ones, had no further consequences for a rediscovery of the pre-classic. But did people in the fifties and sixties really want to hear anything other than exactly this: pleasing entertainment that doesn’t hurt anyone and, above all, is absolutely non-political? That doesn’t confront anyone with social relevance and forces them to remember a problematic past? The pianist Ingrid Haebler fulfilled all of these expectations, they quite obviously corresponded to those of herself. In 1954 she won the ARD competition – at the time that was a seal of quality, a career guarantee.
She certainly benefited from her solid technique, which sometimes seems almost meticulous, but never fussy. Maybe that’s why she was in demand as a chamber music partner. The Mozart violin sonatas with the violinist Henryk Szeryng stand out in the edition. In solo play, this doesn’t always prove to be an advantage. The way she taps the freely swinging, unusually cheerful D major Sonata by Franz Schubert – that’s really depressing. So is it really primarily the time, the post-war situation, the mental paralysis that determines the aesthetics of understanding here? And why does the 1960 recording of Franz Schubert’s great G major Sonata sound more convincing than the new recording from 1969?
Did she try to adapt to the new era of freedom-pushing individualization and open up to a more personal approach to the work? If so, then she failed miserably. She remains rhythmically fastidious in the later recording, unaffected by Schubert’s melodic verve. Was Schubert generally played like that back then? Claudio Arrau, almost thirty years his senior, begins the great G major Sonata in a similar order as far as meter is concerned. But, even in the opening sustained sound, where you can’t work with rhythmic accents, he finds ways to make the whole thing much more spatial. Simply by emphasizing the middle voices somewhat more, he fans out the sound and creates spaces of expectation.
You are immediately in another world. Very similar to Alfred Brendel, who leads the alto voice on an equal footing with the soprano and thus creates a situation of narrator and listener. He immediately tries to create a stage for dramatic narration, in which the figure of the pianist quickly asserts its position as director. With Haebler one must certainly look for personal expression elsewhere, in different forms than with the pianists mentioned and especially with today’s pianists. At that time, the basic meter was taken much more seriously, more dogmatically. Even minor shifts, stretches and compressions of the tempo are an exception for Haebler and therefore an event that she only uses extremely sparingly.
Her self-restraint sometimes leads to sheer greatness
As a result, it restricts itself a bit too much in the C minor impromptus, while on the other hand the beginning of the late G major sonata or the G flat major impromptus gain so much self-evidence and simple grandeur that one is almost a little amazed equipment. Why did subsequent pianists think they had to thunder around here, where Schubert, despite the consistently full-bodied movement, is musically so restrictively directed inwards? The A flat major impromptus that follows is also often heard as show piece misunderstood, and is cheated of the quiet melancholy that, despite the triad cascades and moments of forte, is not a hysterical outcry, but stays with itself.
She doesn’t always succeed. The B flat major impromptus struts rather woodenly, and in the F minor impromptus she initially lacks any understanding of the basic character of this piece. If you listen to the young Alfred Brendel next to him, how he hears the piece from a completely different direction simply by reducing the volume and minimal delays, you are amazed at Haebler’s approach. But that changes. Gradually she allows herself to be convinced by what Schubert formulates in terms of emotional states in musical speech.
In this respect, Haebler is a listening aid for all the timid and also for aesthetic dogmatists who know exactly how Schubert must sound, what his music says and why it is not worth the effort to look for more or something else in it. Haebler takes them at least a little bit further. Not too far, certainly, and that’s what many appreciate about her, for whom the expeditions into the realm of original sound and into the areas of more profound psychology or exhibitionistic-seeming frenzy of expression always go too far. Haebler, that much is guaranteed, will offend no one.
And Mozart? With him it is particularly about the performance of a supposedly innocent original state, which has always worked best in the depiction of the sensitive, in the exposition of inwardness. Despite all the technical accuracy, Haebler carelessly ignores many things, and there innocence becomes ignorance, in extreme cases noncommittal kitsch. There it jumps and jumps, and you can see it immediately in your mind, the lively Wolferl, how it gymnastics through a plush Hollywood film, teasing Nannerl with one hand and with the other holding the scenery in the most ingenious piano sonatas. The post-war generation delighted in this image and held on to it until it melted away in the 1970s and nothing was left of this sticky confectionery world.
After that, Mozart became a social revolutionary overnight. Today he is a macho who prevented the development of his sister’s supposedly equal talent. What does that have to do with the pianist Haebler? Quite a lot, because she laid the foundation for a reception of Mozart that went far beyond pure instrumental music and maintained a neutrality in art, which many music lovers longed for and others dragged all the more vehemently into daily politics. In opera this is less of a problem than in instrumental music, from which one then overhears rebellious sounds and subversive harmonies.
Haebler at least protects against this, and in some places she even gives room to the assumption that she knows about alternatives, about the essence of Mozart’s music, which of course, like all great art, is an extension of the space of experience, not restricted to philistinism, and also as a distraction maneuver from is only of limited use in reality. It is in the slow movements that Haebler’s unsentimental playing unearths more emotions than later performance practice, sometimes driven to the limit of the hysterical, wants to force. What cannot be expressed on the piano must be kept silent. So get over it with dignity and self-control.
That sounds a bit brittle and sometimes a bit boring and it’s also not a main concept, but in individual cases it helps not to suffocate the music in meaning. Therein perhaps lies the pianist Ingrid Haebler’s mastery.