a sacred domain
by
Douglas Messerli
On
the death of the great pianist Paul Badura-Skoda
On
September 25th, 2019, the great pianist Paul Badura-Skoda died in
Vienna at the age of 91. Badura-Skoda was recognized by many as one of the
greatest of classical interpreters, yet his repertoire included a wide range of
composers, including as The New York Times music critic Anthony
Tommasini noted: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Scribin, Rimsky-Korsakov,
Hindemith, and the Swiss composer Frank Martin.
Badura-Skoda began his career as a
pianist whose musical artistry was unquestioned, yet in his early 20s, after
hearing the Austrian harpsichordist and fortepianist Isolde Ahlgrimm, he began
to question his notions of the piano as being the dominant interpreter of classical
musicians.
His musical gifts were widely appreciated
by audiences throughout the world, yet particularly in his later years, according
to Tommasini, seemed “to lack sparkle and clarity” of his earlier recordings—but
then similar complaints were made about Glenn Gould’s somewhat mannered
performances.
Basically, Badura Skoda was widely
admired for his playing as well as he critical works, written with his wife Eva,
a musical historian and fellow performer, such as Interpreting Mozart at the
Keyboard.
I think I never met Badura-Skoda and his
wife, although I may have at a party of the Music Department at the University
of Wisconsin-Madison which I attended as a young student (at the age of 18),
which apparently resulted in a great amount of gossip, so I perceive now at the
age of 72, since the department’s chorale director Vance George, with whom I
was having, at that moment, sexual encounters, invited me to attend. As a
student who worked in the Admissions Department and even in my sophomore year engaged
to numerous professors to help make beginning students feel comfortable, I saw
no problems in my attendance; yet a couple of years ago, visiting Vance in San
Francisco, where he had been now long been the director of the San Francisco Symphony
Chorus—winning Grammy Awards for Best Performance of a choral work Orff’s Carmina
Burana, 1992 and Brahms Ein Deutsches Requiem, 1995, Best Classical
Album of the year Stravinsky’s Perséphone, 2000 and Mahler’s Symphony
No. 3, 2004, with TV and film credits including an Emmy for Sweeney Todd,
2002 and soundtracks for Amadeus, The Unbearable Lightness of Being,
and Godfather III—he hinted that he regretted that invite. I truly don’t
even remember it (I was so very innocent, even then) but I now gather that
taking a student to such an august event might certainly have resulted in many
a wagged tongue.
I certainly had heard some of Badura-Skoda’s
recordings, however, and just this moment listened to his version of Beethoven’s
Piano Concerto No. 4, where he literally
takes the piano on a trip through lovely thrilling trills and almost
waterfall-like trips up and down the scale. I wish I’d recall meeting him and
his wife and have been to discuss his interpretations.
Now dead, they can’t even imagine how much
their living meant to me. After having spent an rather difficult and exhausting
year in New York, leaving after my then-lover Richard, a curator at the American
Museum of Natural History—I might now guess that curators are a big thing in my
life—literally dumped me one morning, telling me that he had previously made a
commitment to another man, I, more pained that I now realize, took to what must
have been the last New York City phone booth, just a few weeks before the now
famous Stonewall protest, to call my parents in order to help me pay for my
trip back to their Iowa home. I didn’t want to return, but I knew I needed to.
And after a few days, I was ready to get back to my university studies at
Madison.
I arrived there without housing, and still
hurting from my NYC days. But I was certainly ready to my student life. I don’t at recall how I
hooked up with Vance again: in those days we knew how to use telephones.
Nonetheless he amazingly invited me to come to the house in which then
ensconced, caring for a property owned by the Badura-Skodas who had traveled to
Europe, probably Vienna, for the summer. Why Vance, who had his own Madison
apartment was staying there, I didn’t ask, and why our mutual friend Pat, was
also there I was silent about. I loved them both.
To me, it was just a wonderful and
beautiful moment of comfort, a kind of redemption for my naughty days in New
York. Yet, of course, the three of us shared a big bed, although no longer with
sex, just hugs and kisses. It’s hard to imagine all that simple and silly
sexual dalliance these days. It was just a terrible friendliness, no demands to
be made.
I remember seeing the Badura-Skoda
library, their books and manuscripts, but we were all protective of their
lives. No one ever pulled open their glass-encased shelves. The bedroom and
kitchen was all we truly allowed ourselves, one evening Pat, cooking up
sausages which I believe her farm-bred brothers had made, adding a good deal of
fennel, to provide one the greatest meals I’d ever encountered. I can taste it
still today. I don’t like licorice, but fennel is something different, which I
will never forget.
And during those few days at the
Badura-Skoda home I healed from my silly first romance (a relationship, giving
Richard’s adamant conservatism I would never have survived in a long-term companionship),
and was ready suddenly to go back to school, ready to return to the Madison
life. I rented an apartment, and soon after met Howard N. Fox, with whom I have
remained with for now almost 50 years.
I don’t think the Badura-Skodas ever
imagined that I’d entered their precious domain. But it was so very important
for my life. And I am so sad for their deaths.
Los
Angeles, October 8, 2019
Reprinted
from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (October 2019).
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