Master Class

I watched last night's installment of the PBS Great Performances series which opened with Daniel Barenboim performing five Beethoven sonatas, and closed with a 2005 Barenboim-led Beethoven master class wherein he showed the four participants (i.e., they performed, and Barenboim stopped them and interjected his remarks, criticisms, and demonstrations when necessary) — gifted young concert pianists Lang Lang, Jonathan Biss, Shai Wosner, and David Kadouch — just how it's done. Or, rather, how it ought to be done.

Barenboim and I are of the same generation, and watching that master class felt a bit like old home week to me. I don't know how master classes are carried on today in general, but Barenboim followed the method that prevailed when I attended school, and witnessing that master class had me feeling all warm and fuzzy right from the get-go (snicker at that last at your peril).

One of the participants, the twenty-year-old Frenchman, David Kadouch, began playing a movement from one of the sonatas, and played forte a measure or two that apparently was marked piano in the score. Barenboim stopped him instantly. Why was he playing forte when the score called for piano, Barenboim asked. "Because," replied Kadouch, barely controlled defiance in his voice, "I like it that way."

For an instant, I misbelieved my ears. No participant in a master class in my time, not even the bravest or most gifted — or the most reckless — would have dared offer such a justification for disregarding so clear a notation in a Beethoven score. Not to a master of Barenboim's stature, at any rate.

In an interval of less than a split second, a dozen witheringly savage responses to that imbecile justification and Kadouch's unmitigated chutzpah flashed through my mind.

I held my breath.

Barenboim didn't miss a beat. "Not good enough," he shot back with equanimity, sounding more bemused than annoyed or angered. "Had you said because there's a diminished ninth that needs to be heard at that point, I would have thought you wrong and told you so, but at least your reason would have had some real thought behind it. Now, let's see what happens when you play it as Beethoven wrote it, and let's examine it from there."*

The right response, and the right way to handle the thing, of course. Savaging Kadouch for his imbecile remark and for his unmitigated chutzpah would have accomplished nothing except perhaps to increase his defiance, and he would have learned nothing of value except that in a master class the master is the master, and against the master one cannot win in the short term.

Needless to say, after about another two minutes of Barenboim nudging his thinking, Kadouch saw his error, and it's a pretty sure bet he'd never again play that measure forte in disregard of the score's notation of piano. And it's almost, but not quite, a pretty sure bet he'd never again treat in so cavalier a fashion any notation of Beethoven's.

Master class indeed.

* I have neither a verbatim transcript nor a tape of the master class, and so I'm largely paraphrasing Barenboim's remarks from memory throughout this piece.