The night before my birthday (last week), I went to see the pianist Mitsuko Uchida play at the Berliner Philharmonie. I only managed to take one photo, as she walked off the stage. She played Beethoven Sonatas that I mostly didn’t know. (In the morning I’d been in Café Slavia in Prague where a pianist played Britney’s ‘Everytime’ to everyone in the café.)
I once queued up to get Uchida’s autograph before or after she played in London. She was strangely rude to me (which I somehow loved), as I didn’t have a fresh piece of paper for her to sign, rather a thick-set flier that already had graphics on it. (I tried to find the flyer, but couldn't, so looked on eBay for other autographed memorabilia instead.)
There’s something about how Uchida plays piano but also how she dresses: The puffer jacket she wore to pick up her DBE, a particular pair of sunglasses she wore to Wimbledon in 2013, that she’s so often dripping in Issey Miyake (as she was last week). Watching Tár made me think about the genre of CD/vinyl cover photography. Lydia Tár did Claudio Abbado and Leonard Bernstein but never Mitsuko Uchida. What type of camp is this?
I’ve watched her performance of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 4 so many times that I now hear the mistakes (they might be more audible to others on first listen) and I’ve listened to her 1996 Desert Island Discs so many times that I’ve ingrained a mis-remembrance: that she talks about how she met her husband on the silver chairs outside Bar Italia in Soho, when she doesn’t. I listen for many reasons but partly to remember this mis-remembrance.
I wonder if this type of obsession has a sexuality. I occasionally imagine myself presenting to a doctor, saying I can’t stop listening to a particular song or something, and the doctor saying it’s okay, it’s just that you are gay. Mitsuko Uchida has something in common with other (here unnamed) objects of obsession: she’s glamorous yet fallible, earthly yet divine, approachable yet rude. I somehow desire to be (or become?) one of these women. I somehow desire to be with them. Perhaps Heavenly Bodies by Richard Dyer can help.
I have been trying to write a thing which became partly about piano playing via a case that involves Max Pollak, the first husband of Dora Sophie Kellner who went on to marry Walter Benjamin. When he was around 11 he began to suffer with insomnia after his parents installed a loud clock outside his bedroom. Rather than remove the clock, his parents sent him to see various neurologists in Vienna, including Sigmund Freud, who told him to stop playing the piano so much as it was too stimulating (in German: erregend). I wondered if this had a gendered or sexual connotation; that the piano might become an object not just of obsession but also of arousal. A friend recommended a 1997 essay by Philip Brett.
Brett’s argument goes something like this: Schubert reduced Beethoven’s cosmos to the interior, the domestic sphere. And the performance of piano duets (i.e. four handed performance) carries with them a gay erotics, important to assert in the aftermath of the AIDS crisis. To play these duets you have to tangle yourself with someone else. You also have to negotiate who is primo (top) or secondo (bottom) and if and when you might switch. He cites a number of examples: Schubert’s Rondo in D (D. 608), his Fantasy in F Minor (D. 940), his Rondo in A (D. 951). I look each of them up on YouTube but only find heterosexual or sibling performances (apart from Sviatoslav Richter and Benjamin Britten playing together – audio only).
***
To return to hands (and the original subject of this newsletter): Charlotte Wolff, who dedicated Studies in Hand-Reading (1936) to the composer and pianist Armande de Polignac, whose hand print also appears later in the book.
Wolff writes that Polignac’s little finger, the Finger of Mercury, is developed, much like Maurice Ravel’s (who also appears in Studies). This is noteworthy, given the little finger is, wait for it, the Finger of Music, as much as it might be thought of as the gay finger. The reading that follows in Studies is of Polignac’s aunt, named by Wolff as ‘La Princesse Edmond de Polignac’, a.k.a. Winnaretta Singer, the lesbian patron to the Parisian music scene and heiress to the sewing machine fortune. Wolff again remarks that her little finger is also extraordinarily long, straight, and inclined backwards from the hand, as is common with musicians – as is visible (or almost visible) in these two self portraits.
In one of her memoirs, Wolff recalls her relationship with Armande de Polignac, which explains the dedication: ‘We used to sit on a long sofa covered in black velvet, in a narrow room made bigger by the reflections of several mirrors. We sat, ate, drank and held hands.’ After she hears that de Polignac is related to Geothe she writes: ‘No wonder I was swimming in sentiment and romance, having found an intelligent fairy princess with whom I could communicate’. When de Polignac left for a trip to Yugoslavia, Wolff recalls that she went to the Gare du Nord to throw a bouquet of flowers into her compartment a few minutes before the train left. After re-reading this memory, I looked up some of the manuscripts of de Polignac’s love songs, and there, as if written about Wolff, in a bleached scan, were the words:
Your
hands
are
flow -
ers
of
lân
Thank you for reading. On Monday (aka May Day, aka International Workers’ Day, aka Labour Day) I will be launching the first iteration of walk connected with a project on public sex and socialist realism in the context of East Berlin. I might send an email here, else on my instagram @raeblodmas ♡
This has become an issue for me, so how did you like Tár?