For the Sake of It

Without a glance at the audience, the stocky little pianist padded straight to the concert grand in the center of the stage. He sat down, arranged his tails, struck a softly impatient chord. When the chatter and applause diminished to a cathedral quiet, he began to play. People in the front rows heard him snort and grunt over sforzandos, in rollicking passages saw his blue eyes twinkle like Santa Claus's. When his program was over, he nodded his big, square head appreciatively, and trundled off stage.

Artur Schnabel never plays encores. In fact, ever since he turned 40, he says, "it is really my desire not to play in public at all." But last week, at 65, he gave two Manhattan audiences a tantalizing sample of the music he plays and loves best--the piano works of Beethoven, Schubert and Mozart--music which no other living pianist plays so well.

First he played Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 4 with his old friend George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in Carnegie Hall; then, a few days later, a piano recital--the only one he will give all year in Manhattan. Yet in the next fortnight he will play in San Francisco five times. Says he: "Agents [he has none] think I am crazy. But when I go some place, I like to stay awhile. To play, pick up the check and run is silly for a man of my age."

Besides, he adds with the sly grin that heralds one of his frequent puns: "Agents are salesmen. I am a sakes-man. I play for the sake of it."

Prodigy Unexploited. Artur Schnabel has been a sakes-man ever since he was a boy prodigy in Austria ("I was never exploited. My parents were very good that way"). He took lessons for only seven years, still hates to practice and seldom does (says he: "I practice in my head"). His teacher, who was,a close friend of Brahms, took him along on several of Brahms's famed walks in the Vienna woods. Schnabel loves to debunk the pressagent story that Brahms discovered him at his first recital, and praised his genius: "I fully expect to read some day that I played billiards with Mozart." Adds Schnabel, with a burgher's chuckle: "The only thing Brahms ever said to me was 'Are you hungry, boy?' before we started eating, and 'Have you had enough?' when we finished."

Now Schnabel does most of his walking in Manhattan's Central Park. He first came to the U.S. nearly 30 years ago, and is now a U.S. citizen. But he still likes to go back to Europe every year, to visit old friends, and to hike in the Swiss Alps. He wears his fame lightly: he seems much prouder of his two sons (Karl Ulrich is a concert pianist who sometimes appears in joint recitals with his father; Stefan a Broadway and Hollywood actor). And he is much more anxious to be praised as Composer Schnabel.

Mozart the Modern. He has written five string quartets, a piano concerto and two symphonies (one of which the Minneapolis Symphony played in 1946). He composes in a freely atonal style, admires the hardy music of Schonberg and Austrian Atonalist Alban Berg. Says he: "After all, Mozart composed 'modern' music when he wrote." When friends ask him why he writes like the new masters, but plays only the music of the old, he says: "I play only music which remains for me problematic--only music that is better than it can be played."

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