My question is about composers like Bach or Beethoven or Mozart. They were incredibly prolific. Were they always able to remember and play their material if someone asked them to?
Say Bach was giving a concert and someone said, “Hey, play that invention in F major.” Could he just break it out on the spot? Would he have to ask for the music? If given the music, could he play it flawlessly? I ask because I am a composer, and have been asked to play my own work at times. My music is familiar, of course, to me but it can be challenging to recreate. I wonder if Mozart ever said something to the effect of “I don’t remember it that well, sorry.” These people had long careers. How did they handle requests for music they may not have engaged with for years?
I also kind of feel like Liszt was the kind of person who would, at a party, pass a room with a spinet, slowly reverse back into the doorway, look left and right, then sit down at it and start holding court with full requests.
Slightly off-topic, but fascinating: There is a recording (!) of Brahms playing one of his Hungarian Dances, on a piano in someone’s house. It’s a minute-long wax cylinder – should be pretty easy to find and hear, maybe on YouTube.
But, yeah, even Brahms probably had to practice a little to refresh his memory before performing one of his own pieces. Not that different from, say, the Beatles – in the film Let it Be, they spontaneously jam (in the studio) to several of their own compositions, with varying degrees of success – it’s clear they don’t remember, say, all the chords to some soneg they’d composed five years before.
In general, across genres, maintaining your repertoire is a set muscles you have to keep in shape or will lose over time. Different people approach maintaining their repertoire in as many varied ways as they have exercise habits. I would assume this is true of classical composers and players as well.
And just like other memories and experiences, we retain ones we acquired during formative periods. The Beatles may not have recalled their own songs from a few years before, but ask them to play Chuck Berry or Buddy Holly and they could do it in their sleep. I suspect that manifests with classical composers and players as well.
At the risk of fighting the hypothetical, JS Bach didn’t do many “concerts” and certainly not of his organ works. There was the Collegium Musicum Leipzig stuff but that involved a whole ensemble, which generally rules out spur-of the-moment requests. I’d be willing to bet he could play a fair number of his own keyboard works from memory (and probably a few of Buxtehude’s as well) but all of them? Not likely.
But I agree both that Mozart almost certainly could and you’d be hard-pressed to stop Liszt from showing off. I also suspect Scott Joplin could play the vast majority of his oeuvre on request, at least until the syphilis kicked in. Ditto Robert Schumann until the insanity kicked in.
On a related note I’ve done a few concerts of John Adams’ music with Adams conducting. Even conducting rather than playing an instrument, Adams had to keep his nose in his own score to keep track of where he was. The era of composers as skilled performers is pretty much over, although there will always be exceptions.
In the case of Bach, I wonder how close he could have come, not from remembering all the individual notes, but from being able to recreate it from the basic logic and structure of the piece.
JKellyMap:
Look or YouTube vids involving the Welte-Mignon mechanism, a complex apparatus developed at the turn of the last century allowing pianists to record their performances with great clarity and dynamic control. Gustav Mahler made permanent records of several of his art songs and movements from the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies in 1905, red meat for a Mahler freak like myself.
Loosely speaking, I would imagine it would vary all over the map, just as it would for modern rock pop and jazz musicians (not to mention modern classical composers): some composers, when they compose, are solidifying, for the moment, a string of motifs that they came up with — and if they had sat down to do so six months later it would have been frozen in a mildly different form but with the same underlying structure. Others are less improvisational in their approach and by the time they are scribbling eighth notes onto bar staves, their composition has congealed to a high specificity and they play it (or the piano version of it, or of its various components) the same way each time.
And in both camps there are those who keep fresh on things they composed in the past, those who have a “never look back” attitude, and all in between.
Here’s an incident: Oscar Levant met Sergei Prokofiev and asked him to play the first movement of his 2nd piano concerto. Prokofiev forgets and stops. Levant finishes it. Harpo Speaks! - Harpo Marx - Google Books
Agreed it will vary a fair amount, but Beethoven I’m fairly sure could have played any of his piano compositions on demand, probably without the music. I don’t know as much about Rachmaninoff’s life but I suspect he could play his concerti from memory too - he was a virtuoso pianist, and given usual performance practice is to play these from memory, presumably the composer himself would be able to.
I had the pleasure of seeing Lukas Foss conduct a couple of his own works from the piano a few decades ago. I think I remember that he didn’t work from a score. I’m sure he didn’t have a page-turner, which makes me think I’m right in remembering that he didn’t use a score.
