As we sat down for the conversation, we were looking at some CDs he brought, including one that was quite special . . . . . . . . .


Justus Frantz:    I founded that orchestra, the German-Soviet Youth Orchestra.  It’s a very good orchestra.  You see, we were always enemies, and suddenly we were together with the music, and it was such an enjoyment.  Everybody tried to be better.  The recording is of the whole concert, even with the National Anthems!  Being a concert we have no chance to repair it!  [Both laugh]

Bruce Duffie:    Do you prefer making records in live concerts?

JF:    Somehow the last times I only did live concerts.  I did one with Vladimir Spivakov and the Moscow Virtuosi, a middle Mozart concerto, and I’m very proud of it.  I’m also proud of Valery Gergiev, who is a wonderful conductor, to do this Beethoven.  I remember in the beginning I really had to fight for the right way because he played it a little bit, in my opinion, like Tchaikovsky.   Maybe I played Beethoven too German for him, and so after a while we met and we both are very happy with the product of this Fifth, Emperor Concerto.

BD:    You say you’re looking for the right way.  Is there only one right way to play any piece of music?

JF:    Of course there isn’t, but in the moment you feel it and you want to be suggestive.  Then there’s only one way.  Later on, maybe five years later, sometimes you’re a little bit ashamed because you think there are lots of ways to make music, but just the particular one you did five years ago, that’s not the right way.  [Both laugh]

BD:    Has the music changed or have you changed?

JF:    Of course, I have changed, yes, and my approach has changed.  It is also the interesting thing, and I must say I’m not interested in artists who always are doing things the same way, because I find the most anti-artistic thing is reproduction or repetition.  It must be always a rebirth and it must be new.  It must be always full of strength, and so repetition is absolutely forbidden!

BD:    Do you find you change even from performance to performance on a given weekend?

JF:    I would say so, yes.  Of course, I don’t want to change the law of the composer and of what he has given to us, but from that moment on we have absolutely liberty.  For example, what does allegro mean?  It means ‘fast’, but what is ‘fast’?  Today this is fast for me, and tomorrow I might need it much faster, and after tomorrow I might be much slower.  That is very honest, and one has to do that this way.

BD:    If your allegro is faster today, will your adagio be slower today or faster to keep up in proportion?

JF:    That has something to do with the strength.  If one can generalize, normally I would say if you have played the first movement very fast, then the slow movement should be a little bit slower to get the right architecture.  But that is very difficult.  Every piece has its own cosmos and its own law.

BD:    You have this huge repertoire of piano music from which to choose.  How do you decide which pieces you will work on, and which pieces you might turn aside for a while?

JF:    That is a funny thing.   I decide like any pianist two, three, four years in advance what I’m going to play.  I’m sitting in the Canary Islands where I’m working on my new programs, and suddenly I can’t work at what I want to work.  I’m seduced by playing some other music, and so sometimes I really have to change because I must be honest.  I’m so excited by some new piece that I cannot follow the wishes I had spoken of two years ago, and I must play something different.  That doesn’t occur very often but sometimes it does, and then I’m following this new idea.

BD:    I assume there’s too much music for you to do everything you want?

JF:    Yes of course, but I decided to play the three late Beethoven sonatas next year.  I played a lot of Mozart  all these years, and suddenly I notice that I never have played Beethoven sonatas in concerts and recitals.  I might have played one, but I didn’t play a whole recital.  Maybe I thought that this was apparently a little superficial, that it is not full of enough contrasts for a whole recital.  But now since I have played all Mozart piano concertos, which I find is the heaven of music, now I want to do this.  So I change.  I change because in this moment I’m in the world of music of Mozart, and I’m very happy to play his sonatas, which he wrote in Paris, so I make a program of Mozart in Paris.

BD:    Is there a secret to playing Mozart?

JF:    It is a line.  Unfortunately we don’t have a piano here in this room or I would show you!  I would say if there is a secret in playing a slow movement by Mozart that it is singing.  You really make a line, a long phrase, and not separate each phrase by having it cut at the Schwerpunkt [the focal point].

BD:    You don’t want a separation?

JF:    No, no, no, no, no.  For example, in the slow movement of the Bb Major K. 595, [begins to sing it] it’s going to the second bar of the phrase, and there is the high point.  But many people and pupils are playing [sings again, showing the lack of phrasing], and then they already have three chunks.  That is absolutely what Mozart did not want.

BD:    So there is no accent on every bar?

JF:    Yes, exactly yes.  No accent, and always, or nearly always, in the music of Mozart there is an upbeat to himself.  For example, every theme that I know he has written that way.  In the A Major Concerto K. 488, [sings again] it goes to the second bar, and it doesn’t start [sings, giving an accent on the first beat].  This is also in the K. 467 Concerto, which I will play tomorrow.

BD:    So it’s always going someplace!

JF:    It’s always leading to something, yes.  That is really a law of Mozart.

BD:    So you always have to look ahead?

JF:    Yes.  That propels his architecture

BD:    Are there any other composers who do this same kind of thing with the long line?

JF:    No.  No one else is like Mozart doing that, absolutely not.

BD:    Why hasn’t some other composer picked up on it?

JF:    Other composers are more on earth than Mozart.  For example, Beethoven is standing with both feet on the ground, and that’s why he needs more accents.  His willpower is there from the first moment.  There is not baroque bowing like Mozart.

BD:    Do you find that Mozart is more in the style of Telemann???

JF:    No, I meant not musical-baroque, but baroque in the way of history.  When people turn and are bowing like this [demonstrates] ...

BD:    Using the grand gestures?

JF:    Yes, the grand gesture, yes.

BD:    It is more elegant?

JF:    It is a very much more elegant, absolutely, yes.

BD:    Are people who are living in the 1990s, who have come through a couple of world wars and depressions ready for the elegance that Mozart put into his music?

JF:    I find it more necessary than ever to hear the Mozart in this time, when after one year of hope for all of us, suddenly we come back to the threat of a war.  I was just in the Baltic States, and I looked especially for Mozart, for concertos for hope.  The last concerto, the Bb Major, is a concerto of hope.  I played it just for my friends there because nobody is helping them.  They want to be independent, like they used to be until 1940 when Hitler and Stalin decided to over-rule them.  Since then they’re suffering, and they need independence like any other country in the world.  They have determination...

BD:    And music can help this?

JF:    Yes, yes!  Music can help because what we all need is hope, and this is what he composed; hope is what Mozart has written there.

BD:    Is music in itself political?

JF:    In itself it is not political.  It is too abstract, but it is also humanistic.  That’s what I believe in, and so it always, at least for a moment, can help people to become better.  As long as somebody is listening to Mozart, he’s not shooting.  [Both laugh]

BD:    [Pursuing the point]  The same cannot be said if someone is listening to Hindemith or Wagner?

JF:    Well, of course, yes, yes.  The approach of Hindemith or Wagner when they’re understood rightly also goes into the same direction, but Mozart is maybe the profoundest of all.  For me, at the moment, that is the case.

BD:    Was Mozart not human?

JF:    He was very much human but somehow it appears to me that he had a direct way to also become an angel, at least in music.

BD:    So he’s divine?

JF:    He’s a divine composer, yes, and he has probably a direct transmitter for divine music.  I hope I am communicating my ideas correctly...

BD:    They’re coming across very well.  I’m glad you’re able to give your ideas in thought as well as in music.

JF:    I hope I can do it better in music!  [Both laugh]

BD:    Do you like being a wandering minstrel? 

JF:    What is a wandering minstrel?

BD:    A performer who travels all over the world... a jongleur!

JF:    [With a big smile]  Oh, jongleur!  Yes and no.  Sometimes it’s a little bit too much.  Normally I feel like a musical gypsy going through the world because I’m at home when I have my keyboard with me.  I couldn’t travel so much without music, but with music it doesn’t take too much effort from me.  I feel at home.

BD:    The keyboard that you travel with, it’s not a sounding keyboard is it?

JF:    No, no.  It’s a silent keyboard, and of course it cannot replace a piano.  But today, for example, I will go to Orchestral Hall for some hours later on.  To learn a new piece it’s perfect on a silent keyboard because your fantasy has to be much stronger than just the piano.

BD:    So there is more heart in it?

JF:    Yes, and the pre-imagination is much clearer.

BD:    As you go around the world you have new pianos to try each time.  How long does it take to make each piano your own?

JF:    That’s a difficult question because I don’t think that every time you can make the piano your own.  Sometimes pianos are using you, and you are playing a different way than you are used to playing because the piano is in its beauty with the treble section, so wonderful that you must use that.  Even you have thought about accents in the bass, because the bass is horrible you can’t do that.  So there’s always an inspiration of the piano to yourself, and you achieve that.  You also have the hall with the piano, and again, in certain ways you try to change a little bit.  You have to change, otherwise it doesn’t work.  Sometimes you are better than the piano, and sometimes you have the feeling that the piano is better than yourself, and that is the most inspired moment.  Very, very seldom, I would say out of fifty concerts there is just one where you really feel that the acoustics are such that with the piano you can achieve a hundred per cent of what you wanted, and everything is fulfilling your wishes.

BD:    I assume, though, that there are times when you achieve things you didn’t think you could do?

JF:    Yes, very often.  That depends on some of the beauty of the acoustical of the piano... and also of the public!  They can be an enormous inspiration when you’re playing a slow movement.  When you try to make an enormous tension with the pause and you suddenly notice that they’re really following, and they are really appreciating this.  You feel the tension in the hall, and then you are inspired and you are maybe better with this public than you are alone at home.

BD:    Are the publics different from city to city and country to country?

JF:    Oh yes, very much so.  I must say on this tour we had a marvelous Mozartian public in New York.  They were so silent and attentive, and when we really played a pianissimo there was not one cough.  It was wonderful!  In Italy, people are not really wanting much in the slow movement.  They’re much more for the fast movements, and there’s always a lot of coughing in the slow movement.  They’re only waiting for when it starts to become fast again.  In Russia they love Mozart more than I thought.  Maybe they love Mozart the most, at the moment at least.

BD:    [Surprised]  More than Tchaikovsky?

JF:    I have the feeling, yes.  We played the last week in Moscow only Mozart, and people were standing around the Bolshoi Hall half a week in order to get a ticket.  And that is for Mozart!  I had the same experience with Sviatoslav Richter and his December festival in Moscow.  There was the same thing, so people want to listen to Mozart in Russia.

BD:    More than just they want to listen to great music?

JF:    Well, I think there is a contradiction which you don’t mean, because Mozart is great music.

BD:    [Smiles]  I mean more than the general picture of great music?

JF:    Yes.  Probably they seldom have more than Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninov or the banging pieces.  [Both laugh]

BD:    [With a gentle nudge]  Mozart is never bangy?

JF:    No, but I don’t believe in a

Berlin, Munich, London, Paris, and so on.  I would say I play seventy per cent with orchestra and thirty per cent recitals.

BD:    Do you ever conduct from the keyboard?

JF:    I started as a conductor.  I never conducted from the keyboard, but I conducted The Magic Flute in Hamburg nearly fifteen years ago, and I might conduct again this year.  Then I will invite all my friends, and they will say this is good or not good!  I have a feeling I would like to continue my relationship with conducting.

BD:    For a concerto performance you have yourself and your own ideas, and you have the conductor with his or her ideas.  Are they always in sync?

JF:    A

BD:    Let me ask the big philosophical question.  What’s the purpose of music in society?

JF:    That’s more a sociological than a philosophical question.  For me it’s quite easy.  I became a musician because I need spiritual meanings in this world, and for me music is the language of God.  I find God by making music, and I need this.  I find that in a world which is overflowing with information and by consumerism, it is so eminent.  It is necessary also to have a world which never can be materialistic, and that’s why music is maybe more important for all of us than it was ever before.

BD:    Do you feel that you’re a musical missionary?

JF:    I feel that everybody who is listening to music is listening to a sort of mission, yes.

BD:    Is it your mission, or is it Mozart’s mission?

JF:    I don’t know.  I think it is a mission which is the beginning.  From the Bible,

BD:    And yet you have to bring this music to the public.

JF:    Yes, but I love this piece.  It’s very unfortunate that it is forgotten by so many pianists.  I find it in the ranking of Romantic piano concertos beside the famous concertos like the Brahms concertos, the Tchaikovsky, the Grieg, the Schumann... [pauses to think]

BD:    The Beethovens?

JF:    Beethoven?  You think Beethoven is a Romantic?  I leave him to the Classic Period.

BD:    I thought at least the last two concertos would be into Romantic realm.

JF:    Yes, maybe.  I also play Beethoven, but I’m speaking about the second half of the last century.  The

BD:    You’re also teaching at the Hochschule?

JF:    Yes.

BD:    Is this piano technique or repertoire, or what?

JF:    We include all of this.  I’m teaching piano technique and repertoire in what we call a masterclass, and I’m also teaching sometimes management through the festival.  Our young artists can come and help in the festival so they learn something about the organization of the musical world.  That way they’re a little bit more self-determined, and they know better what they want and are not simply delivered to the power of the big managers.

BD:    Like lambs to the slaughter!

JF:    [Laughs]  Yes!

BD:    What advice do you have for young pianists coming along today?

JF:    I would say the most important thing is that we must strike against the danger of the electronic media which makes products that are clean and perfect by using many takes and cutting the best parts together.  In a concert you can try to be the same as on the recording, but then very often it destroys the profoundness of music.  It’s wonderful if you can do it, but it’s not the main point.  The main point is that you have a birth of fantasy and of temperament, and that must be striking.  It is much more important to show the great architecture of music.  Beethoven had one pupil, and he delivered a very famous word of Beethoven.  He played at one time the Appassionato to the composer, and it was perfect.  Not one wrong note.  Beethoven was listening, and then he said,

© 1991 Bruce Duffie

This conversation was recorded in Chicago on February 20, 1991.  Portions were broadcast on WNIB the following day, and again in 1994 and 1999.  This transcription was made in 2015, and posted on this website at that time.  My thanks to British soprano Una Barry for her help in preparing this website presentation.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.

Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.