Simon Tedeschi in conversation
Assistant Headmaster (Senior Housemaster) Dr Luke Harley interviewed Mr Simon Tedeschi to gain his insights on the characteristics that define great instrumentalists and his thoughts on the role and value that the Romantic music genre has in modern culture.
Thank you for coming in to College Street, Simon. You’re someone who has achieved considerable renown as a concert pianist, and not many Australians have scaled such lofty heights in the classical world. What do you think are the secret ingredients to making it as a concert performer?
I think humility is very important, but also a mixture of humility, strength of character and strength of vision. Durability, too. And an ability to communicate with people of all kinds. But also a hunger to want to probe deeper into interpretation, while accepting that there is no such thing as “perfection” per se – the music that we play is so immense, and there’s always so much more to learn. So, it’s again that humility, but also that restlessness. They are things that often rub up against each other.
We have plenty of talented young performers at Grammar, some of whom might hold aspirations of musical careers. What qualities, in your experience, augur well for professional success as classical performers?
At the very highest level of concert performance there’s a strength of rhythm, an emotional conviction. It’s an X-factor thing that can’t really be reduced to a set of variables – but you just know it when it’s there, often after only one note. It’s an ineffable quality. There’s a boldness there, even a boldness that you might not agree with. And this boldness might defy a lot of what’s correct theoretically. But it’s just something that causes an emotional reaction, often a very powerful emotional reaction.
So, something that transcends the purely mechanical you think.
Yes, certainly. But at the same time, something that incorporates the purely mechanical, to the point where the mechanical is no longer seen or noticed. At the very highest level, what we’re all aspiring for as performers is a sense that we’ve transcended the purely technical – the effect is akin to a beautiful Maserati where you’re not even worrying about the engine or the muffler or whatever; it just moves with that grace of a swan. And then you need all the usual professional attributes, too: good communication, reliability, and curiosity all help.
You’re a flexible pianist in the sense that you’ve traversed different genres and styles; in recent years you’ve played some jazz, but you started out as a classical pianist. You don’t seem bound by musical categories; today, for example, you performed Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo à la Turk” in the Alastair Mackerras Theatre – a jazzy version of Mozart. What are you thinking about when you play that kind of music?
Well probably lots of things, but in the case of the Brubeck there’s a particular feel that involves thinking more through the body than the mind; it requires shutting off the mind to some degree, and that is a difficult thing to do for someone who has a classical background. I’m trying to relax and remove all thoughts from my mind in the Brubeck.
Before, when I played classical music, I was terrified of making mistakes. With jazz, it’s different. Miles Davis used to always leave the mistakes in his recording because he thought that was the human aspect – and I thought that was great. But not all mistakes are good mistakes.
Does that obsession with not making mistakes in classical music make it hard psychologically for performers?
Yes, in the age of Spotify, that’s become a stumbling block for many people going into classical music. Such people tend to be very Type A in their expectations of themselves and struggle when they don’t live up to those expectations. But at the same time we live in a more forgiving age with mental health – very unlike the 1980s when I was starting out. It’s tricky because victories in competitions launch careers. And success in competitions often comes down to tiny, ineffable aspects of performance that supposedly make one performer “superior” to another – superior, at least, in the eyes of twelve fallible adjudicators. It’s a cruel and in many ways uncreative way to measure artistic excellence.
Photo Credit: Keith Saunders
So, do you think the best performers typically win competitions?
Certainly not. I think often the most confident artists win competitions. Even just on a basic level. Most people who win competitions are men because they tend to have bigger hands – a distinct advantage. And I’m a man with small hands, so that’s a disadvantage. But there are people who literally specialise in winning competitions. That was certainly not me. I mean, I’m not that type of performer, even though I grudgingly admire those who are. However, you also get the rare person who is both an extraordinary musician and wins competitions. Martha Argerich is one.
The older I get the less I focus on competitions. Also, I’ve learned to really appreciate and celebrate the skill of other pianists – something that you’re not raised to do when you are starting out as a concert pianist. I’ve discovered over time that there’s room for many wonderful pianists and some of them do things much better than I could ever possibly do.
The Olympics have recently been on, and obviously athletic excellence is comparatively easy to quantify, in most cases. You run the 100 metres in the quickest time, you win the gold medal. But in the arts, it’s a bit different. How do you measure who’s the most outstanding performer?
It’s so difficult. Some of the greatest musicians of all time never won a competition. Arthur Rubenstein, in a big prank, failed himself to get into the Rubenstein Competition. And then there’s the well-known case of Ivo Pogorelić who was eliminated in the 1980 X International Chopin Piano Competition, causing Martha Argerich to resign from the jury in protest. Then there’s all today’s pianists who are incredible but just don’t win competitions. So it’s a lottery – it’s as much a lottery as human beings are a lottery. And it can come down to the personality of the judge, the prejudices of the judge. It’s like a jury and a trial – we’re all human beings with our own little kinks and our own little weird fixations. And so, it’s brutal in that respect for someone who’s determined to have a career to be reliant upon a person who is just a person like us.
Photo Credit: Keith Saunders
You won major competitions when you were young. Success came to you very early. How has that affected you over the years?
I won a big Australian competition, the ABC Young Performer of the Year award, in 1998, and the top prize in the keyboard section of the Royal Overseas League Music Competition in London (2002). But in terms of being a “prodigy” – that concept that Geoffrey Tozer called a “hideous creation of adults” – it’s been very difficult because so much of it is about appearance: here’s this person who in my case looked five, even though I was nine, playing like an adult. But then you grow up another five years and people don’t care as much, and yet you’re, if anything, more musically developed. And then there’s the aspect of the prodigy that’s symbolic for other people and perhaps even for a society in a way. That’s why so many prodigies come from regimes like say China or Russia, because they’re heralded as symbols of what societies are doing right – you know, “Capital C” culture. And so that’s difficult as well. Unfortunately, you end up developing quite a disembodied sense of self. You don’t really know why people like you so much. And in my case, I assumed that people wanted to be my friend, when in fact they just liked my playing. It’s difficult in terms of “normal” development, especially when you must go to school. So, you almost develop this weird quasi-adult relationship with your teachers who are much older than you. It’s a strange existence.
Yes, that idea of the great performer shows how much the Romantic idea of the artistic genius lingers in our culture. And a lot of parents probably still invest in that idea too. Do you see that as a healthy thing?
Yes and no. Talent exists, certainly, but it can be tremendously damaging if the whole human being isn’t factored into the equation. Luckily, we live in an age now in which even the tough mums and dads you see at the competitions and the eisteddfods are aware that maybe some of the stuff that happened thirty years ago was inadvisable. And I think that that’s a wonderful thing and will in the end produce more broad-minded musicians.
Photo Credit: Keith Saunders
You’re someone who reads widely and thinks deeply about the notes on the page. I studied music composition at Sydney University in the late 1990s, with Peter Sculthorpe, Ross Edwards and so on, and many professors and students there were quite proud of the fact that they were the so-called “intellectual” department, whereas the Conservatorium was more known for prioritising the mechanical aspects of music-making. Richard Gill, in his memoir Give Me Excess of It, argues that most instrumentalists are akin to tradespeople – they need time to practise, more than anything else, and serious intellectual endeavour can be a time-wasting digression from that fundamental task. Where do you sit on that? Do you think the best performers bring a certain intellectual depth to their performance, or is that not necessary?
When you’re talking about the very greatest performers, yes, inevitably they’re great thinkers. It doesn’t matter if it’s a Miles Davis or a Evgeny Kissin, musicians of that calibre are always thoughtful. But yes, there is a tendency for elite performers to be quite tunnel-visioned and immune to any wider experiences of life, and that’s not really their fault – it’s just the life that they’ve led. And I am unusual in that respect, and I always have been, just in terms of my sense of humour and the fact that I was always quite questioning. That, I think, is just an inborn trait.
Our Form IV boys study an Australian novel, Maestro, by Peter Goldsworthy, the father of Anna Goldsworthy.
Anna Goldsworthy – such a wonderful pianist and writer. A few years ago she wrote a review of Fugitive [Tedeschi’s first book of poetry] in The Monthly, and I remember her writing something hilarious – she pointed out that I’ve become “used to [my]self as an object of fascination”. I laughed so hard at that because it’s so true – as a young performer you literally just walk into a room and people are interested in you.
The Fugitive book cover Courtesy of Upswell Publishing
Indeed. Maestro is about a young Darwinbased pianist, Paul Crabbe, who is frequently told by his parents and friends in Darwin how brilliant he is. But in Maestro he writes as a mature person, a 25-year-old, looking back on his teenage years and wondering where it all went wrong – by that point he had failed in his dream of becoming a concert pianist. Paul’s narrative is a love letter of sorts to his teacher, the fictional Austrian pianist Eduard Keller (the “maestro”), a character loosely inspired by Eleonora Sivan, Anna Goldsworthy’s piano teacher in Adelaide in the 1980s. Keller does his best to guide Paul in the right direction, but Paul doesn’t seize that opportunity because he is too self-satisfied and can’t handle constructive criticism. Keller, too, is an interesting character. A Romantic virtuoso who was much admired in Vienna in the 1920s and 30s, he naively believed that his artistic reputation would protect his family. But Keller ultimately loses his wife – a Wagner specialist – and son at Auschwitz – and I know your Polish maternal grandparents were Holocaust survivors as well: you touch upon that in Fugitive. Anyhow, Keller changes after the war and becomes apprehensive about Romantic music – he finds it egocentric and self-indulgent. I think he connects it with certain tendencies in German culture that unnerve him – the elevation of the expressive at the expense of reason, and the nationalistic myth-making of Nazism. Wagner, of course, was the Nazi Party’s favourite composer; Hitler called him “Germany’s greatest prophet”, and Wagner’s music is reported to have been played at the gas chambers. You’ve talked recently about the need to resuscitate some idea of the Romantic sublime in today’s world, an interesting idea given your family’s background. So, what are your views on all that? Do you think that Keller is right to be nervous about Romanticism?
It’s an interesting one. Especially with what’s going on in the world today, I don’t really have any easy answers regarding German Romanticism – which, I should add, is my favourite music, because when I listen to music I listen to Mahler, Bruckner, Schubert and Brahms. I suppose it’s that old idea of separating the art from the artist, and we’re hopefully entering an age, belatedly, where people are starting to countenance the idea that a person can be terrible in some ways but a genius in others; likewise someone good might, on closer inspection, in fact be more problematic than we assumed. It’s difficult with German Romanticism because when you listen to Wagner, the ideology has very much seeped into the music, especially the gigantism of it. But any idea of “purity” is a furphy most of the time. I recently wrote an essay for the Australian Chamber Orchestra on the relationship between Bach and Mendelssohn. Bach, I wrote, was the great rediscovered German composer when Germany needed a composer. But who should discover him, but Mendelssohn, a Jew? It’s a classic example of how messy these things can be.
Pictured: Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog (1818), oil on canvas. This painting is a prime visual example of German Romanticism and a representation of the Romantic sublime.
You said that German Romanticism is probably your favourite music nonetheless.
Yes. The richness of it, and the sublimity – the sense that the whole history of classical music was travelling to this terrible point just before the emergence of the “modern world”. It’s the most ecstatic music, in my view. But I love Bach, Mozart, Brahms. I think what I love about Brahms is that he took from the classical and baroque composers so much in terms of fabric and craft but he added a truly Romantic sensibility. So, Brahms’ music is universal in that respect.
Given this love of Romantic music, is there something deficient in modern music for you, say, since the Second Viennese School?
No, not at all. I adore it all. I love Webern, I love Stockhausen. Xenakis… I don’t play much of it, but I love it.
I’ll finish with a quote from Maestro, one that I think is apposite to our conversation. During one of their piano lessons, Keller and Paul begin discussing aesthetics. Keller warns Paul, who loves performing flashy Romantic repertoire, to “be on guard against beauty always” and to “never trust the beautiful.” When Paul queries why, Keller explains that “beauty simplifies. The best music is neither beautiful nor ugly. Like the world, it is infinitely complex, full of nuance, rich beyond any reduction.”
Wow, what a wonderful quote. I think beauty itself is complex. It can be terribly painful, if you listen to Mahler. And ugliness can also be incredibly beautiful, if you listen to Shostakovich, especially his later works, or Prokofiev. We’re in this interesting cultural phase at present in which everything is supposedly “certain” and “stable” and “pure”. But music reminds us that things are uncertain, unstable and impure. And understanding that can lead to an amazing sense of humility – and hopefully a bit of healing for a very troubling time.
Transcribed by Ms Bridget Cohen
Pictured L-R: Mr Greg Platt, Mr Simon Tedeschi and Dr Luke Harley
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