A Documentary Life History of the American Pianist (1922 – 1953)
By Tim Page. (1954-)
International Piano Archives at the University of Maryland, College Park
ISBN 0-89579-273-7
Christmas 2003 from Viann, but see below
Finished 2004 January 20
Reviewed: 2004 April 20
As a kid in various small Texas towns, I was a young piano student with some promise but not a lot of the right connections, training opportunities, or urban environment to make much of it. Still, there were relatives who fantasized that I might be the next Van Cliburn.
My mother wasnÕt particularly one of them, but she did make me practice and did have a fairly respectable collection of classical recordings, including one or two by a fiery young American pianist, William Kapell. One was an RCA disk, perhaps from the 40s, with two movements of the Khachaturian Piano Concerto on the front and the third movement on the back along with the famous 19th Variation from the Rachmaninoff Variations on a Theme of Paganini and another work that IÕve forgotten, perhaps by Albeniz. At any rate, once I had my own record player in my own room (which may have happened somewhere in grade 7-9 at Taylor or not until grade 10 or beyond in Hubbard) I literally wore this record out, playing it hundreds of times until it was seriously damaged. There was another recording of KapellÕs, the 3rd Piano Concerto of Prokofiev on the flip side of BeethovenÕs 2nd Piano Concerto, the former with the Dallas Symphony. It received similar treatment.
As a piano major at Baylor University, under Jane Abbott, I played the first movement of the Khachaturian Concerto with the Baylor Symphony in May of 1978, indeed, on the Monday evening after Aram Khachaturian passed away in Russia on Saturday.
This briefly describes my youthful connection to the late William Kapell who had made that concerto famous, though he (and I) later came to think of it as little more than Òflashy.Ó But, Kapell had a vital, professional interest in playing and promoting contemporary composers, one of whom was Khachaturian.
Kapell, the first great indigenous American pianist, died tragically in a plane crash at age 31 on October 29, 1953 while returning from a concert tour of Australia. (I was born in February 1956 and Van Cliburn was catapulted to world fame by winning the first Tchaikovsky piano competition in Moscow in 1958.) I had thought for many years that this was one of those early intercontinental flights that got into trouble over the vast Pacific and just disappeared without a trace, but with the 50th anniversary of the accident occurring in the internet age, I decided on impulse to see what I could find out about it. Indeed, the crash was well documented.
For example, this is the final entry for 1953 at http://members.aol.com/jaydeebee1/crash50s.html
Date / Time: Thursday, October 29, 1953 / 8:44 p.m.
Operator / Flight No.: British
Commonwealth Pacific Airlines / Flight 304-44
Location: Near Half Moon Bay,
Calif.
Details and Probable Cause: The
four-engine Douglas DC-6 airliner (VH-BPE), flying to San Francisco from
Sydney, Australia, via Honolulu, was carrying 11 passengers and a crew of
eight. Shortly after crossing over the California coast, while flying in fog,
the airplane crashed into a redwood forest on a mountain ridge 7-1/2 miles
southeast of Half Moon Bay on its initial approach to the San Francisco
Airport. The plane struck the shoulder of KingÕs Mountain at an altitude of
1,950 feet and broke up, scattering burning wreckage over a half-mile area.
Rescuers sighted the wreckage at approximately 10:10 a.m. and determined that
all 19 persons aboard the DC-6 had perished in the crash. Among those killed
was American pianist William Kapell,
31, who was thought by many to be one of the greatest pianists of the 20th
century. Kapell was returning to
the United States following a three-month concert tour in Australia. The
accident was attributed to human error: The flight crew failed to follow the
appropriate procedures for an instrument approach to the airport. The worst
aviation disaster in San Mateo County history.
Fatalities: 19 -- all 11
passengers and 8 crew members.
So, there was a great deal to be
known about the tragedy.
Also, in my internet searches, I
came across the listing for this book which was available by online order from
the University of Maryland bookstore.
I ordered a copy with the understanding that it would be my Christmas
present. After it arrived, Viann
wouldnÕt let me near it until December 25, 2003.
This is not a biography in the
regular sense of the word. It is a
collection of material about the all-too-brief life of Kapell and a view into
the world of a touring musician in the 1940s and 50s.
Kapell was the first of two sons
of a New York City shopkeeper and, on his second try to learn piano at age ten,
showed amazing promise. He
absorbed everything his first teacher, Dorothy LaFollette, had to offer then
worked with Olga Samaroff (ÒMadamÓ) at Julliard and the Philadelphia Conservatory,
beginning at age 16. He made his
concert debut at age 19 and the rest is a career of brilliant and exhausting
fame, like a lightning bolt.
The book is a collection of photographs, anecdotes, and rare information about Kapell and his wife. Before this I had known little about his marriage to fellow pianist Anna Lou Melson, or his two children. His concerts around New York, then around the country, then around the world were of his early repertoire: flashy, big, and impressive. He had his problems, as can be seen in copies of many critical reviews, but he was clearly a pianistic talent to be reckoned with, ÒHomo PianisticusÓ indeed. He only played Steinway and would often show up in a town, go to the Steinway dealership, and practice or talk shop with the workers. His tours were grueling, often playing big concertos several times a month in various places, sometimes two or three times per week, interspersed with solo recitals. He was the act to see.
On pages 78 and 79 there are a series of photos of Kapell in rehearsal with his contemporary, Leonard Bernstein. It is unfortunate that recordings of these performances and many others were not made or were lost. Aaron Copeland wrote a Piano Sonata for Kapell, posthumously. Kapell worked with and made plans with the greats of his day such as Jascha Heifetz. One of his earliest performances as a teenager (or pre-teenager) was at a dinner at the home of Pablo Casals. He even wrote music. I found a handwritten piece reproduced on pages 18 and 19 virtually unreadable at the piano. It would take me considerable work to play it properly and even then it is not clear that I would understand it.
In his late twenties, Kapell took up the chic habit of chain smoking and, like so many artists of alarmingly single purpose, began to become very cranky and even superstitious. He was prone to making public statements, common in the thinking of the first half of the 20th century to the effect that art was not to please the patrons, but was to achieve some new and modern abstract greatness in its own right. I remember having these struggles myself as a pianist in training. What we are doing, I would often think, is maintaining the genius and traditions of times long past. ÒWhat are we doing that is relevant now?Ó I would think. I now work at NASA – JPL where we have, it seems to me, the opposite problem. We never look back, even when a little historical perspective would help. I donÕt think there is an acoustic piano on campus at JPL; the worlds seem profoundly disparate.
That final tour of Australia had not gone well. He had blown ÒGod Save the QueenÓ once and had a particular critic in Sydney in his sights when he said he would never come back to this worthless place again as long as he lived. His final performance featured ChopinÕs Funeral March Sonata. Those who were there found it mature and eerie, even before the tragedy. Anna Lou had returned separately from him on this particular tour and was waiting back in San Francisco. The plane was due late on the evening of the 29th. Early the next morning, searchers found the wreckage on a mountain, a mountain that had been fogged in the previous night. Wreckage was strewn over half a mile. There could have been no survivors.
A bit of the aftermath is discussed. Kapell had a brilliant career but had, as yet, amassed no fortune. There was a lawsuit against the airline that was not settled until the 1960s. It was originally in favor of the victims, for half a million dollars, then was overturned. There had been plans for recordings though classical recording was not yet mainstream at the time, a concert career was mainly concertizing. There had been plans for coming seasons of tours, festivals, collaborations, and creativity. All this was suddenly gone. The music world was in shock. One writer noted how many artists had been lost in air crashes during this era. The speed of air travel was too alluring, its safety too doubtful. This and other accidents of the time brought new flight safety rules that make our lives better today, but William Kapell and his lifetime of possibilities which might still have been in progress even now, are gone. Anna Lou went on to raise her children, obtain a doctorate, make a name for herself in other communities (one photo shows her trekking in the Himalayas), and remarried a man named Dehavenon. This is not their story; nothing more is said, but there are pictures of the children and grandchildren, some of them bearing a striking family resemblance.
Mother asked me if Kapell had not died, would Van CliburnÕs career have been different. The easy answer is Òcertainly yesÓ but it is impossible to say in what ways. Would there be room for two great indigenous American pianists? Would the Tchaikovsky Competition have been so important? Who knows what Kapell would have done or what effect it would have had on the world of music, or the world at large.
The book ends with a complete discography. After some years of industry neglect, some recordings were remade. Anniversaries and commemoratives began to be held. There is a piano competition at Maryland held in KapellÕs name now. There is a Kapell foundation for contemporary music that held a 25th anniversary performance in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of his death last fall. Today, all the extant, public recordings have been collected into a pricey (more than a hundred dollars) Òbox setÓ of compact discs. So far, I have resisted buying it, after all, there are other recordings of the works I want to listen to and I can play for myself, but the box set is on my amazon.com Òwish list.Ó It does contain excerpts from a rare, recorded radio interview in which Kapell is heard speaking. [I bought it for mother for Christmas around 2005. cbd 6/16/07]
As I finished perusing and combing this compendium about the man who had been the closest thing I had to a teenage idol, I reached the final photo on page 188 and was struck by the remoteness of it. There is young a man in a 50s dress suite (looks like white tie), a cigarette hanging from his hand, sitting on a piece of 50s furniture, with a hair style that, in a way, presaged Elvis, and a 50s look on his face. He was probably preparing to go on for a performance. He is frozen in time there in black and white. He could be my grandfather or my father. The entire world that I have known was unknowable to this man and much of it unimaginable. What would have been his response to Sputnik? Would he have cared much or even known? He probably never heard the term ÒCold WarÓ which made Van CliburnÕs achievement world class, much more than just a triumph of youthful musicianship. Kapell was Jewish, but, by his own admission, did not major in this fact.
Would we have really had much in common? Piano and the world of music were his first passion, and his family probably his second, and there were really no others, at least none that emerged in his brief 31 years. This, as decades of wrestling have revealed, is far from true for me. Piano is one of my passions but (and I donÕt say this flippantly, but as a result of careful reflection) it is not first and I could manage, somehow, to live without it. It is but one of my passions.
I closed the book. Some of the infatuation was gone. This man who, though he died before I was born was one of my role models, could never be as much to me as I had thought. There he is, frozen in the early 50s, locked in a world that I could never know, knowing nothing of the world I would know. He played like lightning. Too fast for me to really hear what was going on. Thus, even musically we diverge. After listening to Kapell play hundreds of times as a youth (memorizing even the scratches on the records), I have become my own musician and my own person. Perhaps if he had had a chance to mature, a process for which he was beginning to show promise, there could have been more connection.
Horowitz was KapellÕs early hero. Horowitz died in 1989, aged 86 and has a much more extensive and complete world wide web presence. Kapell was Van CliburnÕs early hero. Cliburn is still performing today. Still, as one who is interested in looking back as well as looking forward, I still found this compendium of William Kapell interesting, enlightening, and compelling.