Chopin, Debussy and Berman

(The author is a Radcliffe senior and a member of the Harvard-Radcliffe Orchestra.)

Although there is a general impression that the Harvard Music Department feels music should be seen and not heard there are some excellent concert artists on the music faculty. One of these is assistant professor Laurence D. Berman. As one enthusiastic undergraduate said. "He is a fantastic, incredible pianist." Students who took the second half of Music 1 last spring were privileged to hear Berman illustrating his musical ideas at the keyboard. Those in Music 154 remember his playing the Liszt "Vallee d'Obermann" or improvising Chopin etudes. They remember his legendary ability sight-read scores. But those outside the musical community may not be aware of Berman's pianistic abilities since he seems to prefer small and intimate audiences.

Berman started to play the piano under Lucille Morrisson Ravyen when he was seven: by the time he was ten or twelve he was working on Beethoven sonatas, playing in state contests, and giving solo recitals. In four years at Harvard, he took not one music course; he majored first in chemistry and then in history and science. He did accompany the Harvard Glee Club and had lessons with Miklos Schwalb at the New England Conservatory and gave several solo recitals. Junior year was a turning point in his career. He decided that he did not want to be a concert pianist, but a composer. He stopped taking lessons, stopped performing and tried (unsuccessful) to fit Music 51 into his schedule. Although he had discussed harmony at his piano lessons, he had never taken a formal harmony course.

After graduating from Harvard in 1956, he went to Paris to study composition with Nadia Boulanger. He was studying composition full-time and had given up the idea of a concert career, yet he somehow found time to tour Holland, Belgium, and France as an accompanist to the singer Robert Gartside. In 1952 Berman returned to Harvard as a graduate student in Music. When Nadia Boulanger visited the United States. Berman impressarioed the concert at the Fogg Art Museum. Shortly afterward he returned to France temporarily resumed accompanying. He came back to Harvard in 1963 and began work on his doctoral thesis.

Berman's thesis, The Evolution of Tonal Thinking in the Works of Claude Debussy, was completed in 1965, and he was awarded his Ph.D. that June. He feels that "Debussy was the final rupture from classical tonal thinking, although this break was prefigured and prepared by nineteenth century practice as far back as Beethoven. Wagner didn't make it the way Debussy did. While the concise structures of eighteenth century tonality seem almost irrelevant to the Wagnerian rhetoric, Wagner still relies on the concept of smooth progressions. Debussy's progressions are classical period. Nevertheless, Debussy does not deny tonality in the larger sense, but devises harmonic progressions which are really analogous to older functional ones."

In 1964 Berman left Harvard to teach at Eartham College in Richmond, Indiana. He left Eartham in 1966 and went to New York where he taught part-time at Hunter College while working intensively at the piano. In the fall of 1967 he came back to Harvard where he continues teaching and performing.

One of Harvard's most eligible bachelor faculty members and attractive to many female undergraduates, Berman is extremely popular with students. He has a sincere commitment to teaching and seems to want to share his love for music with everyone, frequently moving to a piano where he allows his fingers to express his emotion for particular pieces of music.

Asked why he thinks performing Chopin is relevant today, Mr. Berman responded, "I have a problem in that respect. Chopin's music speaks to me very deeply and I sincerely believe it can speak to others in the same way. Perhaps the proof is in the fact that people are still going to concerts in which his music figures prominently. Chopin seems to be one of the few composers whose works can satisfactorily make up an entire piano program. Naturally I am aware of the criticism of some of the criticism of some of the cognoscenti who find Chopin not stimulating enough intellectually, too sweetly sensual for their tastes, too obvious in his emotionalism. Chopin is not obvious at all; he is filled with subtleties-more for the ear than for the mind. Besides, there is the dark as well as the amiable side to his sensuality-that quality which Schumann described as 'guns behind flowers' and which is already very much alive in the F-minor concerto. The piece was written when Chopin was 19, and the style is unmistakable. The harmonic richness, the wealth of pianistic ideas-they are all there."

"No one would argue with the fact that Chopin had an extraordinarily original sense of the sonorous capacities of the piano. Without neglecting its inferent percussive qualities, Chopin wrote melodies for the piano as if it could actually sing and sustain sound. In fact, this is precisely what the piano does least well, since every note the pianist plays begin to decay instantly. The pianist, therefore, must give the illusion of sustaining sound, and for this he must call on a variety of resources: graduation of touch, suppleness of rhythm, and of course the pedal. The pianist has to be prepared to use the pedal very sensitively in order to realize the range and variety of sonorities in the music. In fact, I feel it is the swift changes in sonority which are most responsible for moving the music along; if they are slighted his music becomes cold and lifeness."

"Rhythmic elegance is also very important. Even in the first movement of this concerto, which is marked Mastoso and is built on broad heroic lines, the rhythms must be alert and incisive rather than doggedly determined. There are certain turns of phrase which should be rendered with great finesse, and that, in terms of the Chopin style, that means with a very subtle application of rubato. Many pianists, knowing that Chopin calls for rubato tend to throw it on as if with a trowel, distorting the basic metrical life of the music and making the melodies sound maudlin and oversentimental. I find it's not a bad idea, while playing practically anything of Chopin, to have the Mazurka, the most intricate of Polish forms, in the back of one's mind. Incidentally, the third movement of the concerto is referred to in one of Chopin's letters as a 'potpourri of Polish airs,' and mazurka rhythms are more or less everywhere (although I hear Spanish music, quite interestingly, in there, too). But the second movement is no doubt the high point of the concerto. Even unregenerate anti-Chopin-mongers have been known to succumb (no doubt caught off guard) to the charm of this piece."