JohannaMartzy by David Patrick Stearns at Andante(2001)
Imagine a violinist ofgreat beauty and charisma whose artistic pedigree dates back to thelegendary Hungarian Jen? Hubay. One who is so comfortable in frontof microphones that she releases up to four new compact discs ayear. And one who is so fiery that she has no fear of clashing withsuch august musicians as conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch in therecording studio. Such a violinist would seem to be a musician'sand press agent's fantasy. Yet she's perfectly real. But there's acatch: she's dead.
Johanna Martzy passedaway from cancer in 1979 almost unnoticed - particularly in theUnited States, where she had performed with the New YorkPhilharmonic in the late 1950s but thereafter was an unobtrusivevisitor to North America. Though only 54 when she died, she hadn'trecorded commercially in decades. Her period in the limelight wasbrief; her dénouement was long. Taken for granted then, she'svenerated now. To say that this is evidence of a current talentvacuum would be simplistic: living violinists such as Hilary Hahnand Anne-Sophie Mutter, just to name two, clearly have much greatmusic-making ahead of them. But in the meantime, Martzy and othersfrom the past are being rediscovered, appreciated in ways theyweren't went alive - no doubt because the traditions they camefrom, many now gone, can be heard and identified more clearly. Eventhough these figures represent an earlier age, some of them arevery much alive, such as Polish violinist Ida Haendel, whoauthorizes the release of old recordings if the recording companyallows her to make new ones. The retired Camilla Wicks, whose 1950sSibelius Violin Concerto was hailed by the composer as the bestever, is seeing her discography expand thanks to the Simax label,which is culling live tapes from Norwegian radioarchives.
Mucking around the pastin this fashion is hardly morbid or obscure. It redresses thewinner-take-all mentality of the music industry in past decades. IfJascha Heifetz got more, there was less left for, say, MischaElman. There wasn't much room at the top, and perhaps there stillisn't, on the contract artist rosters of major recording labels.But now there's lots of room to the side. After all, how manyimproved re-masterings of commercial Heifetz recordings can youtake?
Posthumous careers suchas Martzy's germinate unpredictably, often from the second-hand LPrecord market. Her EMI and Deutsche Grammophon LPs, dating from the1950s, now go for as much as $500 a disc. Perhaps in response tothat, Japanese EMI released the six-disc "Art of Johanna Martzy" in1988. The first Martzy CD release in the West came in 1994 with herBrahms and Mendelssohn concerto performances on Testament. Thenfrom smaller labels came a flood of previously unreleased material.The England-based Coup d'Archet delivered five discs of Europeanradio releases that were hard to get in the U.S. (though some haveturned up on Amazon.com). The Doremi label has a series of liverecitals taped in Canada, though only Volume 1 is currentlyavailable. Meanwhile, Japanese EMI re-released its Martzy CD boxthis year with an added bonus: two long-suppressed recordings from1954 of the violinist playing Mendelssohn and Mozart withSawallisch, made amid quarrels about tempo and othermatters.
Slowly, Martzy'sbiography has emerged: her birth in Transylvania, education inpre-war Budapest, the devastating death of her second husband, thefalse accusations about her political affiliations and her decisionto leave EMI rather than grant sexual favors to its chief, WalterLegge. If that doesn't draw you in, the photographs of Martzy will:she was a slim, fine-featured woman, her hair always tied up in abun, the violin never far from her hands, her eyes often distantand quite sad. Music lovers aren't supposed to be entranced by suchsuperficialities, but that's just what makes these posthumousreputations. How, for example, can you not be curious, for example,about the French pianist Monique de la Bruchollerie, who had poormedical treatment following a car accident in Romania and sufferedthe progressive amputation of various limbs, or pianist YouraGuller, who came back from a tour of pre-Communist China addictedto opium and spent the rest of her life in and out ofeclipse?
Naturally, accurateperception of these artists is problematic: we can never watch themor be in the same room with their tone quality. However, a total ofthree Martzy performances of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto areextant (the third is a rare live performance with Otto Klemperer),and they're valuable for charting her range of interpretation fromyear to year in a particular masterpiece, much the way you would ifyou heard her in the flesh over a number of years. In a way, acareer of many decades is distilled down to a few years. What couldbe more convenient? And at some point, one must ask how cruelposterity has been to her.
Johanna Martzy's was adeceptive talent: The tone was filigree and silvery, but notparticularly beautiful. The vibrato was quick and applied with aspareness that never allowed room for sentimentality. Tempos wereswift and straight-ahead with no lingering. In later years (the1970s), the tone grew a bit leathery but the tempos were moreelastic, but in her prime, her playing had a coolness bordering onseverity. The soul of her art was her coloristic expressiveness,delivered with such precision and discretion that each phrasebecame a tiny, and rich, world of its own. Once you've zeroed in onthat quality, the ear can't help seizing on it even in her mostensemble-minded, self-effacing chamber recordings, such as herperformances of Beethoven's Piano Trio No. 1 and Dvorák's "Dumky"Piano Trio with István Hajdu and Paul Szabo. All of this is encasedin a sense of line that's marvelously expansive, unbroken andbuoyant. Martzy's expressive parameters were narrow, but theycouldn't have been more resolutely defined.
She had a quality ofinhabiting a piece from the inside and saw little need to gussy upthe surface; to the jaded or inattentive ear, her interpretationscan seem to lack incident. Skeptics, however, need only listen toher EMI recordings of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas, music to whichher severity couldn't have been better suited. In fact, Bach seemsto be the defining composer of her aesthetic: prior to theperiod-instrument movement, most performances of these masterpieceshave moments of heavy weather, of too much sound being crowded intotoo small a space. And there are easier things in the violinrepertoire than sustaining the repeat-laden dance movements.Martzy's recordings are the exception, her precision of toneaddressing the problems of the former, her long sense of linecarrying her through the latter.
There are downsides toher approach. Cerebral but not intellectual, she's mostly incapableof projecting the charm of Mozart. In her until-recently-suppressedrecording of Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 with Sawallisch, sheseems relieved to hit the cadenza, in which she can throw off theresponsibility to ingratiate. Most puzzling of all are her two EMIrecordings of the Mendelssohn concerto. Though it's always temptingto declare the suppressed version to be superior, this time it'sreally true. The commercially released version conducted by PaulKletzki emphasizes the music's classical qualities to the point ofslickness. Sawallisch is far more attuned to the music's darkerunderpinnings, inspiring a concentration from Martzy that remindsyou - if any doubt remained - that this is a great violinist,albeit one who perhaps didn't know what collaborators were best forher. Might that be the core reason her career neverdeveloped?
