Week 33: Reminiscences of Anton Kuerti
One pianist's journey to perform the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven.
Week 33 Reminiscences of Anton Kuerti
To Anton, if you read this: All of us Canadian musicians miss you terribly. I hope you are doing okay. I haven’t heard much since your stroke in 2013, but enough to know that you are recovering and with loved ones. Please know that your living influence, not just as a pianist, not just as a musician, not just as a Canadian, not just as a philosopher activist, but as a human person we love and admire, continues to inform us. Thank you. We will always look up to you.
.As a young teenager who knew I needed to become a pianist, I surveyed the landscape of musical Canada. This was from my distant home perch on Prince Edward Island, off the East Coast.
I’d have to leave the Island. Who would I become? Via hearsay, CBC radio and television broadcasts, and the rare community concert tour, I could make out that the classical pianists could be roughly grouped into three categories. There were the Dashing Romantics, like Ronald Turini or Marek Jablonski, sporting velvet blazers, long wide ties, hair curling around their collars, flare pants, and cigarettes. There were the Prodigies, like Louis Lortie or Angela Hewitt, wearing polite and formal clothes as they were followed at close range by CBC cameras while performing Olympian feats like going to China with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Third, but not least, were the Eccentric Philosophers. They were a camp of two: Glenn Gould and Anton Kuerti. They further divided into Two Solitudes. The aloof Gould. The populist Kuerti. Both played all the Beethoven sonatas, like I wanted to.
I’d have liked to be a Romantic, but I had a Mennonite ethnicity – I had no idea how to cultivate an image that included smoking, schmoozing, or rumours of torrid affairs. Besides, all the Romantics were men, which was how one got away with such things while staying safe and respectable. In theory, I could be a Prodigy – I thought I could play everything they played, but Toronto might as well have been China in terms of my access. I was already “PEI famous”, which seemed enough fame to everyone I knew. “PEI famous” is a local expression meaning that Islanders know of something you’ve done, not just “who’s your father.” In my case, it was loud and fast piano playing. It got me gigs with schools and churches and garage bands, and on one occasion, a talent show in a smoky community hall where the next act was a chicken caller.
If I was to go off-Island, that left Eccentric Philosopher. I liked people too much to be the Gould variety, so my role model came down to Anton Kuerti. It was a queasy feeling to contemplate, for a young girl who wanted to be pretty and sociable and someday get married and have kids. I assumed that Kuerti could not possibly be married with kids (in fact, he was).
Kuerti had once given a solo recital in Charlottetown, our capital, but I hadn’t been taken to see it. I heard he made a terrible impression when he stopped playing to chew out the audience for coughing. After he resumed, someone, somewhere, dared to cough. He stopped again, got up, and demanded that whoever that was, they leave the hall. It turned out to be an elderly woman. “The poor lady took forever to make her way down the middle aisle, dear, imagine that.” Meanwhile, the stage technicians spread the word that Kuerti had tinkered with the piano mechanism using his own tools, breaking the union rules. Whether Kuerti wasn’t invited back, or didn’t want to return, he’d become “PEI infamous”, and I didn’t get to hear him again on the Island.
After I moved to Central Canada, Anton became part of the texture of my musical life, as he did for so many Canadian musicians of my generation. Right away, watching him interact in person with my mentors, I could see that while he could certainly be outspoken and stubborn, he was also lively and gracious and loved a good joke.
I suspect it was due to a bit of a joke between him and Isobel Moore, director of the Banff Centre music program where I became a student, that she set me up to perform the Dvorak Slavonic Dances with Anton in a Banff Centre faculty concert.
Dvorak wrote this half-hour set of pieces for two pianists sitting at one piano. I heard through the grapevine that Anton had privately joked to Isobel that if a piano student was to play it with him, she find him a pretty young woman. Isobel didn’t tell me this, but she emphasized to me that I should wear a polished silk dress and heels. Meanwhile, she gave Anton to believe the occasion was informal, and he showed up wearing a Hawaiian shirt. To add to the effect we presented, I am more than a head taller than Anton. Isobel, greeting us, was the picture of wicked delight.
There was no harm intended – Anton was a perfect gentleman during the rehearsal and concert. He was all business, taking the bass register and pedal and leading from there. I privately disagreed with some of his ideas, wishing for a gentler pace and rubato. But when I heard the recording later, I had to admit his more structural concept was convincing.
Many years later, I happened to stay along with Anton at the home of members of the New Zealand Quartet in Wellington, New Zealand. I was housesitting, and Anton arrived to stay over, before the quartet returned from a summer institute to perform piano quintets with him.
The first evening, Anton, a vegetarian, took over the kitchen and made the two of us a stir fry. Over dinner, I asked him, “Does the carbon impact of your touring bother you?” I knew he was an avid environmentalist, yet here he was halfway around the world.
“Nonsense!” he said. “One person cannot make any difference. And I like to hope I am of some value in bringing good music to others. I am very concerned for the environment: after my concert, I plan to take a canoe trip in Milford Sound. Now, let’s do the dishes.”
He got up to turn on the tap before I could warn him about a glitch in the pipes. Water flooded across the kitchen floor. “Turn off the tap!” I cried as we grabbed towels and dropped to our knees to mop up the sea of water.
Back in Canada five years later, I was asked by my workplace at Wilfrid Laurier University to make a formal speech introducing Anton to Convocation, where he was to receive an honorary doctorate. I prepared and delivered what I thought was a concise, respectful, adulatory address. It received warm applause which continued as Anton was welcomed to the stand.
Some readers will know that Anton is an activist who once (unsuccessfully) ran for federal office for the leftist New Democratic Party. Other readers will know that Laurier is known for its Business program, which leans right politically, and had many graduands present that day. I have mentioned that Anton can be outspoken and stubborn. I believe his speech, given off the cuff, went on for over twenty minutes. It was righteous, damning, and glorious. He was finally given his doctorate to a scattered smattering of applause. Afterwards, my Dean approached me and I said, “Well, if one is to nominate Anton Kuerti for an honorary degree, one must expect his principles to be expressed”. The Dean looked at me with alarm and said, “I thought YOU had nominated him!” To which I replied, “I thought YOU had!”
Regardless of how he’d been nominated, this began a warm relationship between Anton and Laurier, and we were privileged to have his presence at student masterclasses and performances with our city’s Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony. He was lovely and kind with our students and they were thrilled. He’d had a close relationship already for decades with the Kitchener-Waterloo Chamber Music Society, run by his good friends Jan and Jean Narveson. Indeed, he had helped them raise funds for their excellent Steinway grand piano.
Communities small and large all over Canada have stories to tell of Anton arriving to play his Beethoven sonata cycle, often driving his own piano with him in a converted van. His dogged determination to make this music accessible made an unforgettable impression on me. I know the standard I was set by his example: put the music first, the people second, and don’t care much about the rest of the music industry. Carrying all the Beethoven sonatas in one’s head, when one has that attitude, on the road in the Great White North, is quite the undertaking. He was the man to do it. I can only hope I’ll get there somehow, someday. Meanwhile, I’d like to leave you with a little clip of Anton, speaking on an issue he’d surely address today if he was able.