Edith Farnadi; who was Edith Farnadi? A bleak question because it is astonishing that a pianist of such vibrant and mesmeric personality should have been largely forgotten. The situation is not unfamiliar;  other cases come to mind. For example, Esteban Sanchez-- for Cortot 'a musical genius'-- who prompted Daniel Barenboim to ask 'how is this possible? How can Spain have hidden away a performer of this class?' More recently the late Nelson Freire found Farnadi 'unique.'  Research reveals little beyond the bare facts, and if Andras Schiff in his candid and refreshing Memoir, 'Music Comes Out of Silence,' writes at length of his fellow- Hungarian pianists, including a devoted tribute to Annie Fisher , there is no mention of Edith Farnadi. True, if Farnadi was a bold and fearless interpreter, most notably of Liszt and Bartok, she could be cavalier on her off days    allowing her temperament to rage out of control and leading to approximation rather than precision. There were times when, as one writer picturesquely put it, -the hair seemed to fall into her eyes.' Yet her lapses were a small price to pay for her stature elsewhere.   Vladimir Ashkenazy insists that when even   the most exalted ideas are unsupported by a proper technical foundation,  the result, if not null and void, is heavily qualified. So, what would he   make of Farnadi's slip- shod and lethargic recording of Tchaikovsky's First Concerto, a sad reduction of 'the greatest of all battles for piano and orchestra?  It is remarkable that such a performance ever found itself perpetuated on disc. But then she is supreme in some of the most musically and technically demanding works in the repertoire, in the Liszt Sonata and in Bartok's Second Concerto How do you reconcile one thing with another?

   At this point I would like to evoke Schnabel who, when confronted by a producer's complaint that his  octaves in Brahms D minor Concerto were fallible claimed, 'I could play them more accurately, but I couldn't play the more brilliantly.' a rejoinder echoed by his student Claude Franck who, faced with a similar criticism  of his revered teacher, exclaimed, 'but his technique was so brilliant.' The paradox is everywhere and with Farnadi, a musical truth seeker if ever there was one, you are easily in the 'forgiving mode.' At her greatest her flaws are as negligible as spots in the sun.

   Farnadi positively invites such generality and wide-ranging discussion because of the startling and again(re Freire) her unique re-creativity.  So now let me turn to her in all her glory. Even with the catalogue filled with legendary recordings of the Liszt Sonata(Horowitz-- his 1932 recording-- Gilels, Richter, Arrau and Argerich come readily to mind) her performance is, within its own distinctive terms, supreme. Her technique both here , and in every savage demand of the Bartok Concerto is masterly. In the Bartok she is at the same time alert to the poetic undertow beneath the racing, Bach- inspired figuration. Hear her also in the central 'Adagio religioso,' at the heart of the Third Concerto. and you will surely be lost in wonder at the spell she casts, evoking the mystique of the Puszta(the great Hungarian Plains).

  How unforgettably Farnadi erases Edward Sackville-West's opinion that Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies exhibit 'hasty workmanship, shallowness and an expensive glare.' For Farnadi they are an epic tribute to Liszt's native Hungary;  they are unmistakably her language. You may miss Gyorgy Cziffra's sky-rocketing bravura in his set of the Rhapsodies but Farnadi shows a  far  deeper awareness, Hear her in Nos 1, 3, 5((Heroide-elegiaque') and most of all in the late Rhapsodies, Nos 16-19 where Liszt's former flamboyance and the glitter of his 'glanz' period is transformed into a dark, unsettling and austere utterance. Here is what Alfred Brendel called 'the bitterness of the heart' when Liszt, suffering in his old age from ill health and a sense of abandonment, mocked and derided from seemingly all sides, lived out his last years in relative seclusion. The same is true of the third book of the Annees de pelerinage', again, a dark reflection of Liszt's suffering during his final years when his deeply ingrained religious faith was tested to the full. A time when, in Gerard Manley Hopkin's words, he woke to feel 'the fell of dark, not day.'

    Away from such introspection, Farnadi is charm itself in Liszt's 'Soiree de Vienne' a tribute to his beloved Schubert(for him the most poetic of all composers) notably in No 6 where Liszt, never the complete altruist,  embroiders Schubert's themes with scintillating thread, drawing the listener towards  his own ingenuity and legendary pianism.

    No praise could be high enough for Farnadi's Bartok, not only in the Concertos Nos 2 and 3 but in the complete 'Microcosmos' an endless instructive  journey from simple beginnings to  evolving difficulties. 'For Children,'( a distant relative of Schumann's 'Kinderscenen' and Debussy's 'Children's Corner Suite,' those masterpieces of childhood evocation), the 'Allegro Barbaro,'a gift for a pianist of Farnadi's temperamental force, and the 'Three Burlesques' where satire is more savage than playful. The first, 'Quarrel,' is far from  a gentle disagreement, the second 'more than'A LIttle Drunk,' and there is a macabre slithering momentum in the third 'Molto vivo,capricioso.'

   Staying with another Hungrian compatriot and pianist Farnadi includes two delectable sweet meats by Dohnanyi; parpaphrases on the waltz from Delibe's 'Copellia' and the waltz from Delibe's 'Naila.' She is also fearless in  three of the Strauss-Godowsky Paraphrases;  music  you can  view as monstrosities, alive with disfiguriing finery, or a virtuoso's paradise. An all too brief selection of Waltzes and a single Mazurka show Farnadi as a born Chopin pianist making you long to hear her in the major masterpieces; in the Sonatas, Ballades and Scherzi. She also shows her prowess as a chamber musician. Partnered by violinist Gerhard Taschner she turns from the rigours  of solo demands to playing of an enviably relaxed grace and freedom in the two Grieg Violin and Piano Sonatas and in Beethoven's F major opus 24 and opus 12, E flat Sonatas, making you wonder when, in the opening of the 'Spring,' Sonata Beethoven can rarely have sounded so magiclly dismissive of the doubts and sorrows that plagued him throughout his life. Here, all cares are forgotten, and again  you long for more music from this team.

   Was there no end to Farnaddi's range? Admittedly her's is a strangely elegiac view of Rachmaninov's Second Concerto. Her spread chords in the opening's giant pendulum swing suggest small hands and elsewhere she casts a  dark,  unfamiliar shadow across music more normally associatedwith glamour and heroics. Again, if the gods were with her in the Three 'Etudes de Concert'(subtitled Caprices poetique')and in 'Gnomenreigen,' they  desert her to a damaging degree in the 6 'Grandes Etudes apres Paganini' and also, and most regrettably, given its popularity, in the third of the 3 Liebestraumes.

   More generally if you can point to more accurate and precise alternatives you would still rarely hear performanes more uncompromising or poeticallly committed. Her greatest performances far eclipse her less successful ventures. Did her fervour  lie in her awareness that both Liszt and Bartok shared the fate of all true pioneers. Liszt was for long considered a composer who went from superficiality to senility, and Bartok's music was for many years thought incomprehensible. Again, Farnadi  was, perhaps blessedly, an uneven pianist for whom in the words of Miss Brodie from Muriel Spark's novel, 'The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, 'safety does not ome first; truth and beauty come first.' Above all her perforances whether successful or less so are brilliantly alive. Is it possible that there were no play backs and retakes, the  modern world of the producers hygienic undertaking? For Farnadi her concern was less with the right notes in the right order but with the spirit of all that was placed before her.. She may take things to the edge-- sometimes over the edge-- but her playing. in LIszt's immortal words, 'breathes the breath of life.' 

   A few quibbles. It would have been good to have included the Four Valses oubliee rather than two recordings of the same work(invaluable as these are), music where  Farnadi is memorable in  capturing  their elusive, hallucintory world. Rachmaninov's Second Concerto in C minor is printed  in C major(few works  declare  their slavic melancholy in a more emphatic  minor key). There is also  a passing reference to the Liszt Sonata, a land-mark in the history of music, as 'nice,'a case of (playful?) understatement.

    But I have to say that in many years of reviewing, I have rarely encountered anything approaching Scribendum's outsize tribute. It offers up a kaleidoscopic, endlessly shifting view of a pianist as  elating as she is exhausting. The transfers of LP discs dating from the forties into the sixties are outstanding.  There is also a brief biographical note telling you that Edith Farnadi died at the age of 52; a tragic loss of an extraordinary artist.  My graitude for this issue is immense.

 

Bryce Morrison