Tone

From left to right: Enrico Caruso in a performance of “Core ‘ngrato”; Maria Callas, Renato Cioni and Tito Gobbi in the second act of Puccini’s Tosca; Emmanuel Ax performing Beethoven’s “Für Elise”; Sir András Schiff discussing a Bösendorfer piano.

When it comes to the piano, one often hears a great deal of discussion about “tone.” This is both understandable from the standpoint of the piano itself, and also the person playing it.

By contrast, when one talks about tone in relationship to a singer, one has to take into consideration the fact that the body is the instrument, not the voice. Every aspect of the sound is determined by physical characteristics like height, weight, the size of the head, and many factors related to genetics.

They say that the great tenor Enrico Caruso, for example, had such a big and resonant sound, or tone, because he had a very high palate, which means that the distance between his tongue and the roof of his mouth or the hard palate, was quite high. He would prove this fact many times for people by putting a raw egg in his mouth, closing his mouth, and opening it again without ever breaking the shell!

I will also never forget the shock I felt when I listened to a clip of Maria Callas' Tosca on YouTube. In the scene towards the end of the second act where Tosca kills Scarpia, the tension and Tosca's passion were conveyed through the sounds of their voices, and I was captivated. Maria Callas' voice transported me to the world of Tosca.

By contrast, when it comes to a pianist, it is the piano that is the instrument, and the overall tone comes from the marriage of the piano’s sound with the physical characteristics of the pianist.

In order to create the best tone then, a pianist has to really understand the instrument they are playing, what it is capable of doing, as well as how best to interpret a work in terms of those capabilities. The process is such that in a performance as much is revealed about the instrument itself as the personality and characteristics of the pianist.

I started to pay particular attention to this when I attended a concert by Emmanuel Ax at Carnegie Hall. He is also playing there again this season. I found his sound beautiful, warm, and very rich.

It’s also interesting for me to notice that how different piano manufacturers are associated with certain characteristic tones related to their specific brand. For instance, I think of Steinways as having a brilliant tone, with big bass and very sparkling trebles, while Bösendorfers have a deeper, more solid feel, and express the way you play directly, so there's less room for manipulation. For me, control is more challenging than with a Steinway. I learned this from the piano in the Bösendorfer Salon in the Vienna Musikverein building. When I rehearsed at that salon, I had the experience of drawing out the piano's most beautiful tone. This was extremely helpful for me in my Faust Harrison recital this year.

The idea of tone for a pianist is very much about a marriage of the pianist and the piano. An artist needs to know what gives their playing its own unique characteristics so they can best be displayed on a particular instrument, in the same way that a painter must know his brushes and canvas in order to create the best image.

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