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Every Good Boy Does Fine, the title of pianist Jeremy Denk’s recently-published memoir, will be familiar to anyone who had piano lessons as a child. It’s a mnemonic of the notes e, g, b, d and f which sit on the lines of the treble clef – other variants include Every Good Boy Deserves Favour and Every Good Boy Deserves Fudge.

The title suggests this will be a book about pianistic progress and the smooth path to achievement and success, the fairy-tale of the child prodigy which morphs seamlessly into an account of What Jeremy Did at Music College or How I Became A Concert Pianist.

It’s not that, not at all. In this honest (sometimes painfully so), witty, intelligent, entertaining and eloquent memoir Jeremy Denk explores the exigencies of the path he chose for himself while only 11 – “the piano now seemed inseparable from me…..the only way I’d found to express myself, a shelter and a persona“. We encounter his teachers, each significant, formative in his learning, some kind, others tough, even monstrous, yet each giving him more pianistic food for thought (though at times he wonders if lessons with his teacher Lillian were intended to kill any pleasure he might take in music, a sentiment many of us who had lessons as children can understand).

Pianists’ memoirs are few and far between, though there are many books about the mechanics, technique and artistry of piano playing, most notably Piano Notes by Charles Rosen or Susan Tomes’ excellent books. In fact, Denk’s book is the first I’ve read where the reader is really taken to the heart of what it means to be a pianist in a way that is both honest and inspiring. Denk makes no bones about the hardships, the hours of practice in grim rehearsal rooms, the daily grunt work required to finesse and refine music that goes on behind the notes we the audience hear (“Dohnányi was a new horizon of boring“).

But alongside this is the love story element of his writing (the book’s subtitle is A Love Story, in Music Lessons). As a precocious child, Denk’s curiosity seems unstoppable – and curiosity is, to me, one of the crucial aspects of the musician’s creative and artistic persona. His interest and passion is piqued by specific pieces of music – for example, Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante K364, which he first hears on cassette tape, or Brahms’ D minor piano concerto, which becomes almost an obsession for him – and the book is chock-full of analysis and commentary on the music he is playing. But this is not dry, musicological writing, rather he animates the music for both fellow pianist and listener with his own observations and insights which will have you running to your music desk or stereo to play or listen with new ears.

But it is the cavalcade of teachers and Denk’s description of them that is perhaps most intriguing, for teachers are often the most significant influence on the shaping and development of the young musician. We all remember the good teachers, and the bad ones even more so, perhaps, but if, like Denk, one goes into lessons with a curious, open-mind, the insights and wisdom one can accrue stay with one for years to come.

While adding new lessons, you have to keep listening to the old ones – as it happens, just like the unfolding notes of a melody. 

Encounters with some of the greats (and now late, sadly) are described – amongst them Leon Fleisher and György Sebők, perhaps the greatest of all the teachers with whom Denk studies. As Denk grows ever more fluent and confident in his playing, it is teachers who temper the ego, reveal errors in his playing, but also offer intriguing and challenging new insights. In these encounters we see the paradox of the developing artistic persona – the pull between fidelity to the score and the attempt to get inside the composer’s soundworld, and the desire to illuminate it with one’s own distinct music voice. This is the lifelong challenge of any serious musician. 

It is György Sebők who also reveals the fundamental simplicity (another paradox!) of something so extraordinarily difficult as playing the piano – that it is possible to go beyond technique and simply imagine the sound one wants to produce, eyes closed. When Jeremy plays the passage again, the sound is “deeper and richer”, and suddenly all the struggling to create a big, bold sound is replaced by “a moment of ease”. It’s a lesson I would recommend to any pianist! Sebok also points out to Denk that he is a perfectionist and that this is holding him back – another paradox of the musician’s life where one’s training is all about the pursuit of perfection. It’s another musical life lesson: perfection is an artificial construct, but one must keep striving anyway. And Denk is more than willing to rise to the challenge, such is his love of the music.

You never “still know” a piece, really. You have to force yourself to know it again, even rebuild its foundations.

I first encountered Jeremy Denk through his writing and his blog Think Denk (which was, in part, an inspiration for this site) and I’ve always liked his ability to ground this high artform we call classical music in a place that is unpretentious and readable. In the book, he explains the complexities of music by Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert et al in a manner which is simple without being simplistic, illustrated with hand-drawn diagrams to explain musical structures, harmony etc. And he peppers his commentaries on specific pieces with some wonderful aphorisms

Beethoven makes you earn your difficulties. You can’t just go wild. The fireworks are always held in tension against some spine of meaning.

Young Schumann is a miracle, really, an outpouring of mostly piano music with unprecedented inspiration and imagination, and a model for turning confusion into art.

People often complain about Schubert’s length, and for good reason. He likes to let his ideas spread out, like pets that hog the bed.

(And before all you Schubert fans exclaim at such a statement, Denk goes on to explain how Schubert uses his “heavenly length” to accumulate meaning, “so that the music becomes less about things themselves, but processes operating, like tectonic plates….”)

I love these quotes because they both bring the music down to earth while also revealing its greatness, something Denk fully appreciates, and revels in. It’s an approach that will appeal to serious musicians and classical music fans, and also the non-specialist reader. To add to this, a generous appendix further illuminates with Denk’s own commentaries on specific pieces and his recommended recordings.

 

This engaging and engrossing book is a journey of self-discovery, about coming out as an artist, and also as a person, a gay man, the latter most tenderly, poetically expressed towards the end of the book – but it’s also a love letter to the piano, its literature, those who play it and those who teach and inspire the next generation.

Highly recommended.

Every Good Boy Does Fine by Jeremy Denk is published in the UK by Picador

Meet the Artist interview with Jeremy Denk

Jeremy Denk

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When the concert is perfect, does that make the reviewer redundant?

As regular readers of this blog will know, I enjoy writing about the concerts I attend but I also struggle with the purpose and value of concert reviews. At the most fundamental level, a review is a record of the event, setting it in context and as a moment in history. A review should also offer readers a flavour of the event and the thoughts and opinion of the reviewer about that event. When I left Milton Court last night I told my concert companion I could not write about the concert we’d just attended because it was so perfect that to write about it could not possibly do justice to the quality of the performance…..

Last night I attended American pianist Jeremy Denk’s concert at Milton Court, one of London’s newest concert venues and, in my opinion, the finest for piano music because of the clarity of its acoustic. Add a pianist whose musical insight and intellectual clarity, magical touch and sense of pacing bring the music to life so that you want to hear him “no matter what he performs” (NY Times), and we have the makings for an evening of exceptionally fine pianism.

It was a typically piquant programme, changed from the published version to include just three works – two magisterial, transcendent late sonatas by Beethoven and Schubert and Prokofiev’s Vision Fugitives, twenty fleeting miniatures, by turns quirky, ethereal, rambunctious, grotesque, poetic, delicate, fragmentary….. Denk revealed their individual characters so carefully, so delightfully that each tiny gem felt like a stand alone piece in its own right.

Beethoven’s piano sonata in E, op 109, the first of his triptych of last sonatas, also opens with a fragment – a tiny arabesque of just two notes in the right hand to which the left hand replies with a similar figure. It’s not a melody, yet that opening is immediately memorable. In Denk’s hands the music unfolded before us, its narrative flow so naturally paced. A muscular middle movement which dissolved into a theme and six variations, surely some of the most transcendent Beethoven ever wrote and handled with a delicacy and robustness, when required, by Denk which pulled one into this otherwordly soundworld so completely that one was transported, fully engaged and utterly overwhelmed. It was akin to meditating.

It felt almost wrong to leave the auditorium for the interval and face the noisy crush around the bar, but we knew the second half would take us to another special place, the unique world of late Schubert, his final sonata completed just a few months before his death.

Is the Sonata in B flat, D960 Schubert’s “final word”? A valediction for his departure from this world? I’ve always been suspicious of this view of this great sonata, whose expansive opening movement is like a great river charting is final course before the ocean, and whose finale is a joyful outpouring of hope, a reminder perhaps that Schubert had more, much more to say, had he lived longer. This was certainly Denk’s take on Schubert’s last sonata. The opening movement’s first theme had the serenity of a hymn, the second theme more unsettled, but the overall sense of repose remained, occasionally interrupted by dark, but never ominous, rumbling bass trills.

The meditative quality of the Beethoven variations was felt again in the slow movement of the D960. In some pianist’s hands, this movement can sound funereal, but Denk gave it a mystical grace and a sense of forward movement, so that the warmth of the A major middle section when it came infused rather than surprised the ear. The Scherzo poured forth with the agile freshness of a sparkling mountain stream, but the Trio reminded us that melancholy is never fair away in Schubert’s world, the bass accents (too often overlooked in other performances/recordings) here perfectly highlighting the change of mood….

The finale opens with a bare G, potentially as cold as the opening of the first Impromptu, but a dancing sprightly rondo quickly ensures, rising to a joyous conclusion, all masterfully and imaginatively presented by Denk. The overall pacing of this Sonata, like the Beethoven, was so elegantly managed: it is a long work (around 40 minutes) yet Denk’s clear sense of a through narrative and overall architecture of the music ensured there were no longueurs, not a moment when the mind wandered to other realms.

The encore was Brahms’ ever popular Intermezzo in A, from the Op 118. Tender and poignant, it was a lovely conclusion to an exceptionally fine evening of pianism.

when I have felt in the moment of the performance I have brought the notes on the page to life in a weird way which is outside of me – that is the kind of success that I am after

– Jeremy Denk (interview with The Cross-Eyed Pianist)

Meet the Artist – Jeremy Denk