François-Frédéric Guy is a French pianist who realised early on that his personality ‘fit more immediately to German music’. It was Brahms, Wagner and Richard Strauss that attracted him and ‘not so much the French music, strangely enough.’ He laughs. ‘But you know, voilà, that’s it.’
He can’t quite characterise the reason for this attraction, but he remembers how he discovered it – with Wagner. ‘It happened to me when I was about 14 or 15: I heard Karl Böhm’s recording of the Ring and then I realised that this was the music I’d always wanted to listen to.’ Guy began to study the operas thoroughly. He knows the cycle so well, every note, that now he could even conduct the Ring – ‘If I had the technique,’ he’s quick to add. This is the music that sparks his imagination, ‘although I’m only a pianist’.
Growing up with music
As a pianist, Guy says his ‘playing field’ is Beethoven; his appreciation of Chopin came later. But it was Chopin’s music he heard most growing up. My father ‘was an accomplished pianist,’ he says, ‘very gifted, and could have been a professional. He would play at home and I could hear Chopin all the time – that was his taste, you know. And also some Beethoven, although he didn’t play this music so often, but he had records – Wilhelm Kempff, Brendel and so on – it was a good start!’
‘Of course,’ he goes on, ‘at the [Paris] Conservatoire I studied both these composers, and my own taste started to emerge. For me, Chopin was maybe the greatest composer ever, but it can be difficult: it’s very intimate and has so many characters, and it can be difficult to avoid the clichés, so I thought it was right to wait a little bit.’
Chopin and Beethoven
With Beethoven he has enjoyed an almost instant affinity, Chopin has grown on him. In Guy’s Sydney recital we hear the two composers side by side. ‘Chopin was very critical of Beethoven,’ he says. ‘For him Beethoven was too strict, not free enough. That was how Chopin felt, although I don’t think he was right; there were only a few sonatas that he liked and played himself.’
This has influenced Guy’s programming: ‘In the first half we’ll get the Polonaise-fantaisie and the 31st Sonata of Beethoven, which are in the same key. I thought it would be interesting to see how great is the tribute Chopin has to pay to Beethoven’s sonatas, although he was not so close to him.’
One of the few Beethoven sonatas that had Chopin’s approval was the ‘Moonlight’, and in some ways, this is the closest Beethoven comes to Chopin’s sound world. ‘The incredible thing with Beethoven,’ says Guy, ‘is that he prepared the ground for everybody. If you look really closely at the scores – all Chopin, Brahms, all these different composers – he prepared the ground for all of them. That’s why I say Beethoven is the Alpha and Omega of music.’
Putting it all together
In Guy’s Sydney recital we get to hear two sonatas from 1801–02, the period when Beethoven first came to realise that his deafness was increasing and incurable, and the second last (Op.110), completed in 1822. Originally he’d planned to play Beethoven’s final sonata, Op.111 and his ‘Funeral March’ Sonata, which had influenced Chopin. But then, he says, ‘the balance of the program for me was a bit on the sad side’ and he revised his choices.
Guy’s website quotes him as saying ‘…the fact a piece of music is famous doesn’t mean that you absolutely have to play it.’ But that doesn’t stop him from programming well-known Beethoven, including one of the most famous Beethoven sonatas of all, the ‘Moonlight’. He’s quick to point out, though, that perhaps we in the audience don’t always know pieces like the ‘Moonlight’ as well as we think we do. ‘People know the first movement of the ‘Moonlight’ and the last movement of the ‘Tempest’, but do they really know the other movements? I’m not so sure. So it’s always good to bring the audience with you and say, yes, we can listen to that again, because we’ll discover new things. And it’s such fabulous music!’
François-Frédéric Guy spoke to Yvonne Frindle
Sydney Symphony ©2010
This interview was published in the program book for the International Pianists in Recital series.