Major Pianist

The man at the keyboard was a musician, all right--but was he a topflight pianist? The question agitated most Manhattan critics last week, but it failed to disturb the crowd that thronged Town Hall to hear an eagerly awaited debut. Regardless of critical quibbles, Germany's 47-year-old Hans Richter-Haaser clearly proved to be one of the biggest keyboard talents to hit Manhattan in years.

The agitation about Richter-Haaser stemmed from an old argument: Should a pianist try for note-perfect accuracy, as most U.S. pianists do, or should he try, in Artur Rubinstein's phrase, to "pull the listener in by the hair," letting the notes fall where they may? (Wisecracking Virtuoso Rubinstein boasted after one performance that he could play an entire new recital with the notes that had fallen under the piano.) Pianist Richter-Haaser belongs to the hair-pulling, note-dropping school, in the spectacular romantic tradition. His performance last week--Beethoven's "Appassionato," Sonata, Schumann's Fantasy in C Major, Stravinsky's Sonata, Brahms's Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel--was studded with wrong notes and blurred acrobatics. But it also had the kind of galvanizing effects that only a first-rate musical mind and heart can convey to an audience. Richter-Haaser's approach, particularly in the "Appassionata," was heroic, his tone boldly ringing, his rhythmic drive irresistible. In the Stravinsky piece, he may have lacked the proper corky bite, but his Brahms had a propulsive, thunderous intensity that swept his audience into a roar of applause.

Richter-Haaser's big-time career at the piano began at a time when many a lesser pianist is already beginning to fade from sight. The son of a carpenter (and amateur musician), he studied piano at the Dresden Music School, at 18 started to play concerts all over Germany. A decade later World War II interrupted his career. Assigned to an antiaircraft unit, he did not touch a piano for seven years, except to play in U.S. military hospitals as a P.W. at war's end. When he resumed his piano career in 1946, at 34, after a year of small-town orchestra conducting, he found that his technique was rusty but his musical perception far sharper than it had been. "Before," he says, "the piano was a sport. After the war, it was a medium to give something to people."

Pianist Richter-Haaser's postwar reputation spread rapidly; he has played with virtually every major European orchestra, been hailed as the successor to such German greats as Gieseking and Backhaus. Says Richter-Haaser ruefully: "I do not go on stage to play wrong notes. But the important thing is the idea. The piano must not be like a machine."

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