I first talked to Madeleine Forte more than 20 years ago; and in our two previous interviews ( 24:6 and 35:4), as well as her conversation with Robert Schulslaper (46:1), she’s talked a lot about her teachers (especially Wilhelm Kempff, Alfred Cortot, Zbigniew Drzewiecki, Yvonne Loriod, and Rosina Lhévinne), about Chopin and Debussy, about teaching. But we’d never discussed Bach. This omission was brought home to me when she shared some impromptu videos she’d made for fans and friends in February 2022 (madeleineforte.github.io). “Matthew Bengtson, my dear young friend who plays Scriabin and Rachmaninoff so well, passed by. We were playing for each other, and he said, ‘Madeleine, I am going to record you.’ At the time, I was practicing the Bach Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue. I decided to do the fugue, but I was not entirely satisfied. So the next day, another friend, Richard Petrelli—he’s an amateur pianist—taped me and I was happier. That was lot of fun. We decided to put it on YouTube because actually I am an old lady, aged 83 and a half [a very youthful 83 and a half, I’ll interject], and it’s fun to have that. So it was nothing pretentious, just something to play with.” Those videos also included Bach’s Prelude to the Partita in B♭—and when I listened to her performance of the Bach Concerto for Two Pianos in C on her new e-CD with István Nádas, and noticed that a Bach toccata was also featured on one of her very first recordings (Paris, 1964, also now available on YouTube), it became clear that Bach was central to her life. Why hadn’t we discussed it? Her answer was immediate.

“Oh, yes, of course. Bach. We never had a chance to talk about Bach because it was assumed. I was extremely fortunate that all my teachers demanded the Bach Prelude and Fugues, the Toccatas, and the Partitas. It was assumed as part of the diet. You see what I mean? It seems to be that now that I’m getting older and I have more time to read and more time to think, I realize how important Bach has been in my life.

“My late husband Allen Forte was a great, great lover of Bach. He was, as you know, a musicologist and a theorist”—someone known primarily for his highly technical analyses of atonal music—“but he played jazz and Bach. That’s all: jazz and Bach. Now there is an ivory on the wall in his study. The ivory is looking at me and guess who that is? This is J. S. Bach, the father of us all. J. S. Bach. So really, Bach has been in my life all along.

“I don’t consider myself a Bach specialist at all, not at all—there are so many people who play Bach so very well that I would never dare to play Bach in public. Similarly, I play Mozart, but I don’t consider myself a specialist of that century—I feel more like a pianist of the 19th and 20th centuries. But Bach and Mozart are part of the study. Bach has been in my life all along, since the little prelude that I studied with my Aunt Sonia. Then she started me on the Preludes and Fugues. I had the chance to do that because I was with her until age 15. And of course all the other teachers….”

I ask her to talk a bit about the specific ways in which playing Bach is important. Obviously, it keeps your fingers exercised—but it’s “also your mind, of course, because of the fugues, the counterpoint. Recently, the Yale library let me borrow a facsimile they have of the Preludes and Fugues annotated by Chopin for one of his students (who did not seem to be very advanced). That was very interesting, to have those little pencil marks: The comments of Chopin correspond to the comments from my teachers. As I probably told you already, there was nothing really dogmatic with my teachers in Paris, in France. Many people did the trill on the beat, and some on the upper neighbor. You remember the story of Madame Lhévinne, the funny story that we keep repeating? She started on the beat, the old-fashioned way. A student said, ‘Madame Lhévinne, C. P. E. Bach asks us to start the ornament on the upper neighbor.’ So she replied, ‘Then go and study with C. P. E. Bach.’ So it was not dogmatic.”

Not that there was anything new in Chopin’s annotations of the score—but it was still interesting: “There were little comments, like some dynamics with the pencil mark, and again, where the voice starts, where the second voice starts, where it finishes. It was nothing new, but I was fascinated to see it because anything that concerns Chopin and Bach is interesting.”

I point to my recent conversation with Alexander Kobrin (Fanfare 45:5), where he talked about Liszt’s editions of Bach, since what he found ties in with what she says about her own studies. He had studied with very strict teachers who said, “Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever do that. Don’t ever do that.” Then he saw Liszt doing all the things that his teachers had taught him not to do, and he realized that there had once been a much freer tradition of Bach-playing.

“That’s it. See, that’s it. As I said, none of my teacher was dogmatic. It was a question of taste. According to the singing line, you won’t repeat the upper neighbor if it breaks the line: That was the idea. But if it doesn’t break the line, you do your upper neighbor. That was what I heard. That was the principle, this question of taste. But none of my teachers was dogmatic. None have said, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that.’”

I point out that she was fortunate to have been taught by people from the Golden Age. “Yes, I was lucky. All my teachers were born at the end of the 19th century. I think they were closer to the truth than many people, closer to the truth because Liszt had died in 1886, unfortunately. (He should have lived much longer.) My Aunt Sonia was born 1892. Cortot was born 1877. Josef Lhévinne was born 1874. Drzewiecki was born, let me remember, 1890. So all my teachers, all those people that admire, were born in the 19th century. They had that foot there, so I have a foot in there too. That was my luck—I am still based in that century. Even if I play Barber’s sonata, I feel like I am a Romantic. I am a Romantic because I have that whole line.”

She also studied with Yvonne Loriod, Olivier Messiaen’s wife—but that was a different matter. True, Loriod played everything. “Oh, she was a genius. She was spectacular, spectacular. But she was not my regular teacher; she was my teacher only for Messiaen.” And Messiaen was not part of that same tradition. “Messiaen was beyond that. He was with his birds, with his bells. No, he was not in that at all.”

So how does this non-specialist, but soundly educated, pianist play Bach? “As you probably heard, I play Bach non legato, very well articulated. Then I do the overlapping organ legato. Cortot taught me the overlapping legato, overlapping one finger over the other, like at the organ. Those are my two basic touches. Normally, the strong non legato articulated with good fingers, very muscled, and then the overlapping organ legato, like in those beautiful, very slow Preludes and Fugues from Book 1.”

We return to the intellectual qualities of Bach: “Of course, the intellectuality of Bach, the counterpoint, this is something that keeps us alive. Chopin, at the end of his life, he went in that direction, of course. But not at the beginning. On the radio, at WMNR, I just listened to his Rondo for Two Pianos. My God, it sounds like Hummel! Just so many notes. It is young and fresh, but it is not the Chopin that we know.

“Until the age of 20, he was in Poland. He was so influenced by Weber, Hummel, all those people. But then his style changed. The Chopin that I prefer is the mature Chopin, when he was living in Paris. For me, that’s the real Chopin, because there is that Polish žal, that sadness. Then of course, the intellectuality, he goes to Bach. At the end, that Polonaise-Fantaisie is a marvel. Can you imagine if Chopin had lived a little bit longer, what he would have done? Because this is the direction he was going in.

“So my preferred Chopin is the mature Chopin. Of course it is fun, all those waltzes and little mazurkas, in the style of Hummel: so many notes, too many notes. I don’t think they have that much signification. This virtuosity of Chopin is what people put an accent on now. But I want the Chopin who is more mature and more intellectual, more searching.”

I point out that while I agree that the later works have higher quality, nonetheless, when young Chopin was writing like Hummel, he wrote better Hummel than Hummel himself did. “Oh, right! Like, when he was writing like John Field, he wrote better than Field, because he had genius. You’re right. He writes better than Hummel, and he writes better than John Field. John Field was not very happy that Chopin started to write nocturnes. We know that. He was not delighted. But of course, Chopin brought his genius. That’s the thing. This is why we remember Chopin much more than Field. And we remember Chopin much more than Hummel.”

Of course, even Chopin’s late works have their virtuoso elements—and I know, from email conversations over the years, that Madeleine has strong views about players who emphasize that aspect of his art, who play late Chopin as if he were still early Chopin, with the stress on brilliance.

“I think at my age I am allowed to criticize, and we won’t mention any names. But I criticize the fact that in our time, there is much more accent on the virtuosity of Chopin instead of the intellectuality, and, as I said, the žal—the sadness and the thinking and the reflection and the philosophy in a sense. The younger people put accent on the virtuosity”—which dominated his early years. “We have to give time to Chopin to mature. We cannot put so much accent on the virtuosity. He did not want the virtuosity as such later on—although maybe he had fun playing!”

Talk of Chopin’s virtuosity leads to a discussion of pianists’ hands: “Chopin—who, by the way, was left-handed—had great fingers. He was gifted with a fabulous hand, a natural hand. He was tremendously gifted, physically. I have a reproduction at home from that left hand, which is beautiful, flexible, delicate. It is iron in velvet, that’s what they call it. Cortot, in contrast, did not have a good hand. Cortot could not even reach a 10th of the keyboard. Cortot’s hand was not good, but his mind was good.”

Discussion of hands leads, in turn, to a discussion of hand injuries—a subject on which Madeleine has strong feelings. “Chopin and Liszt never hurt their hands. They never injured themselves. I think it is a question of flexibility and of proper technique. They didn’t bang on the piano. The piano is not a drum; you don’t bang on the piano. You love the piano, but you don’t bang. You cannot attack the piano from on high, like you are going to kill it. You have to have that proper technique and lower wrist, lower arms, and so on, in general.

“So many pianists injure themselves because, as I said, they think the piano is a drum. This is what I criticize, no? If you don’t play with a proper technique and you injure yourself, it is your own fault. Go to Google: You will see the list of the pianists who injured themselves. Now, sometimes it was an accident because the piano was too hard, but many times it was because they considered the piano as a drum.

“This is the reason why I do not practice any exercises any more. I don’t want to injure myself. I practice my stretching, and I go to my pieces, but I don’t practice more than maybe two to three hours a day. That permits me to do a little bit of new stuff, to review my warhorses, and so on. But I never injured my hand. My good friend, György Cziffra, said, ‘Madeleine, wrist, wrist, wrist.’ You see? In my case, the years of practice did the job. I have what you call in French l’acquis, ‘what you acquired,’ which means I do not need to practice even if I have a concert tomorrow. I am flexible enough. I maintain my technique just by playing Bach, by playing Chopin Études, by playing Liszt Études. And that’s enough—without banging, without pushing. This is a question of proper technique: That’s my idea, proper technique.”

I ask Madeleine if she thinks the French tradition provides better training in this regard. At first, she answers affirmatively: “I would say so. You last longer. You last longer because the French technique is more flexible and it makes you last longer.” But on second thought, she decides that it’s not really a matter of national schools. “Great Russian pianists like Richter and Gilels,” she points out, “never injured themselves, because of proper technique. French or Russian or Polish or Hungarian technique—it is only a question of knowing your métier. No technique is superior to any other. Pianists who injure themselves apply the wrong technique.

“I never injured myself. Why? Because I always practice with flexibility. I did practice too much when I was younger. I over-practiced, and then I had fatigue. But that’s different from injury. You see what I mean? When Madame Lhévinne asked me to play Prokofiev, then of course I did it the way Prokofiev is supposed to be played. But I still had some flexibility of the wrist. I am very cautious about my wrist ... and of course, the shoulder.”

I point out that in fact, when I listen to Prokofiev’s own performances, the ones that have come down through recordings, I hear him as much lighter in touch, much more flexible than many more aggressive players of his music are. “Oh, he was a great pianist,” Madeleine replies. “Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev were fabulous pianists. You don’t hear about Rachmaninoff injuring his hand or Prokofiev injuring his hand. Rachmaninoff had depression and he injured his head, but not the hand! As I told you earlier, it is the question of proper technique.”

It’s hard not to envy Madeleine’s experiences with so many of the great pianists of the past—familiar names like Kempff, Cortot, Cziffra, Rosina Lhévinne. But, as our conversations have revealed, there’s another musician, far less famous, at the base of Madeleine’s artistry: her first teacher, her beloved aunt Sonia Chalon. A student of Reynaldo Hahn in both voice and composition, Sonia was a gifted singer encouraged by Saint-Saëns. She won first prize at the vocal Comoedia Competition (with over 800 competitors) in Paris in 1925, singing Debussy’s L’enfant prodigue under Pierre Monteux. She was at the start of what should have become a stellar career as an opera singer (Madeleine has a haunting picture of her as Carmen at the Opéra Comique), but she retreated under parental pressure. She could, Madeleine says, sing both mezzo-soprano and contralto—and she had a striking vocal quality: “Many friends asked me about her voice. I had the chance to listen to Cecilia Bartoli on the radio, and I was most amazed to recognize Sonia’s voice!”

Although Sonia was not primarily a pianist, “she had taken lessons from Isidor Philipp. Then her teacher, when she was young, was a lady called Madame Katrowska who apparently won first prize at the Concours de Genève, or more likely the Conservatoire. Aunt Sonia had a very small hand, very delicate, but flexible, of course. Happily, I did not inherit that—I have long arms, long fingers. Even my toes are long. She played Bach and Mozart very well.

“But Sonia was mainly a singer, and I was very fortunate to do solfège with her.” She was also fortunate to listen to her singing and to her vocal lessons. “In my youth, when I was a child doing my homework, we had a small apartment. My father was in law, but they were middle class and the apartment was not too large. So, I had to do my homework where Sonia had the piano and was teaching. It seemed that everything went into my ear, and I became a specialist of singing, in a sense, because I heard everything.” Of course, Madeleine never went on to become a serious singer herself: “You know I am not a singer at all. I was second alto in the Juilliard chorus. We sang with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, thanks to Abraham Kaplan our choir director. All of us were in love with Lenny; he gave me two photos, one of which is in my book Simply Madeleine [see 35:4]. Gay or not we did not care; he was electric, handsome, fabulous. I imagine Franz Liszt being like him.” But although she did not become a singer herself, she is a great amateur of voice, and she developed a life-long love of great singers: Pavarotti in Tosca and La bohème, Callas in Norma, Bidu Sayão in Villa-Lobos’s Bachianas brasileiras No. 5, Leontyne Price in Madama Butterfly, Kiri Te Kanawa, Marian Anderson, Renée Fleming, Paul Robeson singing Spirituals.

This vocal background has had a great influence on her piano-playing. “That singing line has been helping me. One of the Fanfare reviewers, Peter Burwasser [23:1], said that I was a right-hand melodic line pianist, and it is true because of the voice. And when you read what Chopin wanted, he always wanted the right hand, the singing right hand, or the voice, wherever the voice is going to be. So that was my luck, to have had Aunt Sonia making me sing solfège>. I have all that singing in my ears. I think that has been guiding me in my life—to search for the voice.”

That singing style, especially in Chopin, is closely tied to the Golden Age pianists Madeleine admires. “For example, Raoul Koczalski is wonderful in Chopin—fabulous, fabulous. You can go to YouTube and listen to that beautiful, sumptuous singing tone, the freedom of the rubato, the wonderful use of the pedal, the exquisite phrasing. When he was a child, he studied with Anton Rubinstein. There is no cheap rubato. There is no languishing. There is no useless contortion. Everything is tasteful. Everything is just wonderful. During some summers from 1892 to 1895, when he was a child, Koczalski had lessons with Chopin’s student Karol Mikuli. They were long, long lessons. He was so very fortunate—and we are very fortunate to have those recordings. They are so beautiful. That’s the real Chopin. You can tell. You feel that this is a real Chopin because there is no distortion. It is just so natural; it sings by itself.”

I point again to comments made by Kobrin in his recent interview, where he laments that at a time when historical recordings are so widely available online to everybody, there are so many young players who ignore them.

“You can tell they ignore them because they don’t ... they should adopt that style. But they have a 21st-century style, which is virtuosic. Chopin did not want the virtuosity when he was a mature Chopin. He wanted the feeling. He wanted the emotion. He did not want that virtuosity any more. He was searching for something else. So, we should learn from Chopin himself, what he composed and how he composed. The Barcarolle, the Third Sonata, the Polonaise-Fantaisie, and then the Cello and Piano Sonata: Those are masterpieces of his late life, and you can tell in the Polonaise-Fantaisie that Chopin is not doing virtuosity for its own sake. There is so much intellectuality. We must be very, very sad that Chopin died so young. He could have done so much beyond what he did.

“Of course, further beyond, what do we have? We have Debussy. We also have Fauré coming from Chopin. I think the French people must be very grateful to have had Chopin and Liszt in Paris, because that gave us a wonderful tradition. Debussy was taught by Madame Antoinette Mauté de Fleurville, who said she had been a student of Chopin. You don’t see that in the references, but there’s no doubt that she must have at least taken some lessons from Chopin because she transmitted that to Debussy when he was a young man, very young.

“She was the mother-in-law of the poet Verlaine. Verlaine was the lover of Rimbaud, and we know the whole story. But he also had a wife, the daughter of Madame Mauté de Fleurville. Madame Mauté de Fleurville does not appear in the list of Chopin’s students because she must not have been very good; but I absolutely believe that she had lessons and she was able to transmit that way of playing to Debussy. If you listen to Debussy playing with that wonderful singer Mary Garden, and of course playing also solo in those golden recordings of the past, done with those machines [piano rolls], the first recording, he has a wonderful touch. Debussy has a beautiful touch. So then the line of Chopin is really in Debussy and in Fauré, definitely. So you see they inherited that touch, that sound, that mellowness, the musicality, the style. We are very fortunate in France to have had Chopin live 19 years of his life, from age 20 to age 39 when he died. Because it created a tradition.”

That tradition has been lost, in part because of piano competitions—and because the rise of recordings has encouraged musicians to stress perfection. “This is the problem with Cortot. Some people just count the wrong notes, and of course, he didn’t care. Now, when you listen to his phrasing, when you listen to that beautiful sound—and he didn’t even have a good hand. It came from his head and from his heart. It came from himself, from his intellect. Now, unfortunately, they don’t forgive his wrong notes.” Cortot himself didn’t care about perfection, and he resisted re-takes. “That’s the thing. He did not even want to do it again.

“But there are some wonderful recordings of Cortot when he was young, which are perfect. You see? Those recordings are absolutely perfect. Even Horowitz was impressed by a piece that Cortot was playing by Saint-Saëns. If I remember, it could have been Étude en forme de valse. I heard that Horowitz always wanted a lesson with Cortot to know the secret, and Cortot always refused. I don’t know the reason. Maybe he wanted to keep the secret, or he felt that he should not give a lesson to such a great pianist. But Horowitz never got the secret from Cortot. This is very amusing.

“But as we discussed before, virtuosity should not be virtuosity for its own sake. I am afraid young pianists now don’t listen to the past, you see? They don’t listen to Josef Lhévinne. They don’t listen to Raoul Koczalski. They don’t listen to Myra Hess. They don’t listen to Cortot. They don’t even listen to Dinu Lipatti, who was so wonderful. He was a student of Cortot. They ignore all that past. And they should not.”

“The mind and the heart, the spirit, guide you. They guide you. As I said much earlier, Cortot was not a prodigy. He failed his Conservatoire test when he was a child. He didn’t have a good hand, the hand of a pianist. He could not even reach 10ths, you see? If you cannot reach 10ths, it’s very hard. His hand was not really made for the piano, but it gave him genius to write a method and to overcome the problems. He was a spectacular teacher. I must say that. He was a spectacular teacher, very patient, very stern, and extremely detailed. So I owe him quite a lot.

“Actually, I owe him my technique because when I was with Aunt Sonia, I played like a wild little child. She was smart enough to get books like the Gieseking Primer. She got Blanche Selva. She got Marie Jaëll. She was reading all those things for me and for her students. Of course, we were doing lots of Czerny, lots of Cramer, lots of Stephen Heller. One thing that she found was the Chopin études for the left hand, arranged by French composer Jean Roger-Ducasse. My left hand became so strong that you couldn’t hear the right hand. So then I had to stop doing the Chopin études for the left hand, but that gave me the base.

“Aunt Sonia also was an amateur painter. She did lace. In the 19th century, young ladies had to do lace. She did the Viennese and Milan laces, and I still have them. So she was a very well-rounded person. But she realized her limitations. Fortunately, she was a colleague, friend, and accompanist to Jacques Thibaud’s brother, Francis Thibaud, director of the Oran Conservatory, and through him Sonia got a connection to Cortot. When I was 12, I started lessons with Cortot in Lausanne, Switzerland during the summer. That was my luck because Sonia realized her limits and she wanted the best teacher for me.

“It’s also thanks to Sonia that I got to Wilhelm Kempff. She searched for the top teachers in the world for me. I am so grateful to her for that. She had ambition for me. So you see, some people might not have the proper qualifications, but if they have the intelligence, this is what counts. The humility, humility also—you have to be humble. I think this is what she transmitted to us, her students: the humility. You must always go beyond—search, perfect yourself. You never achieve anything. You just go and search and search.”

The last time I interviewed Madeleine, it seemed a kind of valedictory interview: She had essentially stopped public performance and had stopped recording. Fortunately, the sense of closure turned out to be premature. Besides the new YouTube videos, there’s a pair of 85th anniversary concerts, by Madeleine and her star pupils, scheduled for September 10 and 17, 2023, at the Klavierhaus in New York. Then, too, tapes of old recordings keep turning up, though, and she’s recently issued two e-CDs on Roméo, live performances of duets with István Nádas (a mixed recital moving from Bach to Debussy) and with Del Parkinson (a recital of Hungarian music). “I enjoyed both artists and felt privileged to play with them at different times in my life,” she says, but the experiences were quite different.

“I am very grateful that I met István Nádas, who was a great, great Hungarian pianist. He was a survivor of the Holocaust. He had been caught, when he was 17, by the Gestapo in Budapest. He was buying bread for his mother. He was in a concentration camp, and eventually he was released in Rome. He was in Washington State and I was at Boise State University in Idaho, so we were neighbors. He is the one who decided to do the duo. I was very, very privileged to do lots of concerts with him in Idaho and Washington.

“When I played with István Nádas, I was dominated by him. He was very domineering, demanding, and difficult. I was very young—he was much older than me. I was in awe of him; I was respectful and trying to do what he wanted. So he’s the one who directed our duo. He is the one who decided about Debussy. He’s the one who decided about the Mozart that we played well. He’s the one who decided.... Let me see, we played Schubert, the Fantaisie. He is the one who decided about the Bach Concerto. I think we made a very good duo, and it is on an e-CD now from Roméo Records, taken from a cassette of a concert that I had happily transformed into a CD few years ago and that I recently found again.

“With Nádas, all was sacred, to the letter.” Her collaboration with Del Parkinson was “a totally different approach to playing duo-piano. Del Parkinson was my colleague at Boise State University. With him, we shared ideas. We discussed. We decided the program together. Oh, we were pals. It was just wonderful. We had many, many years of collaboration. We went all over. We even played at the Juilliard School. We went all over the Northwest, and we also have that set of three CDs, one each of French, Russian, and Spanish music. And recently, very recently, while cleaning up my shelf, I found a disc of Hungarian music. The Hungarian program was all in fun: we were dressed up, and also produced some antics for our university audience. It was a wonderful collaboration. So we had all the fun in the world. This, too, is available on e-CD from Roméo right now.

“Oh, it was a joy, really, with Del Parkinson. That was a wonderful collaboration for years and years. I just wish we had done more, but you know…. We played for love of music. We played for the students. We played for the school, and we had such a good time. So that was the real attitude, the real attitude. We were free. It was not something we had planned to do for eternity. This is really for the love of music, for nothing else, because we never planned to produce those recordings all over the world. We did it for fun, for fun and for the love of music.

“This is the attitude we should have—this is the attitude I still have of music. Not as a reward or for publicity or for money or things like that. It is pure, for the love of it. That’s it.”