Pianists explain why Alfred Cortot is one of the Greatest Pianists

Alfred Cortot is undoubtedly one of the most controversial pianists in classical music history.  But for many famous pianists of the present and the past, the greatest pianist or one of the greatest pianists was Alfred Cortot. Many pianists had a deep admiration for him. What makes Alfred Cortot's art so special? I tried to explain this with the discourse of many important pianists.

Alfred Cortot and Samson François

Alfred Brendel has called Alfred Cortot “the one pianist who equally satisfies my mind, my senses, my emotions.”  and Brendel on Cortot playing the cadence of the Bach 5th Brandenburg Concerto: "About the best piano playing I have ever heard!"  

Alfred Brendel: "Edwin Fischer admired Alfred Cortot. One may not have been aware then of certain imprecisions, in the way modern wrong friends are. Where the leading of voices, the grading of dynamics, the control of character and atmosphere, timbre and rhytm are handled with the mastery of Cortot at his best, it appears to me that a few missed notes are not only irrelevant but almost add to excitement of the impact." 

Alfred Brendel: "Hearing Cortot play, you sense the conductor in the multitude of colours that he can produce on the piano - even if Chopin, as I said, was an out-and-out piano composer. There are other piano-playing conductors who play the piano without much colour, merely fluently and evenly. Cortot was an exception. Although he was mainly a pianist, he did conduct a great deal. He was highly praised by Debussy as a conductor of Wagner."

Alfred Brendel: The last great Chopin player in the old sense was Cortot. His recording of the 24 Preludes from 1933 has to me remained a miracle. Throughout my life, it has never lost anything of its phenomenal freshness and daring. Meanwhile, Chopin, the bird of paradise, has been swallowed up by the musical mainstream.

Jorge Bolet: “The greatest performance of the Chopin preludes, ever, was Cortot’s, both live, and on records.” 

Bolet: "Today's audiences go to the concert hall to hear Beethoven and Schubert and Brahms and so on. But back in Godowsky and Hofmann's day, we went to hear what the pianist had to say about the composer; we went to hear the pianists, and the same thing went for every other great pianist. When you went to hear Cortot play an all-Chopin recital, you went to hear what Cortot had to say about Chopin."

Jed Distler: "His dashing joyride through the Fifth Concerto’s elaborate cadenza is one of the most exciting piano recordings ever made–replete with added octaves in the 32nd-note runs."

Paul Badura-Skoda: "Cortot had the most beautiful piano sound I ever heard. It had a penetrating quality and it could be accomplished even on a poor instrument. . ."

András Schiff: "People speak so much today of technique: 'Such and such pianist has great technique.' Mostly, this is misunderstood—the pianist celebrated now by music critics as a 'fantastic technician' is mostly the one who plays the fastest and the loudest, and doesn't produce any wrong notes. But, on the contrary, great technique signifies, to me, an infinitely alive 'sound-imagination' and '-inventivenes'—and then, to realize this. In this way, the realization of the richness of color is achieved. If a pianist hears only two colors, the realization of those is no great art. To me, in this sense, Alfred Cortot, who played many wrong notes, had the greatest technique. Because he produced an unbelievable richness of color on the piano, millions of colors—like a great painter. That's very important to me."

Byron Janis: "For me one of the most magical pianists was Cortot, who had many shortcomings, and in the U.S. we tend to make shortcomings too important. Cortot tended to slide around a lot, had memory lapses and was not always in good shape, but my God, there was something there! There was an essence, and he captured it. His Chopin and Schumann are unbelievably beautiful. He is the best of French poetic style, but with a true depth."

Alfred Cortot

Vladimir Horowitz: A beautiful musician. Cortot was very intellectual. He liked me and I admired him very much. He played Schumann like nobody, absolutely divine. Oh, yes, it was. . . His Chopin and Schumann were for me the best. His Schuman was fantastic."

Martha Argerich: "I love Gieseking and Cortot. Of the older people, Cortot is quite important for me. . . I am very interested in what Cortot says about 'The dispute of conscience which fills Faust's tormented soul in his search for truth,' in reference to the passages of Goethe's Faust that inspired Liszt's Sonata. Some people hate what Cortot wrote in his edition, but I think it opens up a lot of horizons like his playing did too. I don't believe that it works for everything. But for me, yes, for some things it does and well. What Cortot wrote seems very important."

György Sandor: "Cortot was a real poet. Everything he did was absolutely. I wouldn't say unexpected but suprising and profound and colorful and improvised. His technique was superb too, but in those days of course people didn't care so much about notice to the engineers do, so it happens that the recordings which we have of course to have a lot of wrong notes and i would suggest one should not listen to the wrong notes because he could play the right notes to if he needed to but he just didn't bother too much. But tehere were details in any of his performance which were very very unique."

Philippe Entremont: "The greatest one of all, Alfred Cortot. . . I am more fascinated by some of the old recordings of Cortot than by most of what I hear on recordings made today. Today's recordings tend to be extremely well-executed—I use the word 'executed' on purpose, because sometimes it is a deadly execution—with a kind of cool perfection, and a good sound. But there is an antiseptic quality about them. Even in the realm of tempi: people are not playing as fast as they used to play years ago. They have to be reasonable, middle-of-the-road, instantly intelligible, never disturbing. I find this somewhat distressing. Pianists are not willing to take the risks they once did. Pianists once went to extremes, so we now have the complete reverse. But some of the playing today is extremely boring. I can go to a concert and hear beautiful playing, very well balanced with beautiful sound, and there's no doubt that I am captivated by the perfection of what I hear. But when I wake up the following morning, most of what I heard the night before has not Stayed with me. But that would not happen with a pianist like Cortot—even his mistakes were fabulous' Nobody has ever played the Chopin etudes the way Cortot played them. They are so immense, so gigantic. Once when I was in Yugoslavia playing a concert. I heard them on the radio in my hotel room. I was beside myself, absolutely spellbound by the courage of his playing, the nonconformity, the fabulous drive—the poetry ot the music was airborne. Where is playing like that today? I could listen to those etudes every day of my life."

Angela Hewitt: "Twenty years ago, somebody gave me Alfred Cortot's 1930s recording of Chopin's preludes and impromptus. I had never heard anything like it. There is such an eloquence in the phrasing, an unaffected freedom in the rhythm – and he did it with such economy of movement. It's impossible to imitate; one can just marvel at it. His beautiful sound was probably helped by the pianos of the time, which were less harsh and more distinctive; but he had, in addition, an elegance and charm that is increasingly rare in modern life. . . My piano teacher's piano teacher worked with Cortot, and he introduced me to Cortot's editions. These days, the tendency is to return to the basic notes of the ur-text: it's somewhat frowned upon to use editions containing personal interpretative ideas – a shame, because we lose out on many important performance traditions. Cortot's writings were full not just of technical ideas and exercises, but of inspired suggestions as to what exactly was going on in the music, literary connotations and other insights. Cortot helped me realise how free you can be." 

Stephen Hough: "I've loved Alfred Cortot's playing from an early age and I never tire of hearing his recordings, particularly Chopin and Schumann from the 1920s and 30s. He is unique in his combination of utter interpretative freedom (sometimes with a touch of eccentricity) and penetrating insight into a composer's wishes. There are artists who delight listeners with their wild and daring individuality; there are others who uncover the written score with reverence; there are few who can do both. Cortot had a vision which went beyond the academic or the theatrical to some wider horizon of creativity from whence the composers themselves might well have drawn inspiration. In the shifting, kaleidoscopic moods of Schumann's cycles, or the lyrical outpouring of Chopin's preludes, etudes and ballades, Cortot seems to breathe with the composer. It is not a mere dusting off or polishing up of a pre-written work, but an interpreter giving the kiss of life to a dead form – vivifying and intimate."

Cortot at the Pleyel piano

Stephen Hough: "My most important teacher Gordon Green encouraged me to experiment and to stretch my mind musically. Incidentally, I also remember that I used to go to his home for lessons. . . But whatever the lesson was, before we began he might say, 'Just listen to this,' and play a record of Paderewski that he’d been listening to, or Cortot, two of his great idols who became two of my idols also. And he’d smile enthusiastically and say, ‘Just listen.’ I remember Green on one occasion playing the Aeolian Harp Etude of Chopin in the Cortot recording, which I still think is one of the most remarkable performances. And Green would say, ‘See how he releases the pedal on some of those double A-flat arpeggios to get that shimmering effect!’ He’d continuously point out all of these treasures to me."

Piotr Anderszewski: "He really captured the spirit of Chopin, which i think is very very difficult. This combination of being romantic and expressive and yet aristocratic and restrained, i think he really caught this paradox."

Claudio Arrau: "Cortot was absolutely marvelous, I adored him. . . The person I liked most in Chopin was probably Cortot. In spite of his breaking of the hands. I remember a marvelous performance of the etudes in London. I heard him also do the preludes."

Murray Perahia: "Freedom yet logical. . . No one today plays like Cortot, whose artistry reflected his fervent love of music. Pablo Casals, at Marlboro, often spoke to me about the trio he formed with Thibaud and Cortot ('He played so magnificently, you know,' he would always say with a smile on his lips). "

Pablo Casals (I know he was not a pianist:)...) Cortot and Thibaud were superlative artists. Cortot was unquestionably one of the great pianists of our time — he had boundless élan and astonishing power. He was also a brilliant musical scholar, whose writings on piano technique and musical appreciation gained international recognition. He interpreted Beethoven magnificently, and he had a consuming admiration for Wagner. For a time, when still in his twenties, he had been an assistant conductor at Bayreuth, and at the age of twenty-four he conducted the first Paris performance of Cotter dammerung. Perhaps his most treas- ured possession was a portrait of Wagner by Renoir. He was an indefatigable, highly disciplined worker, both as a musician and as a scholar, and he was very ambitious for his career. I think it was perhaps this ambition which led to the sorrowful events that later overtook him.

Badura-Skoda: "... And the time when Cortot came to Vienna in 1947 remains one of my greatest pianistic memories. He came there to play for the first time after the War, and we all knew what the war had been for him, what his ideological engagement had been. Cortot played two programs. The first part of the first recital, how shall I say this... it was an absolute disaster. Cortot played Chopin's Fantasy, which is not very difficult from a technical point of view, but he didn't manage to play even one octave correctly. Jörg Demus was seated next to me, and he was seething: "My goodness, how is this possible? He's an amateur, I'm leaving at intermission!" After the intermission, however, Cortot came back on stage like a changed man. It was a different man, a different pianist. He had gotten ahold of himself. I couldn't believe how well he played the Sonata Op. 35 No. 2, which is such a perilous piece by comparison. At the end of the concert, with Gulda, we found Demus and tried to convince him that he had missed a major event: "That's impossible! I don't believe you – and I already sold my ticket for the second recital!" [laughs] In the end, we weren't able to convince him. A week later, in front of a sold-out house, with all three of us in attendance, Cortot played the 24 Preludes and the Kreisleriana. I can tell you that he went far beyond, in terms of depth, poetry, and spontaneity, all the recordings he had ever made of these pieces, which we knew so well. It was a revelation! It was so moving! All the pianists who were there agreed. When Cortot and Fischer were on the right foot, it was perfect, in terms of the cleanness of their playing, and not just from an emotional or spiritual point of view..."

Daniel Barenboim: "I think Cortot looked for the opium in music. He looked for anything that was extraordinary; he always looked for something, not sickly, but something abnormal, totally removed from reality, and far from anything that could be construed as smelling of normality." 

Yuja Wang: "Curtis has the best library, and there I came to admire Cortot."

Alfred Cortot's Pupils talk about Cortot

Magda Tagliaferro: "It was always said about Cortot's tone that it had such an extraordinary quality that one could recognize it from among a hundred pianists. . . Cortot often asked for 'flutes here. . . cellos there. . . horns here.' He opened up horizons by this emphasis on sound, for it gave us, all at once, a taste for contrasting touches, textures, and the polyphonic style. . . He had a natural sonority that was celestial! Always his sound was pure enchantment, whether the music was soft or loud."

Tagliaferro: "Cortot was such a fabulous man, with total culture. He was turly exceptional as a musician. As a teacher, he wasn't interested in technique per se and his students usually had it already. His interest was in interpretion, and the images that he conjured up for us were absolutely visonary. He was a true poet, and his playing always came from the heart. Even in the fastest and hardest passages, the sense of the music was always his first concern."

Idil Biret: "Looking at the whole cadence in Brandenburg, it is necessary to look at the deep breathing that makes it become a single and endless sentence; His perfection in revealing the single and main structure is truly unprecedented. Brendel said that Cortot's play here was the most beautiful piano playing he had ever heard, and I completely agree with him. When I listen to this play, one realizes that music is based on breathing, that it is life itself, that it is the cause of life."

Biret: "Cortot would sometimes sit at the piano to show details, and the sound of the piano would sound completely different! A velvet dark tone would rise from the piano. To provide his own tone, his hands would be completely placed on the keyboard and he would transfer it to his hands, using his whole body, especially his shoulder." 

Eric Heidsieck: "Cortot taught us to be in the habit of thinking of the piano as a 'little orchestra' or at times maybe a big one."

Vlado Perlemuter: "He always fought aganist the dry, high-fingered brilliance and the notey playing that one frequently heard at that time. He detested it. So in addition to his ideas about wrist and arm, he would help the sound by using a lot of fancy half-pedal and flutter pedal. . "He didn't just have one kind of technique. He constantly adapted his technical approach to the music. . . It's a simple fact that the modern piano is often too harsh without the una corda pedal, but too timid with it. So Cortot would often prefer the sound that one gets by playing strongly with the una corda, if he wanted a sonorous soft sound. It's a sophisticated concept that is not well understood even today."

Vlado Perlemuter: "Even now, after all these years, I have the most vivid memories of his teaching and playing! You simply couldn't forget a lesson with Cortot. He played and taught absolutely everyting and what an impact it had on us! I especially remember his lesson on Chopin's Fantasty and Sonata in B-flat Minor, and Schumann's Kreisleriana, which he taught and demonstrated in such a way that all the details have remained to this day a part of my thinking. Even now his advice is always in my mind when I play and teach."

Gina Bachauer: “Cortot knew Ravel and Debussy and I think that no other pianist could have given me a better undemanding of their music, of their specific sounds. "

Yvonne Lefebure: He was never what one would calla a 'professor'. He was a master, an inspiratior. When you listened to Cortot play, you realized that what he was doing at the piano was not like what other people were doing. . . This concept of freedom within strictness was one of the secrets of his playing. It was exactly related to a central character of his style: to create a beautiful expression within formal simplicity. Or, one might say, to be inwardly romantic while outwardly classical.

Dinu Lipatti: "One of the greatest pianists of today, an ardent defender of Romanticism and perhaps the only musician in whom it is never the virtuoso who dominates the performer, Alfred Cortot offered us yet again, this year, the chance to understand and love even more the music passing under his sublime fingers. . . From the five conferences held at 'Les Annales' I will only speak about the last one, advertised as 'Dialogues between piano and orchestra'. . . Accompanied by the Paris Philharmonic Orchestra under the distinguished and well-known conductor Charles Münch, Cortot played Frank’s Symphonic Variations, Fauré’s Ballade and Ravel’s Piano concerto for the left hand. . What distinction in the Ballade, and what an admirable rendition –not to mention the Variations, where the great musician always works wonders, refreshing both the form and the musical essence of this somewhat outdated work! . . .Ravel wrote his Concerto for the left hand at the same time with his brilliant G major concerto, but the first one is much less played; dedicated to pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who has lost his arm in the war, this concerto is Ravel’s last essay in the genre. . . Even if Cortot authored an arrangement for two hands of this concerto, he played nevertheless the original version. 'Don’t let your left hand know what your right hand does' is a saying which does not apply here: Cortot’s left hand surpassed his right one. And this is not so easy at all!"

Some Testimonies

Wilhelm Kempff and Alfred Cortot. Cortot play Chopin.

Wilhelm Kempff (Quated by Idil Biret) "Kempff's favorite pianist was Cortot. . . Kempff was an admirer of Alfred Cortot, often making references to his understanding in his statements. He admired his extraordinary musical intelligence, his velvety soft touch, his personality."

Alicia de Larrocha (Quoted by Harold Schoenberg): "She talks with pleasure about pianists she heard when she was a child prodigy. She was impressed by Alfred Cortot, 'who played everything as though it was a fantasy.' She remembers a Cortot concert in which he got all mixed up in the first movement of Chopin's B minor Sonata 'and then went on to play the slow movement so beautifully I could have cried,' she said. 'After the performance my teacher and I went backstage. Cortot had his hands in the air, and we thought he was in despair about the mess in the first movement. But no. 'I never played the slow movement so beautifully,' he kept saying.' Missed notes never bothered Cortot very much."

Walter Gieseking (Quoted by Mark Westcott): "My friend Deal Elder, who stuidied with Geseking. . . Dean asked him why he had never performed the Chopin B minor Sonata. Although Gİeseking was not known in this country for his Chopin performances, those few that we have on record are ravishing, and he played a great deal of it in Europe, especially during his younger years. But Gieseking's reply was that he had once heard Cortot play the work so well that he just never piced it up."

Cortot was Heinrich Neuhaus's favorite, Quoted by V. Horowitz: "I was a provincial boy and was fascinated to hear him describe how Busoni played, how Godowsky played, how Rosenthal played, how Ignaz Friedman played, how this player and that player sounded. He liked Alfred Cortot best of all."