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Johanna Martzy (1924 - 1979)
By David Patrick Stearns
The mystique of the lovely Hungarian violinist is growing — even though she's been dead for more than twenty years.
Imagine a violinist of great beauty and charisma whose artistic pedigree dates back to the legendary Hungarian Jenö Hubay. one who is so comfortable in front of microphones that she releases up to four new compact discs a year. And one who is so fiery that she has no fear of clashing with such august musicians as conductor Wolfgang Sawallisch in the recording studio. Such a violinist would seem to be a musician's and press agent's fantasy. Yet she's perfectly real. But there's a catch: she's dead.
Johanna Martzy passed away from cancer in 1979 almost unnoticed - particularly in the United States, where she had performed with the New York Philharmonic in the late 1950s but thereafter was an unobtrusive visitor to North America. Though only 54 when she died, she hadn't recorded commercially in decades. Her period in the limelight was brief; her dénouement was long. Taken for granted then, she's venerated now. To say that this is evidence of a current talent vacuum would be simplistic: living violinists such as Hilary Hahn and Anne-Sophie Mutter, just to name two, clearly have much great music-making ahead of them. But in the meantime, Martzy and others from the past are being rediscovered, appreciated in ways they weren't went alive - no doubt because the traditions they came from, many now gone, can be heard and identified more clearly. Even though these figures represent an earlier age, some of them are very much alive, such as Polish violinist Ida Haendel, who authorizes the release of old recordings if the recording company allows her to make new ones. The retired Camilla Wicks, whose 1950s Sibelius Violin Concerto was hailed by the composer as the best ever, is seeing her discography expand thanks to the Simax label, which is culling live tapes from Norwegian radio archives.
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Mucking around the past in this fashion is hardly morbid or obscure. It redresses the winner-take-all mentality of the music industry in past decades. If Jascha Heifetz got more, there was less left for, say, Mischa Elman. There wasn't much room at the top, and perhaps there still isn't, on the contract artist rosters of major recording labels. But now there's lots of room to the side. After all, how many improved re-masterings of commercial Heifetz recordings can you take?
Posthumous careers such as Martzy's germinate unpredictably, often from the second-hand LP record market. Her EMI and Deutsche Grammophon LPs, dating from the 1950s, now go for as much as $500 a disc. Perhaps in response to that, Japanese EMI released the six-disc "Art of Johanna Martzy" in 1988. The first Martzy CD release in the West came in 1994 with her Brahms and Mendelssohn concerto performances on Testament. Then from smaller labels came a flood of previously unreleased material:.The England-based Coup d'Archet delivered five discs of European radio releases that were hard to get in the U.S. (though some have turned up on Amazon.com). The Doremi label has a series of live recitals taped in Canada, though only Volume 1 is currently available. Meanwhile, Japanese EMI re-released its Martzy CD box this year with an added bonus: two long-suppressed recordings from 1954 of the violinist playing Mendelssohn and Mozart with Sawallisch, made amid quarrels about tempo and other matters.
Slowly, Martzy's biography has emerged: her birth in Transylvania, education in pre-war Budapest, the devastating death of her second husband, the false accusations about her political affiliations and her decision to leave EMI rather than grant sexual favors to its chief, Walter Legge. If that doesn't draw you in, the photographs of Martzy will: she was a slim, fine-featured woman, her hair always tied up in a bun, the violin never far from her hands, her eyes often distant and quite sad. Music lovers aren't supposed to be entranced by such superficialities, but that's just what makes these posthumous reputations. How, for example, can you not be curious, for example, about the French pianist Monique de la Bruchollerie, who had poor medical treatment following a car accident in Romania and suffered the progressive amputation of various limbs, or pianist Youra Guller, who came back from a tour of pre-Communist China addicted to opium and spent the rest of her life in and out of eclipse?
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Naturally, accurate perception of these artists is problematic: we can never watch them or be in the same room with their tone quality. However, a total of three Martzy performances of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto are extant (the third is a rare live performance with Otto Klemperer), and they're valuable for charting her range of interpretation from year to year in a particular masterpiece, much the way you would if you heard her in the flesh over a number of years. In a way, a career of many decades is distilled down to a few years. What could be more convenient? And at some point, one must ask how cruel posterity has been to her.
Johanna Martzy's was a deceptive talent: The tone was filigree and silvery, but not particularly beautiful. The vibrato was quick and applied with a spareness that never allowed room for sentimentality. Tempos were swift and straight-ahead with no lingering. In later years (the 1970s), the tone grew a bit leathery but the tempos were more elastic, but in her prime, her playing had a coolness bordering on severity. The soul of her art was her coloristic expressiveness, delivered with such precision and discretion that each phrase became a tiny, and rich, world of its own. once you've zeroed in on that quality, the ear can't help seizing on it even in her most ensemble-minded, self-effacing chamber recordings, such as her performances of Beethoven's Piano Trio No. 1 and Dvorák's "Dumky" Piano Trio with István Hajdu and Paul Szabo. All of this is encased in a sense of line that's marvelously expansive, unbroken and buoyant. Martzy's expressive parameters were narrow, but they couldn't have been more resolutely defined.
She had a quality of inhabiting a piece from the inside and saw little need to gussy up the surface; to the jaded or inattentive ear, her interpretations can seem to lack incident. Skeptics, however, need only listen to her EMI recordings of the Bach Sonatas and Partitas, music to which her severity couldn't have been better suited. In fact, Bach seems to be the defining composer of her aesthetic: prior to the period-instrument movement, most performances of these masterpieces have moments of heavy weather, of too much sound being crowded into too small a space. And there are easier things in the violin repertoire than sustaining the repeat-laden dance movements. Martzy's recordings are the exception, her precision of tone addressing the problems of the former, her long sense of line carrying her through the latter.
There are downsides to her approach. Cerebral but not intellectual, she's mostly incapable of projecting the charm of Mozart. In her until-recently-suppressed recording of Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 3 with Sawallisch, she seems relieved to hit the cadenza, in which she can throw off the responsibility to ingratiate. Most puzzling of all are her two EMI recordings of the Mendelssohn concerto. Though it's always tempting to declare the suppressed version to be superior, this time it's really true. The commercially released version conducted by Paul Kletzki emphasizes the music's classical qualities to the point of slickness. Sawallisch is far more attuned to the music's darker underpinnings, inspiring a concentration from Martzy that reminds you - if any doubt remained - that this is a great violinist, albeit one who perhaps didn't know what collaborators were best for her. Might that be the core reason her career never developed?
REFERENCED RECORDINGS:
"The Art of Johanna Martzy" (EMI Japan TOCE 6861-66)
Brahms and Mendelssohn: Violin Concertos (Testament SBT 1037)
Franck and Ravel: Violin Sonatas (Coup d'Archet CD 001)
Martzy Performs Mozart and Bach (Coup d'Archet CD 002)
Martzy Performs Beethoven: Sonatas No. 8 and 9 (Coup d'Archet CD 003)
Martzy Performs Dvorák and Beethoven Piano Trios (Coup d'Archet CD 004)
Martzy Performs Brahms and Ravel Violin Sonatas (Coup d'Archet CD 005)
(Coup d'Archet, PO Box 1306, Bristol BS99 2GG, England)
Johanna Martzy, Vol. 1 (Doremi DHR 7753)
Mendelssohn and Mozart Concertos - Martzy, Sawallisch (EMI Japan PCCD 20018)
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