At the Paris Conservatoire he studied piano with Decombes, one of Chopins
last pupils, and then with Louis Diemer, winning a first prize in 1896.
Immediately he was heard and admired as an interpreter of Beethoven's
concertos at the Colonne and Lamoureux concerts, and he also appeared
with Eduard Risler in concerts of two-piano arrangements of Wagner's
music.
In 1898 he was appointed first as a choral coach, and then as assistant
conductor, at Bayreuth, where he worked until 1901 under Mottl and Richter.
This experience enabled him to prepare and conduct the first Paris performance
of Gotterdammerung (May, 1902) and a notable Tristan (June, 1902). His
Société de Festivals Lyriques (1902) was followed by the
formation of a concert society for which he conducted the first performances
in France of Parsifal ( in concert form), Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis
and Brahms’ Requiem, as well as still unpublished works by Chausson,
Magnard and Roussel. In 1904 he was entrusted with the directions of
the concerts given by the Société nationale and also engaged
to conduct the series of Concerts Populaires at Lille.
This activity as conductor, which made Cortot one of the leading figures
in French musical life before he was 30, did not dampen his enthusiasm
for piano although it inevitably limited the number of his performances.In
1905 the Cortot- Thibaud- Casals trio was founded and immediately became
, and for many years remained, the most admired ensemble of its kind.
From 1907 to 1917 Cortot was a professor of piano at the Paris Conservatoire,
but his activities as a soloist in Europe and the USA made it impossible
for him to devote regular, uninterrupted periods to academic teaching.
He therefore founded in 1919 The Ecole Normale de Musique, for which
he appointed a distinguished staff of teachers, while he himself was
responsible for interpretation classes which were to become legendary.In
1943 he founded the Société de Musique de Chambre de la
Société des Concerts du Conservatoire.
As a pianist he was remarkable for his intimate understanding of Romantic
music, especially Schumann, though his Chopin was prized very highly
and continues, even in the comparatively primitive recordings available,
to dazzle pianists by its lyrical delicacy and nobility. He was an ardent
champion of the new French piano music of his day, and devoted three
volumes to its exposition. Cortot made editions of most of Chopin’s
piano music (and some by Liszt, Mendelssohn,Schumann and Weber); they
are “editions de travail” which include technical exercise
related to the music, and annotations. Cortot’s more general observations
of piano technique provided material for a book entitled Rational principles
of Piano Technique published in 1928.
Cortot was an avid and systematic collector and he cared and catalogued
his substantial library of musical autographs, literature, first and
early editions, letters, portraits, coins and postage stamps. Only the
first volume of the catalogue was published (Bibliotheque Alfred Cortot:
Premiere Partie: traits at autres ouvrages theoriques des Xve, XVIe,
XVIIe, et XVIIIe siecles, Paris, 1936). After his death in 1962 the
printed music, some of great rarity, was dispersed mainly between the
British Museum,The Newberry Library in Chicago and the University of
California at Berkeley. Important manuscripts were bought for the Lehmann
Foundation in the Pierpoint-Morgan Library in New York.
|
