MUSICIAN-SCHOLAR WHO GOES WITH HIS INSTINCTS

Charles Rosen is that rare bird in the music world--a respected pianist and a renowned author/scholar. Nonetheless, when he sits down at the keyboard to play some Chopin, as he will Saturday and Sunday at the J. Paul Getty Museum, the veteran musician still relies more on his instincts than his intellect.

Rosen notes that research can merely offer clues--not answers. “If there’s only one way of playing Chopin, I see no point in playing the piano,” he tells a visitor to his Santa Monica hotel. “There are so many contradictions in Romantic interpretation that all you can do is find which works best.”

Thus, when tackling a new piece for the first time, the 59-year-old pianist says he heads straight to the keyboard, seeking out workable fingerings--rather than the library, in search of scholarly treatises.

Far from clarifying the confusion, in fact, a good deal of scholarship on Romantic music has only served to muddy the waters, Rosen says: “Almost all the editions of Chopin are bad.” One overly studious editor, for example, went so far as to eliminate entire beats in a piece, citing a number of large X’s the composer had written above some of the notes. “It turns out,” Rosen explains, “those were places where a student of Chopin’s had played particularly well.”

In the last century, players and their audiences treated music with far less reverence than we may think, the pianist says. It seems that the most interesting performances were likely to happen not in the formal concert hall but in private homes.

Those 19th-Century salon gatherings serve as models for the Getty programs this weekend, featuring Rosen as soloist, and accompanist for singers Cynthia Westphal Johnson and Rickie Weiner Gole.

The agenda concentrates on rarely heard arias and nocturnes by Bellini, Donizetti and Rossini--”the sort of material Chopin would have played in such a setting,” Rosen says.

While the Getty program has been carefully planned, the actual salon evenings in the last century often brimmed with spontaneity and good fun. Rosen relates one fascinating--and evidently true--story that not only captures the mood of those soirees, but points to the folly of deducing the “right” approach to Romantic music:

“Someone asked Liszt to play a nocturne by Chopin, who happened to be in attendance. Liszt’s approach was contrary to Chopin’s--so everyone waited for the composer’s reaction. Silently, he walked to the piano, and brought smiles of approval when he played the same piece.

“The next night, Chopin was invited to play it again. This time, he asked that the lights be snuffed out. Everyone sat in darkness as that unmistakeable Chopin sound filled the room. When the music ended, a candle was lit. And there, seated at the piano, was Liszt.

“The two men had conspired to play this little trick on their listeners.”

Liszt, then, could switch gears almost on a whim. Thus, Rosen concludes, pianists today should be similarly willing to break anchor from long-held thoughts on interpretation in order to gain insight into the music.

“So many people think you have to play Beethoven like Schnabel, that somehow Schnabel is closer to the original. That’s ridiculous. There are many traditions of playing, and they’re very interesting--but they may be wrong.”