Borge’s Comic Act Belied Musical Passion

This is a thank-you, not an obit. When I got the assignment last year to travel to Connecticut and interview Victor Borge, who died last Saturday at age 91, it seemed as if the gods had designed the perfect torture. Victor Borge? The guy selling music shtick on late-night television?

But cynicism yielded to charm like pallor to the Caribbean sun. Borge was charming--smart and charming--and delightfully sensible about his showmanship. He’d spent decades answering the same question: Which are you, a pianist or a comic? So he didn’t wait for me to ask it, but offered a touchingly candid self-assessment. He was a very good pianist, but not a great pianist. And in a world with Horowitz and Rubenstein, who needed very good?

The arts don’t attract many people who can assess their own talent so dispassionately. And even fewer who will do it in front of a stranger. Modesty, among artists, is almost always a liability. No matter how much talent you have, if you know your limits, and dwell on the fact, the canvas will remain blank.

Borge was probably a much better pianist than he let on. Musical colleagues always said so, and the little bits that he let audiences hear were played with professional confidence, clarity and an appealing dash of whimsy. But his act, as he often said, was all about not playing the piano.

Playing music for someone seems like such a generous thing--the gift of music, the language of the heart and all that. But there’s an element of self-aggrandizement in making music: I shall control this space with my music, and after I’m done, you’ll thank me.

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Borge loved to work a room with a generous and inviting brand of humor; he seemed less inclined to work it with that infinitely more revelatory entertainment--music. He was a good host, and a good host takes the temperature of the room at every opportunity. With comedy, you know instantly when you’re killing them; with music, they mostly suffer in silence.

Borge embodied the paradox of the deeply shy. Merely shy people, if they don’t learn any better, end up as tedious wallflowers; deeply shy people are the best company because they’ve worked so hard at being sociable. But shyness will out, and with Borge the last visible remnant of it seemed to be his unwillingness to impose too much music on people.

And yet he loved his piano, and with a love that was undiminished after decades of practice. His piano sat in a beautiful room, an Old World room like the man himself. It was the sort of room that invites solitude and rumination, the sort of room in which Montaigne must have written his essays or Verdi his last operas. It suggested the wealth--real and metaphorical--that he had accumulated. Throughout the course of an hour interview in which he was the perfect subject, he communicated one other thing: a vast desire to get back to that room and be with his music.

By the time I left Borge’s house, I felt guilty for having underestimated him. He did what he did because he could do it well. All the reviews, and now the obituaries, got it slightly wrong. He wasn’t out there to skewer the pomposity of classical music. He had too much respect and love for music to skewer it. He might skewer pompous people, but even that was a small part of the act. He was the butt of his own jokes, another foolproof sign of modesty.

It’s a conceit of this business that you never get to know the man behind the public figure, certainly not in an hourlong interview. The best thing that can happen is to know even less after than you did before, to have one’s assumptions and prejudices wiped clean. Before meeting Victor Borge, he was the funnyman on television, selling a brand of humor I didn’t personally find all that funny. After meeting him, that Borge seemed a fairly peripheral figure--Borge, the working man doing his act. The other Borge was a man of great intelligence, wit and learning, who had found a way to live with music, comfortably and profitably, for a lifetime.