Not taking it sitting down

WHEN was the last time you heard a child say, “When I grow up, I want to be vice president”? How about, “I want to be a copilot”? Even most kids feel such jobs are for people who have missed the gold ring on the merry-go-round and are making the best of what’s left. And many people take the same view of accompanists.

Some singers share that attitude. One well-known soprano stopped in the middle of a recital to berate her pianist: “That’s not how we rehearsed it.” Another diva, on tour in Australia, took her accompanist’s offer to drive between cities as her lofty due. “I would like the car at 10 tomorrow, please,” she said. A common complaint, accompanists say, is “You’re playing too loud.”

But the tide is turning. Degree programs that focus solely on accompanying are now offered at USC, the Eastman and Manhattan schools of music and the University of Michigan, among other colleges and conservatories. Only musicians who want to pursue that path to the exclusion of a solo career need apply.

Pianists’ names appear in larger type than ever before in ads and programs for recitals, although singers’ continue to dominate. And accompanists have branched out to become voice and language instructors, while singers often draw on their extensive knowledge of the repertory for programming ideas.

Above all, accompanists won’t tolerate condescension anymore, and savvy vocalists don’t indulge in it.

“It is very important to feel that a singer is ready to find a mutual way through the music,” says Hartmut Holl, who will play for soprano Renee Fleming on Saturday at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Holl was baritone Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau’s pianist for 11 years.

“If a singer said, ‘Just play for me,’ I would not do it for long,” Holl says. “What we are is a dual partnership -- two people full of ideas, full of feelings, full of understanding, talking together onstage. It’s real chamber music.”

But it’s a supportive kind of chamber music.

“The singer is not painting the pictures alone,” says Martin Katz, who has accompanied, among other celebrities, mezzo-sopranos Marilyn Horne and Cecilia Bartoli. “The singer is not expressing the words alone. The pianist is creating the context for the words. If the singer is not running out of breath, it’s probably because of the pianist. If the singer is singing clearly and projecting clearly, it’s because of a calculation a pianist has made to allow that to happen.

“We do everything,” he says with a laugh.

Well, maybe not everything. But the pianist usually sets the mood at the start of a song and rounds it off at the end. He prompts without seeming to prompt, supports without knuckling under, stands ready to serve as a vocal or language coach, and helps singers choose material.

There are all sorts of offstage working relationships as well.

“It’s like asking what a marriage is,” says Graham Johnson, who has accompanied Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Ian Bostridge, among others. “Sometimes it’s very caring, very touchy-feely. Sometimes it’s a hardheaded political collaboration. Some people are very emotional. Some get on with it.

“One person is ill. One needs a bit of loving attention because her husband is getting a divorce. There are human issues of working together, just as in any profession where people work together.”

If all that is true, why do so many people underestimate the accompanist?

“People hear in a flat manner,” Johnson volunteers. “Most hear the top line at the expense of anything happening underneath. To appreciate what the accompanist is doing, you have to hear the inner parts and what’s happening in the counterpoint. I’ve often been ignored and seemingly insulted by people not because they mean to be nasty. They have simply failed to hear what I’ve done.”

What many listeners also don’t realize is that most of the great song composers -- Schubert, Schumann, Brahms and Strauss -- were accomplished pianists who wrote accompaniments for themselves to play. They were not likely to shortchange their parts.

“The repertoire was conceived as a duo, as one thing entwined with the other,” Johnson says. “That is the payoff. The music is ineffably great.”

To change the public’s perception, many pianists have started calling themselves “collaborators” or “associate artists.” USC -- which began offering the first courses in accompanying in the United States, in 1947 -- now calls its degree program “Keyboard Collaborative Arts.”

“The word ‘accompanist’ has gotten so much baggage of being associated with a second-rate, secondary kind of pianist,” says Adam Smith, USC’s keyboard studies chairman. “ ‘Collaborative pianist’ or ‘collaborative artist’ puts a different slant on it immediately.”

Not all professionals go along with the change.

“People have this idea that ‘accompanist’ is somehow a demeaning term,” says Roger Vignoles, who has worked with such artists as Elisabeth Soderstrom and Philip Langridge. “I don’t think there’s a better term for what people like me do.

“ ‘Collaborative pianist,’ ‘associative artist’ -- those terms sound so anemic and euphemistic to me, like saying ‘vertically challenged,’ apologizing for what you’re not.”

Whatever the word, probably few people who are not music professionals realize that the way singers and their accompanists are paid automatically establishes an unequal relationship between the two, at least in this country.

“The normal practice in the United States is for a singer to be paid a fee, out of which they pay for an accompanist,” says Johnson. “So basically, if an accompanist wants to get a raise, where does he go? Essentially to the singer, who is the boss. It makes for a messy situation.

“It’s very different in Europe, in London. If you want a singer and an accompanist -- say at the Edinburgh Festival -- they know they have to hire two people, each costing a certain amount. In America, you hire one person.”

As a result, Johnson says, accompanists in the U.S. have an incentive to keep their opinions to themselves.

“It’s difficult to be honest,” he says. “If I’m very, very nice, complimentary, if I shut up about a singer singing flat, not being correct stylistically, or correcting his German, I’m likely to keep getting work. I’m paid to be a schmoozer.”

Partnership, its ups and downs

With such strikes against the job, why would anyone take it up?

“Anybody you talk to will tell you they do it because they love it so much,” says Katz. “You don’t get rich, you don’t get top billing, you don’t get famous, except for a few people. That’s just what we love to do.”

The job also draws a certain personality.

“I like the social aspect of making music,” says Warren Jones, who has accompanied Kiri Te Kanawa and Carol Vaness, among many others. “Maintaining a career as a soloist requires a lot of time being by oneself. When I make music with other people, I get energy from them and I give them energy, and it’s the cycle that we engage in that replenishes everyone.”

Still, things can go wrong.

Gilbert Kalish remembers playing for soprano Dawn Upshaw in a group of Bartok songs: “I saw a look of surprise on her face, but everything went very well. But when I was finished, she said -- very much in an aside -- ‘You skipped one of the songs, Gil.’ Since it was in Hungarian, few people knew. I was terribly grateful for that.”

Vignoles recalls how he went through “a baptism of fire” with German soprano Rita Streich. “She rehearsed me for six hours, by the end of which I was going completely crazy. She kept saying I was playing too loud. She made me play softer and softer, and there were all sorts of things that were difficult to do. Then at the concert, she sang full voice like she never had at any of the rehearsals. I was too shellshocked to adjust my balance. And in fact I was too soft. There was nothing I could do about it.”

Each of these accompanists has built his career in a different way. There seems to be no boilerplate.

Jones segued from 10 years of assistant conducting at the Metropolitan Opera. Kalish began playing contemporary music at a time when few others wanted to. Vignoles formed long-lasting partnerships with Soderstrom and Sarah Walker.

“It was much easier to get into the field then than now, much less competitive,” says Vignoles. “But there are only a handful of people who are really interested in doing it in any generation. Still, there are only a handful who are actually going to make a go of it at any one time.

“It’s not a whiz kid’s career. You don’t shoot for stardom as an accompanist. It’s very dependent on the people you work with.”

Most graduates of the USC program, in fact, survive by making “a patchwork quilt of teaching, coaching and performing,” says Smith -- because the glory days of recitals may be over.

“Compare Gerald Moore’s career, going back 50 or 60 years,” Katz observes of the British accompanist who played for virtually every celebrated singer of his day, from Janet Baker to Schwarzkopf. “He never had to do an hour’s worth of teaching. He gave 200 recitals a year. But for my generation, there just aren’t the opportunities, sad to say.”

Vignoles agrees: “It can be quite difficult to get audiences for song recitals. I don’t expect people who know nothing about music to come flocking to performances of Schubert. But I am always saddened when people who will sit through a whole evening of Beethoven late quartets won’t cross the road to hear [the song cycle] ‘Winterreise.’ ”

For Johnson, the situation is more gloomy.

“The fact that we accompanists are underestimated is a minor problem in terms of the underestimate of the entire medium of classical music,” he says. “A lot of people don’t want to face the fact that through a combination of lack of education and repudiation of depth, everything today is instant consumption. What the modern listening world wants to do is stroll to the summit.

“The type of repertoire we’re born to do is losing its credit. It’s still great and will remain great, and someday it may be refound. But nobody needs depth now. We are going through a remarkably flat and depth-free period.”

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Seated at center stage

Few record buyers purchase a CD of vocal music because of the person playing piano for the singer, but there are recordings from which the art of the accompanist shines forth. What follows is an arbitrary selection, arranged alphabetically by pianist.

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Leif Ove Andsnes

Schubert: “Winterreise”

Ian Bostridge, tenor. Leif Ove Andsnes, piano (EMI Classics)

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Hartmut Holl

Wolf: “Goethe Songs”

Mitsuko Shirai, mezzo-soprano. Hartmut Holl, piano (Capriccio)

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Graham Johnson

Schubert: “Die schone Mullerin”

Ian Bostridge, tenor. Graham Johnson, piano (Vol. 25 of a 37-volume set of the complete songs of Schubert) (Hyperion)

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Warren Jones

Brahms, Sibelius, Stenhammar: Songs

Hakan Hagegard, baritone. Warren Jones, piano (BMG/RCA Red Seal)

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Martin Katz

“Voyage a Paris”

Frederica von Stade, mezzo-soprano. Martin Katz, piano (RCA Victor)