Elizabeth Sombart: Beethoven, Her Artistic Inspirations, and The Problem with Music Education
Photo credit: Nick Rutter
French pianist Elizabeth Sombart has spent her career bringing music to places where it is not normally heard. In 1998, she created the Fondation Résonnance, to bring classical music to hospitals, orphanages, prisons and refugee camps around the world.
Twenty years later, the Foundation offers several hundred concerts each year, and Sombart has received France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre National du Mérite and the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. We talked with her about her new Beethoven project, who inspires her as an artist, her advice to young pianists, what it’s like to play piano outside of concert halls, and so much more.
For inspiration and words of wisdom from Sombart, read on!
You have just announced a new project: performing and recording the complete Beethoven Piano Concertos. Can you tell me more about the inspiration behind this?
I had an intuition that getting through the five concertos was like a spiritual journey – not only for me privately, but also for everyone who listened to my performances. I felt a very strong urge to get inside the concertos, to meet the point of inspiration where Beethoven could hear internally all the sounds yet could not physically hear them – to share that whole journey of his from hearing to not hearing any longer, and to understand what had changed from the first concerto, when he could still hear, to the last one when he couldn’t. And it was an unbelievable experience, because it helps us to really speak about death and resurrection.
What’s the one thing you want people to remember about your artistry?
The artist has to be the servant. When he plays, the artist has to reconcile his talent to the experience and expectations of other people and to meet his audience with his performance.
Why do you choose to perform on stage? What do you feel when you perform for an audience?
I feel very strongly that it is good to make a recording, but especially good if it helps encourage people to experience the gift of live music, because the art of music is spatial. It’s at its best and strongest when experienced in reality, immediately. When I perform for a live audience, above all other attractions is the feeling that we are all one.
Where do you come up with your best ideas that you might end up applying to a score?
When I open a score, I first get all the parameters organized, and then analyse the harmony and all the important details. Then when I have internalised the phrasing, I mark my own breathing pattern in according to the breathing and the pulsation I’ve encountered in the score. When I have synchronized my breaths with the breathing in the music, I have reached reconciliation with the score.
Do you have a daily routine? How do you feel that affects you on stage?
My daily routine is to begin in silence, and to get ever more deeply into the understanding that we have to do everything as though it depends only on us, knowing at the same time that it doesn’t depend only on us. When I am on stage, the best performance happens when I can forget myself and let the music flow through me.
What do you do off the stage that provides inspiration on stage?
I would say that everything we do during the day is part of the preparation for being on stage. It is all part of learning how to be in the ‘here and now’. The more you can be here and now on the stage, the more you can be the servant of the music.
We have to become the music. To do so we have to get out of the commentary of what we are doing, what happened yesterday, what’s happening tomorrow. It is hard work and it’s the work of life.
Where do you want to be in five or ten years from now?
Above all, still working at being in the here and now!
What needs to be done to improve growing classical music audiences for live concerts? Or is it fine the way it is at the moment? Please explain your point of view.
I think that my Foundation’s work in going to places where music doesn’t normally go is very important because of the lie that says that classical music belongs to rich and cultivated people. It is not true.
I have played in the most unbelievably deprived places where people have never seen a piano, and they were deeply touched by classical music. They were all in tears after Schubert’s Ave Maria, or a nocturne by Chopin. We must go to these places. And we must make everyone sing together in choirs at school. It is very important for everyone to experience in our souls the sounds we make together.
What is your #1 piece of advice to artists who are starting their careers as professional musicians?
I would tell them to not take too much notice of the judgment they will receive from others. The public and critics can both be very hard. I know a lot of young artists who have been destroyed by criticism. We have to learn early on, as Beethoven said, that we don’t need to wait for any reward, any medals from anybody. We understand it inside, we know what we are doing, we know if we have played well, and not to give too much away. We should not give anyone else the power of making us happy or unhappy.
What steps need to be taken in many parts of the world to offer high quality music education to children?
We have to begin at school. Singing together is very important for children as we learn so much about being in communion with one another, and the potential for fraternity when we sing. Equally, career musicians must give master classes as much as possible, to pass on what they know and have in their fingers.
For children to admire artists is one of the most important steps in the process because the journey of a pianist or a violinist, for example, is very difficult: we have played as much as we have because we had a teacher or someone we admired so much that we wanted to be like that. The example is very important and has to be shared with the next generation.
Can you tell me about three musicians who have inspired your own artistry?
Bruno-Leonardo Gelber, who was my teacher when I was 17 in Argentina. With him, I understood that music is emotion – yes, absolutely emotion – but that you cannot paint a wonderful picture if there is no wall. I built the wall with him, the technique – everything that we have to construct first, in order to be able to forget it afterwards.
Then, Hilde Langer-Rühl – she was my next teacher, in Vienna. She was really the one who taught me that one doesn’t play with the fingers but with the diaphragm and the breathing. She was really revolutionary with this approach. All musicians know instinctively how and where to breathe, but she taught us how to use it for phrasing. It was really important to learn that gesture on the piano has to be a consequence of really controlled breathing.
Finally, Sergiu Celibidache. It was with him that I travelled the whole journey of understanding the phenomenology of music – learning that in music one plus one is not two but is still one, and embarking on this infinite body of knowledge was the last stage of my preparation. I studied with him for more than ten years and it changed absolutely the way I hear sounds, put them together, and present them.
Elizabeth Sombart’s recordings of the Beethoven Piano Concertos with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will be released on Signum Records.
