Marguerite Wolff

Marguerite Wolff0:00

Hello, I'm Kirsty Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in two thousand and two, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

Presenter0:22

My castaway this week is a pianist. She gave her first recital at the Wigmore Hall in London at the age of ten. At fifteen, she gave her first orchestral concert conducted by Sir John Barbarolly. She's been enchanting audiences ever since. Beautiful, elegant, and charming, she's devoted herself to her piano, practising eight hours a day, every day, for as long as she can remember. She stopped performing for some years during her marriage, but returned to the concert platform after her husband died and still tours the world today. Her clothes are as lovely as her playing. Her first concert dress was made for her in 1940 by Norman Hartnell, to whom she took a length of material in a brown paper bag. I'm almost an obsessional worker, she says. I do love the whole giving experience. She is Marguerite Wolfe. I think we should hear about that first concert dress, Marguerite. What was it like? Tell me about it. It was a marvellously made dress, and the actual way it was made, I still have dresses made today for concerts. It had an underdress of silver lamy, and then it had a very large skirt that when you sit down, you flick over the piano stool. It was very marvellous, but I never really cared for the bodice, but I was too intimidated to tell the French fitter that maybe it wasn't right. How many dresses do you have in your wardrobe? I don't have such an extraordinary amount of dresses. I have dresses for an occasion. You give birth to a dress, you might say, for a particular occasion. Then, of course, you use it a great deal. But it takes a long time to make. But they are all marvellous. I mean, they're they're very luxurious, aren't they? Chiffon and organza and summer decoration. The fabrics are very, very good, and they're also interesting. They want to be strong and, of course, be able to sit on the piano.

Marguerite Wolff2:14

Beat your family.

Presenter2:23

And so colour does matter. I know you wear, you know, wonderful yellow if you're in the Far East, don't you? And that y you design yourself, as it were. It's all part of the performance for you. Oh, it's part of a performance. I love it. The little black frock is not what you do. No, not for a performance. No, not not at all. They take a lot of looking after these dresses, I'm sure. Didn't you have a disaster with a a chiffon number in in the Philippines once?

Marguerite Wolff2:32

Points department.

Presenter2:46

Oh, yes, it was a real disaster. It was a very pretty dress. It was a sort of embroidered pink chiffon.

Presenter2:53

And I of course don't speak the language. And so a very nice girl came in, really, just to press my dress, and I indicated that I wanted some water,'cause I was very hot and there wasn't a bathroom there. She completely misunderstood my wanting some water, thinking I wanted my dress washed.

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And so, later on, with enormous pride, she came in waving which looked like a huge balloon. It was the underskirts of my chiffon dress that was just for pressing, and she'd thoroughly washed it. Ruined for all time, huh? Yes, completely ruined. Fortunately, I always take two dresses, and I had another. Well, now you've said that music for you is as evocative as a photograph. Play a piece of music, and you can recall the scene. So tell me about the scene that this first piece you've chosen evokes for you. Well, the scene immediately goes back to my childhood, where my mother and father all the time played violin and piano, and particularly the spring sonata by Beethoven, which I adored and adored.

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The opening movement of Beethoven's Spring sonata, the Fruling, number five, for violin, played by Yehudi Menuin and Louis Kentner, both of whom you knew well, I think, Marguerite. Oh, yes, especially Kentner. Who was your teacher? Yes, he was my great Maister. But that evokes, you say, um, home, North London, your mother and father, and two brothers and a sister.

Marguerite Wolff5:13

Yes, it was going great.

Presenter5:22

Everybody played an instrument, mostly the piano, I think. Yes. And your mother taught you? My mother taught me, yes. And her grandmother played as well, I think. My grandmother, who lived to be a hundred, yes, she played. She said, music is my life. So, in a way, looking at your story, one thinks, I wonder if you were fulfilling the dreams of the grandmother and the mother, really, to end up on the concert platform. I don't think so. My mother, I don't think, had any ambition to perform herself at all. In fact, my mother wouldn't have radio in the house and for a long time not even television, because she didn't want to stop live music. So it was essentially for the music. I had a music master, Mr. Baron, who came to the house. And I remember the day he said to my mother, Marguerite will be a concert pianist. And I rather think that it possibly altered my mother's attitude. In what way?

Marguerite Wolff6:18

In what way?

Presenter6:20

Well, I think she possibly thought of my future.

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Because at ten you're not usually proclaimed you're going to be a doctor or you're going to be a lawyer, and so he's and in music you are. But did you ever look at other girls, you know, your school chums, or look wistfully out of the window and see them and think, Oh, I just wish I could be ordinary like them and not, you know, at this piano? Oh, yes. I remember one particular occasion. I'd been to Gertrude Ajulet for a lesson. Your teacher. My teacher. I think it was a a a public holiday.

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And I was waiting at the 31 bus stop to go home, and I can remember seeing girls laughing and passing, swinging tennis rackets. And then I felt wistful and thought of how easy not to have the, I suppose, responsibility. How easy life would be if you could just go and play tennis. But of course, that feeling was very temporary. But of course, the

Marguerite Wolff7:15

How easy life would be.

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The wistful feeling.

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Uh does come in. But you made, I I mentioned in the introduction, uh your first big public performance, aged ten, in in the Holy of Holies, the Wigmore Hall. One of the Holy of Holies, anyway. How did that come about?

Marguerite Wolff7:33

I mean one of the

Presenter7:36

Well, there used to be all over the country some Murdoch piano showrooms. They sold pianos and music.

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And they had a competition every year.

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and the prize was the Whigmore Hall.

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And what did you play, do you remember?

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I remember playing the rondo in G of Beethoven, and then I played the A major sonata, opus number two.

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And then I played a group of Mendelssohn, which I still play. Well, I play them all today. You played an an enormous amount. Were you frightened? Do you remember? No, not at all. I hadn't experienced at that stage so called nerves.

Marguerite Wolff8:13

Yeah.

Marguerite Wolff8:16

Yeah, not at

Presenter8:21

The nerves were to come. Yes, there were. We'll pause there for record number two. What's it to be?

Presenter8:27

When I want to give myself a treat, I take myself off to the ballet, and so I have chosen for my second record The Sleeping Beauty by Tchaikovsky.

Presenter9:39

Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty played by the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andrei Previn. It wasn't a smooth path to the top for you, Marguerite Wolfe. There was another teacher, I think, along the way who you played a couple of bars for, and she told you you were terrible. Before Gertrude Ajwood, I must say I had had a lot of praise and a lot of love and I felt really quite comfortable.

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And I went because my mother thought there was something.

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wrong in um in my teaching and after three bars she said stop it is really very bad devastating yes that was completely devastating how old would you have been then i would have then have been about eleven and it was completely devastating but i must say my mother was hugely impressed and in a way i was in of course tremendous awe because everybody else praised me but she thought it was bad so she must be rather rather marvellous she was quite an eccentric figure though wasn't she yes she was a very eccentric figure she always wore a hat and she always had a cigarette at the side of her mouth with the ash falling on the keys you said though that she wanted you to be a musical nun oh yes very much so she said that women pianists who married

Marguerite Wolff10:45

Yeah.

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You could hear the hoovers in there playing.

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And she did her very best to indoctrinate me. Against marriage and men. I wanted the lot.

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And I certainly, I certainly didn't want to be a musical nun. You had a string of suitors, I think. You didn't marry for for a little while, but you had a string of suitors, the majority of whom were somewhat older than you, and rather distinguished. I mean, there was an ambassador, wasn't there, and there was a director of the British Museum. You obviously liked the company of older men, as they say. Yes, I did very, very much so. I think that if you are a pianist, and especially if you're performing quite young, you do tend to have the company of people older. Older people take you up. Older people are interested in you. Therefore, they're more interesting. You can get quite bored with your own generation. And then one day you met a young man called Derek Moss. What was different about him?

Presenter12:03

I don't know.

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I think that it felt entirely different.

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Also he was extremely good looking, and I've always, I must say, been partial to that.

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And so I suppose I just fell in love. I didn't think about it. And you knew you'd fallen in love, am I writing saying, because you didn't do some practice when he invited you out, which you'd never done before. You'd never given up the piano for a man. No, never. And my definition of love is when the piano becomes second. And really I gave a performance that I blush when I think of it. I'd never played the Tchaikovsky, and I was asked to play it at three weeks' notice, and it is a very, very big work. And Derek asked me to do the normal things, walks on Hansford Heath, the cinema and such like, which I did.

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when I should have been practising at least fifteen hours a day.

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And really the performance was not good.

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Next piece of music.

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Music, and particularly film music, brings back

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Memories. So I've chosen for my record the marvellous film Casablanca with Humphry Bogart and Ingrid Bergman set in The Last War.

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Time goes by.

Speaker 313:26

You must remember this.

Speaker 313:29

A kiss is just a kiss.

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A sigh is just a sigh.

Speaker 313:38

The fundamental things apply as time goes by.

Speaker 313:49

And when two lovers who

Speaker 313:52

They still say I love

Speaker 313:55

Uh

Presenter13:55

Henry Wilson, and as time goes by from the film soundtrack of Casablanca. So the war years, Marguerite Wolfe, you played for the troops and workers in the war. You travelled around under Walter Legg, then director of HMV, who set up these concerts. Where did he send you and how did you go? How did you travel? We travelled all over England in the royal coach. In the royal coach? In the royal coach. It was quite magnificent. It was sort of marvellous maroon colour. And in the back, where the luggage would normally go, we had a grand piano.

Presenter14:32

I suppose we've covered nearly all the Air Force bases, the Chatham Royal Barracks, Portsmouth, everywhere, even underground, for one week. No, never.

Marguerite Wolff14:46

We frighten.

Presenter14:49

But it was quite frightened.

Marguerite Wolff14:49

It's quite dangerous.

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What did you do, then knock on people's doors and ask them to take you in, as it were? Well, that was my own thing.

Presenter14:59

I would knock on the door, usually of a doctor, because they're usually musical, and explain that I was giving music to the troops, and explain I needed to practise, did they know a music lover? And with almost out exception they used to say, Of course you can come here and you can stay.

Presenter15:23

Now, it was during the war that you'd started having lessons from the virtuoso pianist Louis Kentner, whom we had in your first piece of music. Can you explain to me how it felt the first time you went to him and you and he decided that, yes, you would become teacher and pupil? What was it like that first encounter? Oh, it was quite extraordinary. Going to Kentner and that first time was like golden doors opening, or a dirty window being wiped clean that you could see through. And when I played to him, he said that I played

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with all the experience of the experienced concert artist, but without the thousand and one things that go to make up a pianist. And I have ever since then tried

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finding those thousand and one things. How did he t transmit this to you? He opened these these doors, the whole musical uh his musical conception, his style. And pr for instance, I sit very, very low. Kentler sat very, very low. I used to sit very, very high. He altered my my whole uh technique.

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And it was a question of fine balance and architectural design.

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We're just

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Everything, and of course history. But there is a point, isn't there, when, you know, for all the technique

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Art has to take over, and you begin then to communicate what you say is for you the most important thing.

Marguerite Wolff17:02

For you the

Presenter17:04

Oh, the communication is the vital thing. And of course Kentler always said that when you play you mustn't show the seams. You you work and work and work and work, but of course that is only

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To prepare the performance, the performance must be a hole where you're just playing.

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Next piece of music. Now tell me the scene that this evokes. When I first played at the Albert Hall, on the same programme was the great baritone Tito Gobby making his first appearance in England.

Presenter17:44

So I have chosen for my next record Gobby and Callas singing in Tosca, and I think their performances of Tosca, especially the second act, are legendary.

Speaker 418:10

Oscar Vinaimentavia!

Speaker 418:17

Spinning Marjorie Costa!

Speaker 418:27

Uh

Marguerite Wolff18:35

A Utah

Marguerite Wolff18:37

Fuck those.

Marguerite Wolff18:39

Yo

Speaker 418:46

Are you so professor?

Presenter18:57

The dramatic end of Scarpia. Maria Callas and Tito Gobby as Tosca and Scarpia at the end of Act Two of Puccini's Tosca with the Orquestre de la Société des Concerret du Conservatoire conducted by Georges Prétre. And memories for you, Margarita, of appearing in the same concert as Gobby at the Albert Hall. There were cues down the road for it, you say. Oh, yes, it was absolutely colossal. I'm afraid to say that the cues were for Gobby, not for me. But you played the Beethoven C minor. I played the Beethoven C minor. Standing evasion. I had a wonderful audience, yes. Kentner embraced you the show. Yes, he did. That was a most marvellous moment. And you cried yourself to sleep.

Marguerite Wolff19:25

Stat

Marguerite Wolff19:31

Yes, indeed.

Presenter19:35

Yes, I did, and I I I literally did.

Presenter19:39

So it was all wonderful success. But as you say, you wanted it all, and you got married, and then you had two children, and your husband began to find the piano a bit of a rival, didn't he? My husband wanted me for himself.

Presenter19:54

And looking back, I can understand. He asked you to give up public performance. Yes. I think he was rather surprised, and a lot of other people were surprised that when I married that I wanted to continue. Certainly they were very surprised that I continued after I had children. But then you did give up eventually. I think the pressure, obviously, from your husband was too great. I don't know. But you felt it was the right thing to do and you stopped public performance, didn't you? It was uh difficult. I felt in a way I was living with twenty-five per cent of myself. William, I suppose you would, after all of those years of practice and performance, there would be a a vacuum. Uh yes, there's a vacuum, because although you can play, it is not the same sort of playing as when you are performing. And if you are not playing for that, I don't think you you work in the same way.

Presenter20:51

And then one morning in nineteen sixty four, after you and Derek had been married for some fourteen years,

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Well, something absolutely awful happened, didn't it? Yes. I was talking to my sister Dolly, of which I must say we did a great deal. On the telephone? Yes, on the telephone, habitually.

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And we were talking about a programme, the Beautiful Schubert Fantasy, in F minor, and we had a particularly light-hearted conversation and said goodbye. And then I thought that my husband, who was a tremendous worker, was sleeping rather too long. And I went up and I asked him if he wanted his breakfast. And I kept on asking him.

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And he was dead. He'd had a massive, massive heart attack. And how old was he? He was forty four. And the children were tiny. Yes, they were very small. Dreadful.

Presenter21:46

This next record, this piece of music, is in fact, I think, the piece of music you were discussing with your sister Dolly on the phone. Yes, the Schubert Fantasy and F minor.

Marguerite Wolff21:52

Yes, the

Presenter21:56

Dolly and I we played four hands, one piano, and it was a most beautiful combination because we loved each other very much. And I think that as a duo forehand playing is really like chamber music. You have to have great balance and great rapport. And this, I think, I'm right in saying, is the first piece you played at a public concert after your husband had died? Yes, it was the very first. Although, curiously enough, it had been arranged before he died.

Presenter23:29

The opening of Schubert's Fantasia in F minor for Four Hands, played by Radhu Lupu and Murray Pariah. And you played that piece with your sister Dolly in 1964, your first concert, Marguerite Wolfe after your husband died, and an important concert in another respect, because that was where you met Sir Arthur Bliss, who was then Master of the Queen's Music, wasn't it? Yes, it was a very, very important.

Presenter23:52

Meeting for me. Not least because he then asked you to start playing his music, and I don't think you'd ever done any modern music music. No, not at all.

Marguerite Wolff24:00

No, not at all.

Presenter24:01

No not at all, nor had I ever intended to. Quite frightening with the composer sitting there in the audience? The first performance I gave of the Bliss Sonata was in Malta, and Sir Arthur Bliss was going to introduce his sonata and me.

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And just before the transmission.

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He came to me and he said, My dear, he said, I hope you will forgive me. I will introduce you, I will introduce the sonata, but then I have to go. The relief I felt was immeasurable. Very decent to him. He knew exactly what he was doing, obviously. Absolutely, because when I finished the sonata, the first person to come up to me to embrace me was Arthur Bliss. Do you think he'd been hiding round the corner all the time? He'd been in the studio all the time. He knew I would feel easier.

Marguerite Wolff24:51

So you think you'd be high

Presenter24:58

He's been very much part of your his music, very much part of your repertoire ever since, hasn't he? You travel everywhere. You go to South America, Africa, the Far East, and and

Speaker 425:02

Yes, I think I'm thinking about.

Presenter25:10

All over the world. The pianos, I dare say, vary terribly, but the thing that doesn't vary is your stool. Yes, my stool. You take it with you? Yes, I take my stool with me. I sit very, very low, and I found that people are not very keen on chopping down their their stools. Is it so important? Is it that important?

Marguerite Wolff25:29

Yes, it is very

Presenter25:31

It is enormously important. Your whole way of playing the piano is in balance in relation to the pedal and the hands and your back.

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But taking a stool with you around the world must cause a bit of a fuss at airports. Well, I don't make a sensation at airports, but my stool certainly does.

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Record number six. A work that I would go anywhere in the world to play, I love it so, is the Cezanne Franc Piano Quintet.

Presenter27:04

The opening of César Franc's piano quintet in F minor, played by Clifford Curzon and the Vienna Philharmonic Quartet. A very erotic piece, you said it isn't. Oh, enormously erotic. It's wildly exciting to play. And when Liszt first heard it, he was absolutely appalled by its sensuality. And it was very strange, because César Franck himself was an organist and a very, very quiet man. And then you have this this marvellously passionate and, I must say, highly erotic. Work.

Presenter27:36

You've been playing professionally now for a long time. I mean, at least five decades, I um maybe more. And you started very young and and age isn't something you care to discuss, I know, and why should you? But you don't seem to to slow down at all. Are you doing as much and practising as much as ever? Oh, I would say if anything, more. I travel more and more. But you never take a day off. Do you never think I'm just not going to sit at the piano today? After a performance, I usually like uh a day and feel utterly miserable. It never goes as I want, because you feel after a performance very let down and you feel rather miserable. So you think always before, oh, what a lovely day it's going to be, and it isn't. But when you're away, you usually have a lovely day and see the sights, which is marvellous. And when you're practising.

Speaker 428:12

Uh

Presenter28:26

Are you on a sort of automatic pilot, as it were? Are you criticised, listening to yourself? Would you just sit there and play in a in a sort of trance? Oh, no, certainly not. You listen minutely, and maybe only practice a bar liner a whole morning. It is always listening and concentrating. I mean, if you suddenly thought, Oh, I must buy a pound of apples.

Presenter28:53

You'd know perfectly well you weren't practising very well. That's when you'd hear the Hoovers in your play. Yeah, that's when you hear the Hoovers. You mentioned earlier on your sister Dolly, who was a fine pianist and also had lessons from Kentner, but she didn't become a famous concert pianist. Now why not? What is the difference? What makes one person do it and one person not? I think that it's something in you that wants to communicate with people. I mean I remember as a child, it doesn't sound very pleasant, but when I

Presenter29:20

went to a party. I used to sit there thinking, Oh, I do hope they asked me to play. I wanted to play to people. Now if I'm asked if I go out to dinner, I hate it. Yes. But it's obviously, and has been for you now, a complete way of life. And after Derek died

Marguerite Wolff29:31

Do you

Presenter29:38

And you were still only in your thirties when that happened.

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You obviously never consid or did you ever consider remarrying? Or did you put the piano back first in your life?

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Well, I never made rules about not marrying.

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But uh

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I think it was too complicated, really. You know, music and children.

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And maybe I didn't want to replace my husband. And maybe you didn't want a love affair with anything other than the piano.

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Maybe. Record number seven.

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When my daughters, Crystal and Gloria, were very young,

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I took them to a concert at the festival hall, and there was an absolutely miraculous performance of La Mer by Debussy.

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After the concert, it was a lovely night in May, and we walked over the bridge to Charing Cross Underground, so happy and so full of joy, that that performance of Le Maire has shimmered over the years and is my next record.

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The opening of Debussy's Lamaire played by the Philadelphia Orchestra conducted by Eugene Ormondy.

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Um, Marguerite, you love beautiful things. You love order and grace. I'm not sure I can see you on a desert island. It's not exactly cut out for you, is it? Or you cut out for it? Well, it would have its difficulties, because I'm not very good at doing things. Well, it's those hands, you see, they're so fine and beautiful. I mean, they're not going to knock up a a lean to, are they? Oh, very and I'm very inadequate at you know, fuses, anything. Not that I'd have that on a desert island, but I'm not very good at doing things. But spiritually you could cope, because being alone is what you know about. Being a pianist is very solitary, because you work for hours on your own. But you're not really solitary, because you have you have music. Well, you've got music on your desert, aren't you? You were telling me just now that you clap sometimes when you hear recordings. I sometimes listen to a Kent recording, and I find myself in the end clapping and saying, Oh, how wonderful.

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And here he is playing your last record. What's this one? Well, I couldn't go on a Desert Island without a recording of my great Maestro Kentner. And so I've chosen a concert arrangement of Strauss's

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Blue Danube.

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Played by Duikhan.

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Strauss's Blue Danube Waltz, arranged by Schulz Evler, played by Louis Kentler, and that was recorded in 1944. It's a lovely end, actually, isn't it? Oh, I think it's a beautiful piece. One can dance. Now, if you could only take one of those eight records, which one would you take? I think it has to be the Tchaikovsky. It would remind me of all the treats I'd given myself after concerts. Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty. What about your book? You've got the Bible, you've got the complete works of Shakespeare. I've chosen Dr. Alan Walker's enormous biography of Liszt, possibly the most fascinating virtuoso in musical history. It spans the political, social, and religious scene between Beethoven's death and Wagner.

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A desert island would be the perfect place to immerse oneself in it.

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And what about your luxury? I had thought of my trainers, because they take me where they feel like on my daily

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Walk.

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But then I decided, well, it had to be the piano, which is both necessity and luxury.

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Hopefully.

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that the stool would be included, because I wouldn't be very good at cutting down trees.

Presenter35:39

Marguerite Wolfe, thank you very much indeed for letting us hear your Desert Island discs. Thank you for having me.

Marguerite Wolff35:51

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.