Imogen Cooper

0:06Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading artistic figures discuss the influences and experiences that have had the biggest impact on their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is one of Britain's most esteemed concert pianists, Dame Imogen Cooper. Having played since the age of five, she was mentored by the great Austrian-born pianist Alfred Brendel before making her name internationally with interpretations of works by Schumann, Schubert and Mozart.

0:41She was made a CBE in 2007, became the first ever pianist to be awarded the Queen's Medal for Music in 2020, and the following year became Dame Imogen. She recently announced that at the end of a year-long international tour, she'd be retiring from live performance in early 2027.

1:05Imogen Cooper, welcome to This Cultural Life. It's a great pleasure to be here, John. You grew up in St John's Wood in North London, the youngest of four children, I believe. Your father was a music critic, so does that suggest that all of your earliest memories are musical? Very much so. There was music round the house the whole time. He was reviewing new recordings that came out, so there was some sort of music circulating at all moments. We had a rather beautiful small brown piano with a very sweet sound, and history has it that I jumped onto the stool when I was three and picked out, I don't know, the first Noel or something like that with no mistakes and then announced that I wanted to be a pianist and hey, for some reason I never looked back.

1:51That's a story that's been told to you, but do you have a memory of your first moments? I do. I do actually remember jumping onto the stool. I had a pale blue knitted jumper knitted by my mother and I remember thinking, this feels very natural. and after that we would play games. My mother would play big clusters of discordant chords and I would sit under the piano and she would tell me to tell her what the notes were and I found this no problem. I couldn't think what the issue was. So you had perfect pitch? I had perfect pitch obviously from a very early age. That's amazing. Had you been taught, I mean obviously you must have been taught the notes, you must have had some kind of tuition from a very early age.

2:32Yes, actually maybe this game only happened when I was about five. but I wasn't terribly old, yes. I was never good at extemporising, which my father was very. He could sit down at the piano and do anything. He was a very good amateur pianist and I never really developed that, I'm sorry to say. So you always needed music in front of you, sheet music. Absolutely. I needed music in front of me with all the harmonies there and all the structure and sort of still do. Really? So you never at home sort of go off-piste and sing where it leads you? And I think it's partly because this was never from the very start.

3:09This was not about fun. It wasn't fun. It was, well, it was fun. But the main thing was that it was a goal to actually share music from the platform. It was a sort of vocation, really, in a way. And as such, the idea of messing around to get to know, you know, the instrument better and to have fun and to explore was not really part of it. There always had to be the structure, practicing, and I wasn't that good at practicing, but my mother sat me at the piano, and even when I was five, I did about an hour a day, which is quite a lot for a five-year-old. But that's a really serious sense of intent and purpose.

3:50Yes, it was. At the age of five, six years old, you knew this was going to be your life in a way. Definitely, yeah. I mean, it never occurred to me to do anything else. Let me just ask you about your mother as well. I read that she was an artist, a painter? Yes, she was. She was self-taught. I mean, she actually came from Northern Ireland military stock. And she was born just before the beginning of the First World War. And her father went off to fight. And her mother died when she was about three or four. And when my grandfather came back from the war, he married his dead wife's sister. She unfortunately also died not that long after.

4:31So I suppose you could say that my mother's template for maternal warmth was not terribly strong. But she was an amazing person because she did also have this creative, artistic side to her. As a music critic, your father would have spent, I presume, many evenings in concert halls. And did he take you? Do you have any earliest memories of live music? Well, I went to Rigoletto with him at the Royal Opera House when I was three. Quite a bloody operatic start for a very small girl, but I remember loving the whole format. Do you remember that even? Do you remember the performance? Yes, I do. I do.

5:10I remember Cara Nomi. It was very, very beautiful.

5:38It's a very bonkers idiom, I mean, let's admit it, but it all made sense to me and I got incredibly, in the dark, sitting in the dark, getting caught up in this wonderful story. I was absolutely hooked on opera from then onwards.

6:03On this Cultural Life, Imogen Cooper, my guests choose the influences and experiences that have most inspired their own creativity. And your first choice for this programme is moving to Paris to study piano at the Conservatoire in 1961 at the age of just 12. First of all, why Paris? That's a very good question. I mean, at that time, the music schools that are now so strong in this country either didn't exist or were not in quite such a good shape. So there was nowhere that a rather serious little girl of 11 or 12 who had quite decided she wanted to be a pianist could really go. And I played to a few rather distinguished gentlemen who said she should go to either Paris or Moscow.

6:48Now, I think Moscow seemed, for a 12-year-old, pretty tough at that stage. And Moscow then, too. Paris was far enough, believe you me. I mean, I got on a plane and then didn't see my parents for two and a half months at a time. You were sent alone? Yes, yes. Well, there were other kids who had to be looked after back home. and I went to live in a hostel run by nuns because I was brought up as a Catholic and it was the same nuns as the nuns who had run the rather terrible school where I had been going in London. But it was a hostel outside Paris for young female engineers who would go off every morning to the local Renault factory to learn about engines and motors and things like that.

7:37Now, why was I there? firstly because of the nuns but secondly because I could have in my room an upright piano I was far away from everybody and I could make as much noise as I wanted which was perfect because I had to from the get-go practice probably five or six hours a day that was the routine of the conservatoire So you arrived there when you were 12 I presume these trainee engineers were sort of in their late teens Yes, well spotted, yes considerably older than you so what did they make of you? I think they were very fond of me. I was a sort of little mascot for them, really. They were very protective of La Petite Anglaise and they were a wonderful bunch of girls, but we certainly didn't have music in common, that's for sure.

8:22But you had no other girls there of your age? No. No obvious friends, I presume. Were you homesick? Were you scared? Yeah, yeah. I would apparently send letters back to my parents covered in tears and whatever. But they were very wise. They knew I was a quite balanced little girl. And by the time the letter had reached them, I would have been fine again. And I was. Because, you know, the bottom line was I was doing what I wanted to do. I wanted to train to be a professional pianist. If this is the way I had to do it, fine. That became normality for me. But I presume it wasn't just the training, the piano training, which was tough.

9:01It was just life itself. You were in a hostel outside Paris. and having to travel into the Conservatoire in the centre of Paris every day alone at the age of 12, 30. I wasn't alone at the very beginning. I was chaperoned by one of the nuns who also waited for me at the end of my class at the Conservatoire. So when I came down that great big flight of stairs with my little friends from the class, they would go off to the cafe in the corner to have a post-mortem and I would go off with my nun. So that was quite tough, I have to say. I never managed to make close friends with anybody in my class.

9:37I never got asked back to families for Sunday lunch or anything like that. They didn't really do that. So there was life at the conservatoire and there was life at the hostel. But what about the travelling in between? I mean, there's a vulnerability, isn't there, at the age of 12, 13, when you are alone in Paris. Did you feel in danger at all? I felt in danger from roving hands on the metro in the Russia. And indeed, I was given a pin to use advisedly if needed. Whereas in actual fact, my way around it was to faint. I remember fainting quite often. I don't know if it was self-protection or whatever it was.

10:19What, you mean if men were in effect assaulting you? Yes, yes. I just fainted. Wow did that make you did it give you a sense of independence do you think later in life all of those early experiences definitely because when I moved to another hostel which was within Paris I then was completely alone there were no nuns looking after me or anything and I would walk to the conservatoire and back I had an arrangement with the local bank so that I could get money out. I had a once a week telephone call with my parents at 11 o 'clock in the morning, which was always a little bit stilted because the contact is a little bit broken, despite letters and things like that.

11:03So I became much, much more independent then. And I roved around Paris. But I didn't really have a young life there. I'm not sure that I ever went to the quartier latin in the whole of the six years I was there. Well, I was going to say that you lived in Paris for six years, your teenage years playing out at a time in the mid-60s when there is so much cultural and social change going on in Paris. You know, we're talking about the new wave cinema, there's jazz in all the cafes, the left-bank intellectualism. Were you aware of all those sort of seismic shows? No, Paris was school for me. It was school.

11:37There was curfew in the evening. I think we were allowed out one evening a week so as to be able to go to concerts. There was no idea of doing anything else. You were cloistered then, really? Rather cloistered, yes, I would say. But, you know, I was so one-track minded that it didn't really bother me and all I wanted to do was play. What sort of schooling did you get? Did you get a very French education? Well, I learned about the Hundred Years' War from the other side, yes, you could say. I didn't get much of an education, to be honest. And somehow I always felt wrong-footed about it. I always felt that I was being told that I should have learned this, that and the other.

12:15all this that I was doing was only of marginal interest to me and all I realised was what I was supposed to do at the piano. Looking back, do you think you were a happy child at this time? Oh yes, I was. Because of the piano? Yes. I mean, the comic thing is that in my 40s I did a good healthy spell of psychotherapy thinking I never really had teenage years. It was only after about two or three years of this that I suddenly woke up and said, hang on, I was actually very happy in Paris. I didn't suffer, you know, because life hopefully is a long thing. You can catch up much later with stuff that you haven't lived in your teens.

12:58It's almost unthinkable that it would be allowed now, though, to send a child alone to Paris to be living with you. I'm sure it wouldn't be. No, probably not. All of this young experience in France, what do you think it did for your cultural outlook in later life? Oh, I mean, it was wonderful. I became bilingual within perhaps a year. No credit to me. I mean, nobody spoke English in those days, so I just had to speak French. And just living in another country at a very formative time, I mean, I do think that one's sense of humour and maybe sense of logic, all those things are perhaps formed at that age.

13:37I was becoming a little French girl, really, and I did feel more French than English and in a funny way that hasn't completely left me.

13:51Your next choice, Imogen Cooper, is going to Austria in 1970 to study with Alfred Brendel, one of the greatest pianists of the 20th century.

14:09Where did you first meet Brendel? My father had met Brendel on a jury. He very rarely did juries for competitions. He said to him, I know that my daughter would love to play to you. And Alfred, for some reason, had heard about me. I'm not quite sure how. and I went to hear him playing a concert of Schubert Impromptu's. I was completely blown away.

14:52I went to see him after and I said, I must work with you, otherwise I shall die. He said, why don't you live and come to Vienna? And that's exactly what I did. What did you mean you would die if you couldn't get to work with him? Was that a figure of speech? I mean, was that a sense of how important it was? Yes, I think just that, really. I knew urgently I had to learn from this man and nobody else. What had you heard in his playing that night? What set him apart? Oh, just a depth of expression, a cultural understanding and intellectual grasp, a wonderful sound. You just had to listen.

15:54He was about 39 when I first met him. and it was just around then that everything exploded for him and everybody wanted him, but he still had time in Vienna to do some teaching, and he gave me unlimited time. There was no watching the clock, and quite often if he had more time, we would then sit and listen to musicians of the past who had mattered a lot to him. It was absolutely wonderful. It just blew my mind away. Do you remember the very first lesson that you had with him? Yes, I do actually. I played in the Schubert A. Manus Sonata, Deutsch 784, which has a slow movement, which starts with a chord low down in the piano made up of just four notes.

16:53I sat at the piano and I was quite confident I could make a good sound and I played this first chord and he stopped me the next 20 minutes I had 20 minutes for one chord I just had to go on playing and he would say No thumb too loud, balance of sound wrong, no atmosphere, think of the pedalling. It just went on and on and I was getting a little bit discouraged and then I played one chord and I thought, ah, I just wonder because by then I had got into what he was hearing and he turned around. You see, I've got goosebumps even thinking of it now. He turned around and said, thank you, now let's go on.

17:36What was the difference, do you think, in that first chord? And he wouldn't let you get past the very first chord of that. Well, we then got as far as the next chord and I then had to string the two together. So the lessons were long and detailed. What was the difference? What did I learn from him? I learned a lot of things. I learned how to be really aware and to listen not to what was inside myself, not to kid myself as to what the sound was, but to really hear. You know, when you're playing, you have to be both the person playing with the full emotion and the person sitting out there receiving the sound that you are making.

18:22And I think I learned that from him. I remember I played him the Schubert Mon Mon Musico and we were going through the score after. And he said, here in this section, you lost focus. You were not in it. And he was quite right. I remember perfectly well. The sound was right, the sound was good, but actually I had forgotten that I had a story to tell and a message to give. And that I clicked immediately. Whether I managed to do it subsequently, not least for the rest of my life, I don't know, but that was a very important thing to learn. So he wasn't just hearing the notes you were playing. He was hearing the, what was it, the broader, the colour and the story.

19:06The colour, the story, the storyline, the narrative. his teacher Edwin Fisher used to say a piece starts from the seconds before you make the first sound and ends seconds after you make the last one and you have to pull the audience with you Fisher had a wonderful image I can't demonstrate here in the studio but he would make as if he was getting hold of a rope he would say this is the silver cord and then he would move backwards, backwards, backwards of pulling on the rope, and he said, you have to pull the audience with you like this, and you mustn't let there be a kink in the rope. You've always got to take them forward, and that was one of the big lessons I learned in Vienna.

19:51The best thing that can happen is when somebody comes round after and relates to you, in their own words, exactly what you've been trying to do. This happened to me in Buenos Aires. I was playing at the Teatro Colón, Huge place with the most wonderful acoustic. And I played two Schubert recitals one evening after the other with not the easiest Schubert works for the audience, quite apart from me. And after the first one, a young girl came around. I think she was about 17. She said, I've never been to a classical concert before. And I didn't know anything about Schubert. Can I tell you what I heard?

20:31I said, feel free. She said, I've got goosebumps again. she said I heard tenderness, love, terror, death, fear and she looked at me and she said how am I doing? I said you're doing absolutely brilliantly. She was actually describing Schubert's world and this was so moving to me that a young girl who knew nothing about the language of classical music could come and relate to me exactly what it was I was trying to express. I've never forgotten that. That's extraordinary. It was. That's the sort of feedback you really want, isn't it? It is. What were you playing that night? The Schubert D Major Sonata, which is a very, I was going to say, ungrateful work with a slow movement that isn't a slow movement.

21:17You can't relax in it at all.

21:35Is it a late work? Well, I mean, he died at 31, so 1825, about three years before he died, yeah. So getting on for late. Died from syphilis, I think, didn't he? Well, I would contest that. I think syphilis had a very large part in it, although it's not known whether he'd got to the tertiary stage or not. What he actually died of was typhoid fever. And it's a rather sad story. his dear brother Ferdinand noticed that he was working incredibly hard and composing a huge amount, some of his greatest works. He said, you look tired, why don't you go and stay in my house outside Vienna in those days, not now, it's now central Vienna.

22:17So it was a Biedermeier house, it was actually only shortly before finished and the plaster on the walls was still moist, which with Schubert's state of health was not good. and furthermore it was near the Wienseiler, which is where all the effluents of Vienna go out. So Schubert, weakened by syphilis probably and certainly by the amount of work he was doing, caught something and was in a very poorly state all the time that he was there. And there's a wonderful story that there was a fantastic Viennese quartet called the Schuppanzig Quartet and they had just given the premiere of Beethoven's Opus 131, one of the greatest quartets ever written.

22:59And Schubert said, I would like to hear this. And the Schupanzig Quartet came and played for him.

23:20And it was the last music he heard. He died ten days later.

23:36Alfred Brendel was a great performer of Beethoven, of course, and Schubert, and you are so renowned for your interpretations of Schubert. Did Brendel himself encourage you to seek out Schubert? Or were you already very familiar? Yeah, you know, it was a natural way to go. In Paris, it had been very much big, important building blocks of the piano repertoire. But I think rather fortunately, it didn't go too much towards the central European repertoire. Because to come to that with Brendel was the best place that I could have done. Schubert was but a part of that. And Brendel then was quite instrumental in bringing Schubert to the fore.

24:16I read somewhere that Brendel himself was self-taught, largely. So did that mean that in his way of teaching, he encouraged you to follow your own or to develop your own style and technique very often? That's a very good point. I think there was a large element of that. He wasn't part of any school. He sort of cherry picked with a few wonderful pianists of which probably Adrian Fisher was his greatest influence. But you can't say that he really belonged anywhere. Probably my base is the French school. I do realize that. My technique is probably rather French, but musically I evolved entirely on my own after working with Brendel.

24:59When you say French technique, how different would that have been? Well, one of the strong parts of French technique is articulation. I can run around at top speed for as many hours as you give me to do it. It doesn't worry me at all. So that's sort of just being able to move your fingers quickly. Correct. but also clearly and with a certain element of poetry, hopefully, and just without any strain to any muscles at all.