The Music Behind Liberace’s Capes, Jewels and Candelabra

The director Steven Soderbergh and just about everyone associated with “Behind the Candelabra,” the new biographical film about Liberace, emphasized from the start that the movie was going to be about a love affair. A strange love affair, for sure — more a sordid co-dependency between Scott Thorson, a rootless young man, and Mr. Entertainment himself, Liberace, who was 40 years older.

The much-awaited film, starring Michael Douglas as Liberace and Matt Damon as Mr. Thorson, was shown on HBO on Sunday night (and continues its run on that channel and through HBO Go and HBO on Demand). As we were forewarned, not much attention is paid to Liberace the pianist or his attitude toward music. “I love giving people a good time,” Mr. Douglas’s Liberace explains to Mr. Damon’s Thorson soon after they meet. “That’s what I’m all about.”

There is an element of entertainment in all the performing arts. Liszt, at the height of his touring-virtuoso period, took the trappings of the superstar to another dimension. Beatlemania had nothing over the Lisztomania that swept Europe in the early 1840s.

But was there musical substance to Liberace’s showmanship, at least in its early years? I am no expert on the subject because even as a young piano student I thought his flamboyant television persona and frilly playing were absurd.

Still, “Behind the Candelabra” stirred my curiosity. I watched some videos of Liberace’s early appearances, including a 1940s film segment of him playing “The 12th Street Rag” on a white grand piano for three adoring, glamorous women, and a 1960s television appearance on “The Hollywood Palace” hosted by Milton Berle. But one video in particular — a performance of Chopin’s popular Polonaise in A flat (Op. 53), from what appears to be a 1950s television show — was revealing, even touching.

Born in 1919 to a humble family in West Allis, Wis., near Milwaukee, Liberace had precocious talent and solid training. His Italian immigrant father, who played the French horn in bands but also held down jobs as a laborer, recognized his son’s gifts. Liberace took lessons with Florence Kelly, a student of the virtuoso Moriz Rosenthal.

But while Liberace studied classical piano, he also played popular music and jazz in theaters and cabarets. At 20 he played Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for a concert in Milwaukee. The reviews were positive, especially from the critic in The Milwaukee Sentinel, who wrote that Liberace “kept Liszt’s bombastic passages within reason” and “did not miss some of the piano’s most liquid conversations with the woodwinds.”

That same year, 1940, Liberace went to New York and started playing in nightclubs. Thus began his evolution into the flamboyant entertainer who specialized in medleys in which popular songs segued into “Home on the Range” and bits of Chopin morphed into “Chopsticks.”

Still, that broadcast performance of the Chopin polonaise from the 1950s surprised me. From the way Liberace announces the piece, it clearly will be something unusual. Wearing a black tuxedo and facing the camera directly, Liberace explains that he is going to play the Chopin work “in its entirety.” The implication is that we are about to be engaged in an act of uncompromising artistry.

Actually, Liberace cuts two extended passages, places where sections of the music are essentially repeated. Still, the performance has its charms.

Though there are some rough patches, there is fluidity in his technique and nice colorings in his sound. His fingerwork does not seem much encumbered by the ring he wears on his right-hand pinkie. This is Chopin’s “Heroic” Polonaise, and Liberace brings stirring energy to the theme and a nice bounce to the left-hand accompaniment, though he stretches the tempo indulgently. The middle section, which breaks into stern marchlike music with a relentlessly repeating bass pattern of four descending notes (played in octaves), is famously difficult. Liberace pulls it off pretty well.

Yet something in his playing is frivolous and saccharine. This is not Chopin’s exciting polonaise happening in the moment with everything on the line. Rather, this is an exercise in nostalgia. Liberace is reminding us how much we all love this grand and splendid polonaise. Isn’t it marvelous?

A telltale moment comes in the work’s surprising lyrical interlude before the return of the heroic main theme — a ruminative passage in which a searching melodic line and gentle chords go through minor-mode excursions. Here is music that, for a moment, questions the whole idea of heroism. But Liberace seems oddly inhibited, too reticent to explore the emotional depths and ambiguities.

I may be reading too much into the performance. Perhaps I am straining to find early hints of the Liberace who in 1984, three years before his death at 67, would arrive onstage for a concert at Radio City Music Hall in a silver Rolls-Royce and emerge wearing a $300,000 fox cape with a 16-foot bejeweled train. But to me, the Liberace playing that Chopin polonaise in the 1950s seems to understand that his performance is nothing exceptional, that any number of Juilliard students could have played it better.

Of course, some of those Juilliard students, for all their well-honed technique, might have lacked a little flair. Liberace certainly had flair.

Early in “Behind the Candelabra” Mr. Douglas’s Liberace, in a self-deprecating moment, tells young Thorson that a critic recently complained, “Liberace is no Rubinstein.” Well, Liberace retorts, “Rubinstein is no Liberace!”

Actually, the comparison is interesting. Rubinstein was a master pianist and extraordinary musician, but he had a healthy streak of the entertainer in him. I recently rewatched the French-made movie “Arthur Rubinstein — The Love of Life,” which won the 1969 Academy Award for documentary feature. This wonderful film follows Rubinstein, about 80 at the time, on a visit to Europe and on a stop in Israel, and it includes footage of his early career.

In one scene Rubinstein is sitting in the garden of a house he owns in Spain, talking about how audiences loved him from the start. He humorously recalls the sensation he used to create playing Manuel de Falla’s brilliant “Ritual Fire Dance,” which has a breathless passage in which the two hands play hard-driving, alternating chords. Rubinstein explains that, to enhance the drama, he always threw his hands high in the air after striking each chord. The audience would go wild, he said. Leaning back in a chair, Rubinstein says (translated from his fluent French), “That piece of music bought me this house.”

Toward the end of the documentary, that wizened master is shown speaking with and playing for a group of students in Israel. One piece he plays is the Chopin Polonaise in A flat, and during this impromptu performance he may drop a few more notes than Liberace does in his video.

But here is Chopin’s familiar polonaise played with exhilarating depth, breadth and majesty. In that pensive interlude, Rubinstein’s playing is at once noble and heart-wrenching.

Yes, this is an unfair comparison. But Liberace, at least the Liberace of “Behind the Candelabra,” brought it up

While touring in Europe last weekend, Justin Bieber paid a visit to the Anne Frank House and left a guestbook message that incited a wealth of public ridicule: "Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber."
To The Biebs' credit, the museum's spokeswoman went public to celebrate his visit by saying, "We think that what's special is that a 19-year-old comes to the Anne Frank House and spends an hour visiting on a Friday night."
- See more at: http://www.chacha.com/gallery/5777/which-celebs-made-holocaust-related-blunders?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_campaign=zergnet_55266#sthash.78HF62Et.dpuf

While touring in Europe last weekend, Justin Bieber paid a visit to the Anne Frank House and left a guestbook message that incited a wealth of public ridicule: "Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber."
To The Biebs' credit, the museum's spokeswoman went public to celebrate his visit by saying, "We think that what's special is that a 19-year-old comes to the Anne Frank House and spends an hour visiting on a Friday night."
- See more at: http://www.chacha.com/gallery/5777/which-celebs-made-holocaust-related-blunders?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_campaign=zergnet_55266#sthash.78HF62Et.dpuf

While touring in Europe last weekend, Justin Bieber paid a visit to the Anne Frank House and left a guestbook message that incited a wealth of public ridicule: "Truly inspiring to be able to come here. Anne was a great girl. Hopefully she would have been a belieber."
To The Biebs' credit, the museum's spokeswoman went public to celebrate his visit by saying, "We think that what's special is that a 19-year-old comes to the Anne Frank House and spends an hour visiting on a Friday night."
- See more at: http://www.chacha.com/gallery/5777/which-celebs-made-holocaust-related-blunders?utm_medium=referral&utm_source=zergnet.com&utm_campaign=zergnet_55266#sthash.78HF62Et.dpuf