Sargent the musician

From James Fenton’s “Catching the Moment” in the May 9th New York Review of Books -

This is the painter John Singer Sargent, writing in 1880 to his friend Vernon Lee after a trip to Spain and North Africa:

You wished some Spanish songs. I could not find any good ones. The best are what one hears in Andalucia, the half African Malagueñas & Soleàs, dismal, restless chants that it is impossible to note. They are something between a Hungarian Czardas and the chant of the Italian peasant in the fields, and are generally composed of five strophes and end stormily on the dominant the theme quite lost in strange fiorituras and guttural roulades. The gitano voices are marvellously supple.

If you have heard something of the kind you will not consider this mere jargon.

What strikes one is the assumption of shared expertise. Had Sargent heard these dismal, restless chants? He seems to have. Had he tried but failed to notate them? A prodigious task for an amateur…

Sargent was clearly destined to be an artist… But he was also, to a mysterious degree, a musician. One thinks at first: Oh, but everyone in that world, in those days, was a musician in some sense. Then we learn that Sargent’s talents gravitated toward the fiendishly difficult end of the repertoire: he could play Isaac Albéniz’s piano suite Iberia (1905–1909). That alone puts him in the elite. According to the violinist Joseph Joachim, he could have been a professional musician. Sometimes it was said of Sargent that he did not necessarily play all the notes but had a gift for seizing on what was essential. That in itself would have been a sign of profound musicality. It offered a way of responding to the occasion. Supposing, for instance, a group of friends were sight-reading a four-hand piano transcription of Wagner’s Ring (the kind of thing Sargent’s circle liked to do), they might be grateful to have him as first piano, giving impetus to the rest.

• James Fenton, “Catching the Moment”, New York Review of Books (link)