ANew York Times, New York, New York, Sunday, April 29, 1962 - Page 127
Pawns, Rooks and Notes
In Chess, as in Music, the Materials Must Be Bent Into a Form of High Art by a Strong Creative Mind
By Harold C. Schonberg
Starting Wednesday, the eyes of America—well, some eyes—will be focused on Curaçao, in the Netherlands West Indies, where once again America and Russia will touch in conflict. It is not an orbital mission, nor is it a musical competition. But the Brooklyn-born Bobby Fischer and the Hungarian-born Pal Benko, now resident in this city, will meet, over the chessboard, the best that the Russians have to offer; and the winner of this Candidates Tournament will meet Mikhail Botvinnik to play for the world's championship.
And what may chess have to do with the hemidemisemiquavers that normally concern this department? Nothing specifically: no more than painting, literature or the abstractions of pure mathematics. The arts are a complex that, basically, have to do with the esthetic phenomena. Each is different, but each also is, in the Platonic sense, the same. And chess is an art, in that it deals with the materials and processes of creation, and evokes an esthetic response. The more one gets into this ancient game (but it should not really be called a game; it is sheer intellect, tempered with imagination, in which there is no element of chance) the more its parallels with the other arts, and especially the art of music, become clear. Chess writers never for a moment let their readers forget it. How many times has Paul Morphy, the first great American player, been referred to as “the Mozart of chess”?
Prodigies
And there is good reason for it. Chess, like Music, has had its Wunderkinder. Morphy, José Capablanca, Samuel Reshevsky, Bobby Fischer — by the time they were 10 years old, just high enough so that their eyes were about on a level with the chessboard, they were delighting and amazing onlookers with the beauty and clarity of their combinations, the precision of their style, the instinctive profundity of their moves. It was pure instinct, just as it was with the 10-year-old Mozart or Mendelssohn, for no child, however gifted, can have the experience that maturity brings.
Later on, of course, the Mozarts, Mendelssohns and Capablancas develop their prevailing styles. For every style in music there is a corresponding one in chess. One speaks of Capablanca's classicism and Alekhine's romanticism, Reti's hypermodernism and Reshevsky's eclecticism.
Inner Similarities
But the parallels between chess and music go much deeper. Both are arts of combination, working from the basic material of the thirty-two pieces and the twelve notes of the chromatic scale. There is the material: what can be done with it? To people without a special gift in this direction, the materials lead to ineptness and banality. To those who at least have studied the problems, the materials can be handled logically, though without any individuality. But to those who have genius, the materials can be molded, deftly and inevitably, into creations that beat the mark of the maker and are not to be duplicated by anybody else. Then we get into art. For one of the characteristics of art is its uniqueness. No piece of art—the Mozart G minor Symphony, the Marshall-Levitzky game at Breslau, 1912, Cézanne's card players—can ever be duplicated, perhaps not even by its creator. It can be copied, but that is another thing.
It is rather amusing that in both chess and music the cry has been raised, within recent years, that the end has come. All is technique, memory, intellectualism; there is no more emotion or heart left; oh, for the good old days of Alekhine (Wagner). Capablanca (Ravel) and Anderssen (Liszt). But then, inevitably, come along composers who demonstrate that the twelve notes are not worked out, and chess players who prove that the game, with all of its contemporary stress on pure technique, can yield warmth and excitement. Certainly Bobby Fischer has as good a technique as anybody around. But his game has never slipped into dryness and academism. Quite the contrary. Fischer is an attacking player. He will take chances and he loves to mix it up. He can see beautiful combinations that literally modulate in a Schubertian sense. One moment, Schubert is in this key, the next in another, but always with logic rather than caprice. Fischer goes about it much the same way; and so, incidentally, do all chess players with romantic leanings.
It is true that romantic chess, like romantic music, is a little out of fashion. As an art, chess also follows the dictates of the age, and always has. In the European classic revival of the late eighteenth century, the great player was Philidor, a neo-classicist. The romantic age had its Andersens and Birds as well as its Liszts and Schumanns; all of them dashing, spectacular, full of new ideas and bubbling over with exuberance. As the romantic age spent itself, there emerged a Brahms and a Wilhelm Steinitz. When the Cubists were throwing notions of painting upside down and when Schoenberg was writing such unorthodox scores as “Pierrot Lunaire,” there also was emerging a new school of chess, headed by Richard Reti, in which all established notions about opening theory were cast away. And today, as in many of the other arts, the trend is towards a cut-and-dried eclecticism, in which memory and pure technique are more important than daring and imagination.
Close Alliance
Thus every age produces its own notions about art, and chess is no exception. The great chess player is closely allied to the great composer. He composes over the chess board, creating a new work every time he plays. On him are beating the forces of the age, which have to be modified by his own genius and imagination. He develops his pieces as the composer develops his notes, and the aim in both cases is to produce a work that has originality, validity, logic and beauty. The result is, of course, self-expression (an expert can easily distinguish between a game by Euwe, say, and one by Alekhine) in the most creative sense of the word.
The great chess player does not arrive at his eminence by accident, and he has subjected himself to much the same kind of discipline that the great composer has. In both arts you start at the age of 10 or before, and have made some kind of a mark on the international scene by the time you are 20. You get there by constant practice and study; by memorizing scores and doing exercises; by trying your own creative flights; by evolving a style and sticking to it; by having faith in your talent that amounts to egomania. But none of this will do any good unless you have genius, else you will be a competent craftsman and nothing more. Yes; the composer and the grandmaster are adjacent spokes in the same wheel.
