My avatar is my favourite chess World Champion, Vassily Smyslov (born 1921, and thankfully still with us). He always related music to chess. Indeed, he was a professional-level baritone singer, and auditioned for the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscva (Moscow) in 1950. He failed in the audition, but competition was stiff to get in there. And also keep in mind that he was already a world-class chess player by that time, having come in 2nd in the 1948 match-tournament that was to determine the new World Champion after the death of Alekhine in 1946. Only 6 people were invited to that tournament (one of them, Rueben Fine, declined to play so it ended up being only 5). It was meant to be the best of the best, and coming in second behind the great Botvinnik showed Smyslov's already tremendous strength.
Smyslov won the supertournament at Zurich in 1953 and went on to play Botvinnik for the world title the following year. It was a drawn match, Botvinnik keeping the title. Smyslov went through the candidates' cycle yet
again, an almost impossible feat that would later be matched by Boris Spassky in the 1960s. This time, he managed to unseat Botvinnik, who had finessed himself a rematch clause just in case this happened. Smyslov lost the return match narrowly, but even so, was almost certainly the best player in the world in the mid to late 1950s (even Botvinnik himself thought so; the best doesn't always win, in chess or anything else).
I first got interested in Smyslov when learning about his climb to the candidates' final match at the advanced age of 63. People who are not into chess may not realise how impossible this is. He failed to qualify for the World Championship match with Karpov in 1984 only because he was eliminated by Garry Kasparov, who went on to become the strongest player of all time. No shame in that at any age, but at 63! This was the candidates' final, the very last step before the World Championship itself, and at the age of 63. It would be like a 50+ year old winning a 100 metre dash in the Olympics, it's just unthinkable. I consider this the most phenomenal age-related achievement in all of competitive events, physical sport or games or anything you can name.
Anyway, Smyslov's autobiography was called "In Search of Harmony". He believed that a game of chess, like music, should involve all components working together in harmony. His greatest strength was the endgame, where his power in his heyday was unmatched by any, even Botvinnik himself (who was known for his endings as well).
Smyslov used to sing occasionally with another world-class chessplayer, Ukrainian Mark Taimanov, playing the piano. Taimanov was a concert pianist, and is now in his 70s. He was married to Lyubov Bruk, and they recorded together playing works for 2 pianos. A double-disc set of them was released in Philips' "Great Pianists of the 20th Century" series. (
http://tinyurl.com/32x8s3)
By the way, here is an audio file of Smyslov singing with an orchestra. Could anyone identify the piece?
http://www.patrick.k12.va.us/josh/audio/smyslov.wavMildly related asides: Prokofiev was a very strong chess player for an amateur. Here are four of his games:
http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessplayer?pid=61923 Capablanca would be World Champion in 1921, and Lasker had been prior to 1921. The Capablanca game is listed on that page as a tournament, but it was not; Prokofiev wasn't
that strong! It was a simultaneous exhibition.
Hungarian Lajos Portisch was another world-class chessplayer who was (is) a singer. Here is an interview with him from just the other day, translated by a fan:
http://www.chessninja.com/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=6;t=001504Portisch: I confess I have greater ambitions now. I would like to sing songs for which later I will not have the time or the voice.
Q: Is this more important to you?
Portisch: Classical music is an inexhaustible treasure-house, at least as huge as chess. I know professional singers who sing merely twelve songs. I know from Schubert at least 70-80 songs. I have hardly performed any Brahms songs in front of an audience. At the moment I am studying Wolff-songs and Wagner airs - my voice is especially suited for heroic figures of Wagner, or it would've been suited had I sang any operas. We chessplayers tend to have a heroic temperament.
...
Portisch: I looked at the games from the recent Linares tournament, I took notes of what interests me and discarded the rest. Although it does happen occasionally that I study chess in the evening and in the morning I search the litter because I realize I shouldn't have thrown out everything. I've always been like this, sometimes whole bunches of analysis landed in the wastebasket because I wasn't succesful with the particular opening, and later I searched for the papers in vain. I have been and still am impulsive. Occasionally I even threw out music sheets, although not as often as chess analysis. I know it's a sin with musicians, but music sheets can be copied as well.
Q: Sorry for asking, but why the music sheets?
Portisch: In case I sang something in a bad tune, and got angry.
Q: Which position of your games would you put on your birthday cake, which is the most memorable?
Portisch: I couldn't choose, I have many nice games. But I couldn't choose a music either, the history of classical music is so rich.
