Alan Rusbridger: How my struggle with Chopin helped me handle the hacking scandal

Playing Chopin daily makes Alan Rusbridger a better editor of the Guardian, he tells David Sexton
p22 p23 Portrait of The Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger, Marylebone, central London. PHOTO MATT WRITTLE
MATT WRITTLE
21 January 2013

The violin of Ingres, looking a bit forlorn, is in a glass case in the museum of his home town, Montauban, southern France. The great painter so loved to play music, at which he was not equivalently gifted, that “violon d’Ingres” has become the standard expression for “an occasional pastime, an activity other than that for which one is well-known, or at which one excels”. It’s a shame in a way, because it probably means “Rusbridger’s piano” won’t catch on as it deserves.

Alan Rusbridger has been the editor of the Guardian now for 17 years, overseeing the paper’s transformation, as it has changed format and headquarters and become a pioneering “digital first” operation, while also breaking stories on the scale of the phone-hacking scandal and WikiLeaks. It is a big job — all the more so now, because, like most other papers, the Guardian has not yet found a way of adequately monetising its online readers, making the paper’s future uncertain, while print sales continue to fall. The Guardian’s operating losses last year were £53.5 million, and group chief executive Andrew Miller warned in the annual report that cash consumption from its owner, the Scott Trust, would continue while the company invested in future growth and sustainability.

Meanwhile, Rusbridger has found the energy and made the time to publish a fascinating book about his private passion, playing the piano.

In Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible, he describes how he attempted to learn to play Chopin’s sublime but extremely difficult First Ballade in 12 months, from the summer of 2010, when he heard it performed brilliantly at the piano camp in the Lot in south-west France that he has been going to for many years. Playing it is an undertaking that Rusbridger describes as “akin to a middle-aged man deciding to climb the Matterhorn”, though not perhaps quite so lethally dangerous.

To train for it, he aimed to find 20 minutes each day in which to practise but did not always succeed — for during this time the paper was still involved in WikiLeaks and the eccentricities of Julian Assange, and then the phone-hacking scandal began to break.

Presented in diary form (some of it spoken into his phone on the journey to the office), the book inevitably describes what was going on in his working life as well as at the keyboard, sometimes with slightly funny results as these different worlds clash. “It seems to me that all this Leveson focus is taking a toll on the Chopin. I think I might actually be regressing,” he grumbles at one point.

We meet at the Steinway showrooms in Marylebone where, having just come out of the mobile-purdah of an interview at the BBC, he is sitting at the receptionist’s desk catching up on emails and briefly pretends to be a salesman, asking if he can help me.

When I reviewed a previous book by Rusbridger, A Concise History of the Sex Manual, back in the Eighties, I impertinently observed that he was remarkably fresh-faced — and amazingly, it’s still true now he is 59.

Tall, clever and serious he may be, but he is one of those formidable men who have something appealingly boyish about them too, like Harold Pinter and Max Hastings.

In the book, he forgivingly quotes an American journalist saying that he looks “more like Harry Potter’s lonely uncle than the kind of man capable of bringing down Rupert Murdoch” — and himself suggests he might be best played in any phone-hacking movie by the late Carry On comedian Charles Hawtrey. (Such a film is indeed in development by Spielberg’s DreamWorks, to be directed by Bill Condon, the maestro of Twilight: Breaking Dawn; Rusbridger has inspected the first version of the script and reckons “broadly, they’ve done a good job”.)

Rusbridger speaks quite quietly and with little emphasis, very controlled and careful in what he wants to say. He wrote Play It Again, he explains, because of the huge response he has had whenever he has written previously about playing the piano. “The world is full of people for whom this is the biggest regret in their lives — that they played an instrument and they gave up. I suppose the only justification for writing the book is that it might inspire some people to think they could do this too.”

He only returned to the piano in his mid-forties, by which time, he says in the book, his repertoire had “dwindled to a few nursery rhymes”. He admits that maybe the Chopin was too difficult a piece for him to choose for the project — “because I’m not a very good pianist, that’s the truth,” he insists, “I’m not very good.”

He’s genuinely irritated by the idea that anybody might think he shouldn’t have taken the time out from work to practise the piano, though. “One of the points I wanted to make in the book is that not only are you not neglecting your job by finding 20 minutes to do something else but actually it’s positively healthy — you do your main job better. It probably doesn’t matter much what it is — it could be watercolouring or training for the marathon or basket-weaving. I think it helps if it’s a manual skill and you use a different bit of your brain, rather than learning Serbo-Croat. But definitely the days I didn’t play the piano during some of the most stressful periods, I did feel a bit more jangled and less ready for the day. That’s my answer to it if you want to be churlish and say you shouldn’t be spending 20 minutes on anything but work.”

He’s more defensive about the fact that he reveals a standard of living in the diary which Guardian readers nursing egalitarian delusions might well resent. He has houses in London and the Cotswolds, both with grand pianos. In the diary, he describes building himself a separate music room in the country, using an inheritance from his father, to house a Steinway that he buys for £25,000, and sending the Fazioli he has in London all the way back to its artisan maker in the Veneto to be reconditioned.

Writing 10 years ago about starting the piano again, Rusbridger admitted that buying the Fazioli was “an expensive midlife crisis ... It was really the classic midlife crisis — it came from nowhere, I couldn’t explain the grip it had on me, and afterwards I felt a little foolish.”

In another article, on piano-makers, he declared “a Fazioli is a Ferrari”. Reminded of this, he says quickly: “It is the price of a Peugeot estate, it’s not a yacht, it’s the price of a family car. How much is a Ferrari?” I’ve no idea, I say.

The Guardian’s public accounts reveal that in 2012 Alan Rusbridger’s salary was to have been £457,000 plus a £150,000 pension contribution but that he honourably volunteered for a 10 per cent pay cut and halving of the pension contribution, doubtless in recognition of the cuts now being required at the Guardian, which may result in unprecedented compulsory redundancies there and possibly even strike action.

“There have been compulsory redundancies at the Guardian before but historically we tend to down the voluntary route and in the past we have generally got the savings we want through that route and I hope we will — we are in discussions about the progress we’re making at the moment.”

When I ask if he ever worries about having led such a big organisation so decisively into “digital first” partly on the basis of his own personal enthusiasm for new technology — “I love gadgets,” he admits — he retorts first that he has just written a book. “I’ve written something with an awful lot of words in it — and my background was entirely in print, and print continues to be a very important part of what we do.” The paper is not planning to ditch print, he maintains.

But, he goes on to ask, what is the more truly conservative thing to do? “Some people say it’s more conservative to hold on to print while we’ve got it, and some people think it’s more conservative to think that the Guardian has got to have a digital strategy so that when — not if, when — this happens, we’re going to be well-placed.”

But can an online paper make money through advertising alone? “Well, the truthful answer is we don’t know. At the moment, the one thing you can say with certainty is that I don’t think you can sustain any paper like the Guardian or The Times or the Telegraph on a UK digital audience. So therefore you have to think bigger than the UK — which is good, because two-thirds of our audience is outside the UK, so the Guardian has become a global brand.” Hence the Guardian’s hopeful launch of a New York office and soon one in Australia too.

It’s reach before revenue, then. So, nice and slow on the uptake, I say: you have done it before you know how it is going to be paid for?

“You have to, you have to,” Rusbridger says emphatically. “Have to. The only way forward is to relentlessly experiment. And I don’t think you could honestly say that any general newspaper has cracked digital in terms of monetisation. It would be a very, very reckless editor, I think, who said, ‘I can’t see how it’s going to work, so let’s not do it’.”

He is “intensely interested in news, the future of news, what’s involved in that and how to negotiate your way through it, and I could have written another book on that — that is the bit that consumes 97 per cent of my life and my day. So the fact that I have chosen to write about the three per cent I hope doesn’t emerge as he doesn’t care about the 97 per cent.”

His immediate predecessors at the Guardian edited for 20 years and perhaps Rusbridger wants to do the same. At any rate, he agrees that his commitment to the paper is “open-ended” at the moment. “Would I like more time to play the piano? Yeah, a bit more time but I’m really not that good a pianist and if you suddenly had two hours a day to play the piano — it doesn’t appeal to me really.”

Then, after posing obligingly for the photographer, joshing about ending up draped over the piano like the late Rosalind Runcie, just as he’s about to leave, he can’t resist suddenly turning amateur photographer himself. It’s another of his hobbies, another enthusiasm. With his smartphone, he snatches his own picture of Steinway’s great showroom.

Play It Again: An Amateur Against the Impossible is published by Cape at £18.99.

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