The complete idiot's guide to classical music (23 page)

At the same time, Paderewski was one of the most celebrated and popular musicians on this side of the Atlantic. Americans rechristened him “Paderooski” or more simply “Paddy,” and endlessly played his Minuet in G at home, then flocked in record numbers to hear his concerts. Crowds would wait at railroad crossings hoping to get a glimpse of the pianist as his private car went by; sometimes his entire route from hotel to concert hall was lined with adoring fans.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
Paderewski designed his private railroad car for utmost comfort, complete with easy chairs, independent heating and lighting systems (in case the ones on the rest of the train malfunctioned) and, naturally, his own grand piano.

One way or another, Americans couldn’t get enough of Paderewski (on a single day in 1902, his opera
Manru
was performed at the Metropolitan Opera, while the pianist himself was giving two Carnegie Hall recitals), and in due course he became the highest paid musician of his day. He was also one of the most generous, allotting the profits from all his wartime concerts to Polish relief, donating the money needed for the construction of Chopin Memorial Hall in Warsaw, and eventually giving away millions of dollars to other worthy causes.

Less than ten years separate the births of those mighty Russians, Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943) and Igor Stravinsky, yet what a world of difference is to be found in their musical legacies. Whereas Stravinsky probed ever new and more challenging boundaries (we’ll talk about him later, in our composers’ chapter), Rachmaninoff remained true to his romantic calling, touring the world as a virtuoso pianist in the manner of Liszt, all the while composing works of the most extravagant beauty, even if they often seemed more in tune with 19th than 20th century sensibilities. His emotional, some would say sentimental, style often left him out of favor with critics, but not with audiences, who to this day are enchanted by the deep melodic warmth of his Piano Concerto no. 2, the brilliance of “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini,” the thundering power of the Piano Concerto no. 3, and the dazzling virtuosity of the dozens of shorter pieces with which he enriched the solo piano repertory. Ironically, the most famous of them all, the Prelude in C# Minor, was so insistently requested at his concerts that Rachmaninoff himself grew to hate the thing with a passion.

Fortunately, Rachmaninoff’s own passionate and bravura technique lives on through his many recordings, and his music—through its frequent appearance in the concert hall, films, and such classic pop-song ripoffs as “Full Moon and Empty Arms” written by Buddy Kave and Ted Mossman in 1946 (its luscious theme swiped from the Piano Concerto no. 2).

 
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“The artist tries, and tries again to achieve the impossible,” said Rachmaninoff in response to a comment about his brooding manner on stage. “Sometimes he is lucky and gets a little nearer to his goal. But all of the time he is forced way out someplace, way out where no one can comfort him, nothing can help him.” No wonder his friend Abram Chasins described Rachmaninoff as having “a gaunt face, with the stern sorrows of the ages engraved upon it,” while Stravinsky simply said he was “a six-and-a-half-foot-tall scowl.”

“I was born to play the piano,” said Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1982) on a radio broadcast, and that pretty well sums it up. His father tried to interest him in the violin, and young Arthur promptly smashed it to pieces. On the other hand, they couldn’t keep the child away from his piano. He could play difficult pieces long before he learned to read music, and early on had a strong sense of his own destiny: He was barely five-years-old when he carefully designed little cards to give to his friends. On them was printed Arturic (his boyhood nickname), the Great Piano Virtuoso.

 
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As much as he loved to play the piano, Rubinstein didn’t much like practicing, so he came up with a clever little system: “I used to go into the practice room and lock the door behind me. I’d put a beautiful novel in with my sheet music, a box of cherries on the right side of the piano, and a box of chocolates on the left. I’d play runs with my left hand and eat cherries with my right, or the other way around, and all the time be reading my book.”

Rubinstein made his European debut in Berlin at the age of 13, conquered Paris while still in his teens, and made his American debut before his 20th birthday. Thereafter, he came back to the U.S. off and on, but not with anything approaching the universal acclaim that he would reap in his later years. The pianist freely admitted that much of this lukewarm response was his own fault. “I was lazy,” he said; “I had talent, but there were many things in life more important than practicing. Good food, good cigars, great wines, women . . . I dropped many notes in those days. . . .”

All that changed after a period of soul-searching and disciplined work, and when Rubinstein returned to the U.S. in 1935, it was as the supreme master so many of us remember with deep affection. Yes, he still dropped notes from time to time, but the obvious love he took in public performance, the exuberance of his personality, and the natural warmth of his piano sound combined to make him one of the most beloved artists of our time.

 
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Once at the conclusion of a Carnegie Hall concert—as usual, with stage seats accommodating part of the overflow crowd—Rubinstein was backstage after having bowed several times to the still cheering audience. Just as he returned yet again, a lady in one of the stage seats got up to leave, whereupon the pianist stopped in his tracks, bowed, and graciously helped her on with her coat. That gentlemanly task accomplished, he proceeded to take another bow.

Although Rubinstein was especially known for his radiant Chopin performances, he was a master of music from almost every earlier and later era. He didn’t often approach Bach and the other Baroque composers, but he recorded a number of the Mozart concertos, all of the Beethoven (several times, in fact), and also gave the premieres of works written for him by such notable 20th century composers as Villa-Lobos and Granados (whose
Nights in the Gardens of Spain
remains one of the most evocative concertos in the entire Spanish repertory).

His enormous popularity was further enhanced by Hollywood, which used his soundtrack performances in three films from the mid-1940s (
I’ve Always Loved You
,
Song of Love
, and
Night Song
), and featured him in two others,
Carnegie Hall
and
Of Men and Music
. A 1975 film documentary called
Love of Life
chronicled his fascinating life and times, and a 90- minute television special, “Rubinstein at 90” followed by only one year his farewell recital in London.

A few days before Christmas, 1982, as Nicolas Slonimsky has put it so poetically, Rubinstein “slid gently into death in his Geneva apartment, as in a pianissimo ending of a Chopin nocturne. . . .”

The story goes that after a concert in Ann Arbor, Michigan, a young fan approached the great Vladimir Horowitz (1904–1989) with the words, “Maestro, how do you do it? You must have at least 20 degrees of subtlety between piano and pianissimo.” “Ah,” replied the pianist, “thank you my friend for noticing.”

Horowitz had such incredible finger control that his technical prowess got a lot more press and audience attention than his musical gifts. As Harold Schonberg points out in his invaluable book
The Great Pianists
, “Horowitz never liked to be known as a stunt man. Aside from some extraordinary tours de force that he himself wrote as recital-closers—a transcription of Sousa’s ‘Stars and Stripes Forever,’ arrangements of several Liszt rhapsodies, and so on—he considered himself an artist who used his technique for musical ends. Unfortunately, he was too rich technically for such a modest disclaimer, and his audiences generally came to see him turn the piano upside down.”

Despite international stardom and the idolization of his audiences, Horowitz several times left the concert stage, once for a two-year hiatus in 1936 after his marriage to Wanda Toscanini (daughter of the famous conductor), then for a far lengthier retirement, from 1953 to 1965. His return to the stage—at Carnegie Hall, May 9, 1965—made international headlines, with all tickets sold out within a matter of a few hours. Fortunately, that entire recital was recorded, and thus will live forever as a golden moment in musical history. The CD is called
The Historic Return to Carnegie Hall
; it comes packaged with another Horowitz recital program, and includes works by Bach, Debussy, Schumann, Scriabin, Chopin and more. The label is SONY Classical S3K 53461.

 
Bet You Didn’t Know
When tickets went on sale for that return concert, 57th Street was jammed with people waiting in the rain, desperate to be able to purchase one of the priceless tickets. Horowitz was so touched by this evidence of his fans’ devotion that he ordered hundreds of cups of coffee to be delivered to them in line.