Rosenthal's Return

A virtuoso must be as careful of his body as an athlete. Like an athlete, what he dreads most is age. At 74, Moriz Rosenthal, the round little fellow with big mustaches and skin like boiled lobster, returned to the U. S. that has adored him most of his life. Manhattan hailed him last month and last week he proved to Chicago's Orchestra Hall that, for vitality, he is still one of the youngest pianists in the world, artistically still one of the greatest. That his name is unknown to many a music lover today is scarcely surprising.

The critics who first hailed Moriz Rosenthai are long since dead.

A professor's son, Rosenthal was born in Lemberg, Poland the year after Schumann-Heink was born near Prague. Almost from infancy he studied piano. He made his first tour at 14, pleased Rumania's Poet-Queen Elizabeth so much that she made him court pianist. That was the year Tsar Alexander II of Russia crushed the Turks. Going home through Bucharest, Alexander heard young Rosenthal play at a victory celebration, invited him to St. Petersburg.

Next year Rosenthal enrolled with Liszt, quickly became his star pupil. At Weimar and Rome he took a lesson from Liszt every day, practiced six hours for each lesson, little by little mastered the nuances and changes of pace that were to win him world fame. When he reached 18 he gave up public playing to study philosophy and classics at the University of Vienna.

Six years later he returned to the concert stage, became a hero after a single performance at Leipzig's Liszt Verein.

Critics soon were calling Rosenthal one of the greatest technicians of all time. In 1889 Metropolitan Opera's Director Stanton took him to the U. S., engaged for the same New York concert a 14-year-old violinist named Fritz Kreisler. Rosenthal's American tour was entirely a triumph.

In his 60 years of public performing Rosenthal toured the U. S. nine times. last time in 1929. The opening recital of his tenth tour, in New York last month, was so warmly received he had to stay on and repeat it. Audiences in other cities, aware of his age, waited to hear him before forming an opinion. Many were openly doubtful last week when the old man moved slowly to his piano and struck the first note Chicagoans had heard from him in seven years. By the time he had finished his Beethoven sonata there was no room for doubt. Rosenthal had lost little in force, more than made up for it with increased subtlety of accent.

While Chicago showered praise on a reinstated hero, Rosenthal announced he would go next to Phoenix, Ariz., planned some 30 recitals from coast to coast before he returns to Vienna. At these recitals he will play Liszt, Chopin, Beethoven, the great romantics whose music he carries in his head and loves above all. Septuagenarian Rosenthal is still a powerful swimmer, doubts that he could swim Lake Como as he did in 1898. He still takes pride in his jujitsu and his thoughtful chess, boasts of his friendship with Chessmaster Capablanca. He says he once solved a case that had been puzzling Vienna doctors by deciding that it was goitre which made a patient's pulse race, eyes bulge, hands flutter. Since then he likes to think of himself as an expert diagnostician.

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