Bouquet for Moriz

Concert artists, like dogs, always grow to resemble their patrons. Most of today's (examples: Gieseking, Casadesus, Heifetz, Serkin) resemble bank presidents or New Deal intellectuals. Most of yesterday's (examples: Paderewski, de Pachmann) resembled haughty princes of the blood. One lordly, athletic survivor of the time when artists wore the royal purple is orange-whiskered Polish Pianist Moriz Rosenthal, pupil of Franz Liszt, who in Manhattan last week was recovering from his 80th birthday celebration.

When Moriz Rosenthal made his U.S. debut in 1888 the audience reached such a frenzy it had to be forcibly calmed by the police. Swooned the critic of the New York Sun: "A giant of ability, a hero, a demigod, a perfect pianist." Echoed the New York Post: "His powers are so extraordinary that it is difficult to speak of them in measured language."

Last fortnight Critic Olin Downes paid Moriz Rosenthal homage in a nostalgic vein with the purplest passage in the modern, if not the entire, history of the New York Times. Wrote Critic Downes:

"We didn't hear him till 1907, in Symphony Hall, Boston, when Rosenthal, of the stocky, powerful figure, eagle-beaked, massive-jawed, with black mane and Kaiser mustache, played the Liszt E-flat concerto, and Karl Muck leered over him on the conductor's stand, snapping the chords from the orchestra as a Mephistopheles would crack a whip over his minions, and the two played into each other's hands with a deviltry beyond words. Hah! The intrepidity, the dash, the saber and spur of it, the wild exhilaration, the reckless mastery of the whole business!"

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