Monday, Feb. 20, 1956
The Magnetic Pole
When 67-year-old Artur Rubinstein swept his coattails back and sat elegantly down at his Steinway one night last week, many in the crowd in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall felt they were about to listen to the best living pianist. All of them knew that they were to witness a notable musical event: the last of the great romantic performers in the spectacular tradition of Liszt and Anton Rubinstein* had set himself a schedule of no less than 17 major works in a series of five concerts in 13 days--all the concertos of Beethoven and Brahms, plus ten works by Mozart, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, Liszt, Chopin, Falla, Franck and Schumann.
It was a characteristically Rubinsteinian feat--part grandstand play, part musical passion. "Anyone could do it," he says with grand self-depreciation, "but no one will imitate me because I won't make a penny on it." Out of his share of the receipts Rubinstein was paying for the accompanying symphony orchestra (mostly members of the New York Philharmonic Symphony) under Conductor Alfred Wallenstein. Despite the backbreaking concert schedule, tireless Artur Rubinstein took on two recording sessions, one of them at midnight (he has sold more than 3,000,000 albums for RCA Victor).
It was almost 50 years ago to the month that Artur Rubinstein first played in Carnegie Hall (a mere coincidence, he insists--"I hate anniversaries"). In that half century he has grown from a prodigy to a musical playboy to a great artist with the broadest popular following of any front-rank musician in the world. The compact dignity of his entrances, his ramrod back and frizzled grey crown, his highhanded hammering of the keyboard are known and loved wherever there are pianos.
Student of High Life. Rubinstein was born in Lodz, Poland, the youngest of seven children of a small manufacturer. By the time he was three, he was a "terrible little fiend" about music, screaming at his sisters when they struck a sour chord and banging the piano lid on their fingers to make them stop. Impressed with his son's possibilities, Papa Rubinstein bought him a child-sized violin. Artur promptly smashed it. Papa bought another, and Artur smashed that too. Papa gave up, let him concentrate on the then less fashionable piano.
Rubinstein made his official debut in Berlin at the age of eleven, playing Mozart's A-Major Concerto (K. 488). Critics cheered, but today he rarely plays Mozart. "He is the greatest of them all--so clear, so pure. Today I am too clever, too knowing, no longer simple."
Instead of regular school, Artur had three tutors--one for French, one for English, and one for everything else. At 15 he was a veteran performer in the capitals of middle Europe and went to visit Paderewski, who relaxed the prodigy's initial tenseness by feeding him champagne. The treatment worked so well that a visiting music critic from Boston arranged for his first tour in the U.S. On the boat going over, the charming teen-ager-of-the-world lost all his cash learning poker, but he made a big hit with the fashionable New Yorkers at the card table, soon learned his way around the big houses on Fifth Avenue.
But the critics gave him a pasting, and he admits now that it was well-deserved. "They wanted to hear a performer play every little note as written," he says ruefully. Back in Paris he devoted himself to high living, for which he had almost as much talent as for music. He shared an apartment with a French count, "had a little carriage and was thin as a stick because I never got to bed until morning." One evening Composer Paul (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) Dukas found him breakfasting in a cafe and insisted that he come at once to his studio. There he presented Rubinstein with a handful of pornographic pictures. "Why?" asked Artur. "Because that's the only thing you seem to be interested in these days," said Dukas. That slap in the face and the stern lecture that followed sent Rubinstein to the country and a milk diet. But after a short while there was another love affair ("Terrible, terrible--I had to fight a duel with the husband"), and Rubinstein was soon thin as a stick again.
No Might-Have-Been. During World War I he worked for the Allies as translator (he speaks eight languages), was so shocked by German atrocities in Belgium that he vowed never to play in Germany again, and never has. Asked what countries he had not visited in the last 40 years, he once named Tibet, because it is too high, and Germany, because it is too low. In 1938 he returned a decoration awarded him by Mussolini with a telegram signed "Artur Rubinstein, Jewish pianist."
Audiences loved him, but he was squandering his talent, and he knew it. The solution for that was pretty Aniela Mlynarski, daughter of a Polish conductor with whose orchestra Rubinstein had played as a boy. He met her when she was 16, married her when she was 22 and he was 43. Within a year he was a father (of Eva, now an actress in the Broadway hit The Diary of Anne Frank), and the responsibility made a serious and disciplined musician out of him. "I didn't want people telling my child after I died, 'What a pianist your father might have been!' "
For the first time, Rubinstein began to practice regularly, began to explore the musical depths of the composers he had been playing with dazzling facility for so long.
Not Quite, but Almost. These days Artur Rubinstein is on tour most of the time; each year he makes an extended tour of Latin America, with a stopover in Havana, where admirers keep him supplied with his own custom-made cigars.* "At home I get no rest," he complains amiably. "I must listen sweetly to my children or compliment them on something. My wife wants this or that, and there are friends to see and parties to go to. Touring is easy. I go to my hotel, and there is nothing to do but have my dinner and lie down for a while and read. Peace and quiet. Then the concert with everyone so kind, so good to me."
But peace and quiet have nothing to do with Artur Rubinstein. In his painting-crammed Park Avenue apartment, or his painting-crammed house in Paris, or in the world's best restaurants and sleekest salons, he is always onstage and always in action--shrugging, mugging, clowning, hand-kissing, charming, talking, talking, talking. And in concert halls and auditoriums, gymnasiums, stadiums and town halls from Sydney to Saskatchewan he is making music with hands and heart, and always trying to do it better.
As he said last week of his present series: "I have played all those works so much at different times, but not always as I wanted to. I would like to play them all decently before I disappear. Not that I think I can do them perfectly yet. But I think I can do them almost as I want."
*No kin.
*Inscribed "Artur Rubistein" on the band: "That is what they call me in all Latin countries. The middle n is for them an extra effort."
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