Rubinstein at 89

"Isn't it so, Nela?"

It was the day after one of the most remarkable recitals in the long history of New York's Carnegie Hall. Ever so gingerly Pianist Artur Rubinstein--at 89, four years older than Carnegie--was blowing his own horn. The huge hands (he can span a twelfth, which is an octave plus four white notes) were spread imploringly on the table. The gray-blue eyes gazed boyishly across the hotel room where his wife of 43 years, Aniela, his Nela, was reading on the sofa. In the inquiring way that some husbands have with wives they depend on, he was at once asking for confirmation and for permission to boast.

Nela: "What is it, darling?"

Artur: "I am saying that yesterday I play less wrong notes . . ."

Nela: "Fewer."

Artur: ". . . fewer wrong notes without eyes than I used to play with my big, big eyes wide open. Eh ?"

Nela: "Possibly."

At this, Artur roars with laughter.

Nela: "I didn't count them."

Artur roars louder.

Nela: "I was ready with a basket to catch them."

Artur's face is now on the table, his shoulders shaking with glee.

There has never been much that could get Rubinstein down for long. He goes on despite the fact that he can no longer see well enough to read a note of music or see the keys beneath his fingers. Age has been weakening his eyes in recent years, and for the last four months he has had only peripheral vision. He can see his wife's scarf by looking at her nose, but the center of his field of vision is a dark, impenetrable cloud. The prospects of his learning new music are nil. "I must rely entirely on my memory," he says. Fortunately that memory is photographic and still in focus.

A passionate reader who sensed what was to come, Rubinstein last year went through all of Proust and Joyce's Ulysses ("By Jove, I had it, didn't I?"). He says his eye condition cannot be cured by surgery: "It is final, you see. But I am an optimist. I love life tremendously. I think to myself, what will I do with my time?"

He has found a solution, which he recounted last week to TIME Music Critic William Bender and Researcher Nancy Newman. "I was always lazy to practice the piano. I loathed it all my life, and somehow by miracle I got away with . . . er, without it. But now I practice more than ever before."

It shows. There was a time a few seasons back when Rubinstein was hitting so many clinkers that a basket would have been useful. Last week in Carne gie Hall he played Beethoven's Sonata No. 18 in E flat with the same lithe rhythms and robust tone that brought him fame in the first place. He played a Chopin group--four of the Preludes, Op. 28, the Scherzo in B flat minor, Op. 31--as though he, Rubinstein, had invented rubato and the triplet. But most of all, he played Schumann's Carnaval, that paradigm of whimsy and frolic, as if only old age could understand the joy of being young. Cheered on by a sold-out audience, Rubinstein behaved all evening like a man who could not believe he had been given the marvelous present of playing in Carnegie Hall--where, in fact, he first played in 1906. At the end, he raised his hand and said: "For 40 years I came every year. You listened with marvelous affection for me. I love you."

Bitter Mood. Another love is the former Aniela Mlynarski. Though 22 years his junior when they were married in 1932, she transformed her husband from a playboy pianist into a great virtuoso. Recalls he: "I said to myself, no, I will never stand for it that people should say to my wife, 'Oh, if your husband had worked a little more he might have been quite a good pianist.' " Yet that is really when Rubinstein became Rubinstein.

Today he and Nela live quietly in their own house in the fashionable 16th arrondissement in Paris. He is justifiably proud these days of a sparkling new set (his third) of the complete Beethoven Piano Concertos, made last year in London. Accompanying him is the London Philharmonic under Pianist-Conductor Daniel Barenboim, 33. "I saw Barenboim from birth. Before even. His mother showed me that she's going to have a child. She said 'If he's a boy, I want him to be a pianist like you.' " The young have a way of inspiring Rubinstein. The day of his Carnegie Hall recital, he was grumbling about his piano ("I was in a bitter mood, I thought I chose the wrong one"). Then his younger daughter Alina arrived and told him how eager she was to hear his Carnaval. "I thought, even if it's only for her, I will play everything out, and I did."

Contemplating the uncertain days ahead, Rubinstein says: "You take life as it is and you don't complain." He does not believe in Cod. If there is a hereafter, "I will be pleasantly surprised. When I was a little boy I wanted to see God," he recalls. "Moses had seen him. I was a good little boy. I begged him to come. He didn't and I think he was wrong."

Now Rubinstein is more philosophical: "Contrast makes everything alive. You know sadness only when you have been gay, and you know happiness only if you have been unhappy. Otherwise things become boring." But then Rubinstein would not know about that.

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