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Music: Intoxicated with Romance

6 minute read
TIME

It was a late supper: buxom Emmy Destinn, one of the greatest operatic dramatic sopranos of the time (1907), and the slender young Polish pianist and boulevardier Arthur Rubinstein. Rubinstein gallantly began to discuss music:

“I try to translate your perfect breathing control into my own phrasing, and I feel certain that Chopin had exactly that on his mind when he required rubato in his works.” The technical musical discussion only infuriated the diva.

“All right, all right,” she screamed, smashing her champagne glass, “I know I am a good singer, but I am also a woman.” Obviously, Emmy Destinn was thinking about making a different kind of music.

In his memoirs (My Young Years; Knopf; $10), Rubinstein recalls the moment with gusto and some dismay.

At the time, he was deeply involved with another woman, yet suddenly was “expected to prove that I was a man.” That was only the first shock. The second was discovering that Destinn had a tattoo of a boa constrictor circling her leg from the ankle to the upper thigh. “I am afraid I was not at my best that night, but she seemed not to mind.”

The world today knows Rubinstein as an ageless wonder, the warmest of musicians, who at the age of 86 can still bring an audience to tears with his blend of drama and poetry. But in the early years of the century he was a Casanova in tails. His seemingly endless list of courtships had begun in his native Poland with a twelve-year-old girl, appropriately named Mania (he was ten at the time). Then came a staggering array of flirtations and affairs.

There was Olive, a well-to-do American and ex-chorus girl; in Warsaw, there was the Harman family—he romanced the two daughters, titillated the mother, excited the son, who was afflicted, as Rubinstein quaintly puts it, “by a chronic physical deficiency which resulted in his inability to make love to a woman.” In Paris, a countess eased up to the piano as he was playing Chopin and kissed him square on the lips “with a wild passion,” while her husband dozed on the sofa.

When women do not dominate the book’s pages, kings, princesses and the great of opera, literature, commerce and the fine arts do. Millionaire J.P.

Morgan offended the pianist—not just because “one of the richest men in the world” came late to a dinner-recital party but because he did not pay a cent to hear Rubinstein play. Arthur was then penniless. What Rubinstein remembers today is the financier’s nose.

“You couldn’t call it a nose; it was a huge blue, brown, and mauve tubercle, which showed pus in some places.”

Then there was the time Cellist Pablo Casals broke up their friendship over Arthur’s failure to repay a £10 loan.

“We did not look at life with the same eyes,” says Rubinstein.

The pace of My Young Years is allegro, the mood vivace, and the results bravisslmo. It is the first of a hoped-for series of volumes, written without the aid of a ghost writer. If Rubinstein’s memory has romanticized the past and his prowess, no matter. The book spans his early life from his birth in Lodz in 1887 through the spring of 1917 when, as the author confidently puts it, “I had gained the necessary hold on my career.”

The Rubinstein family was not gifted musically; his father owned a small textile factory. But when three-year-old Arthur,* kibitzing during his sister’s piano practice, began slapping her hands at mistakes, and later played her part correctly, his impressed parents arranged for lessons. By 1900 he had turned pro.

He loathed practicing. When he played scales, Rubinstein confesses, he had to repress the image that his hands were cleaning a giant set of teeth. He early learned to camouflage technical flaws with clever pedaling, and audiences succumbed to his boldness and showmanship. Still, his 1906 tour in America was a relative failure. He gave only occasional concerts here thereafter and did not really conquer the American audience until his grand tour of 1937. “The Americans paid their money and they expected to hear every note,” he explained. “In those days I dropped about 30% of them.”

Before he was 20, he had met the musical titans of the day—Paderewski, Saint-Saëns, Ravel, Hofmann—and had performed in the world’s cultural capitals. Life was often a feast of caviar, lobster and champagne with nobility playing host. But too old to be a prodigy, too undisciplined to be a mature pianist, he found that bookings soon became scarce. A daily struggle for survival replaced Lucullan orgies. In Berlin in 1908, without engagements, he pulled up a chair, fastened the belt of a worn-out bathrobe on a clothes hook, knotted the other end around his neck and kicked away. The belt snapped and he fell with an ignominious thud.

He lay there weeping. “Half-consciously, I staggered to the piano and cried myself out in music.” Then he strode out into the street, and suddenly the world underwent an astonishing transformation. Every object, each leaf on the trees became vitally interesting. “I felt as if I had been reborn.” He had discovered the secret of his future happiness: “Love life for better or worse without conditions.”

At 45 he married the beautiful Aniela Mlynarski, a woman 22 years his junior; it has been a most happy marriage. At 46 he became a father and newly conscious of the artistic legacy he would one day bequeath his children.

Withdrawing to his studio, he immersed himself in practice, determined to shed his playboy image. He emerged a consummate virtuoso. Today he is still concertizing—impishly cautioning all who engage him to make certain God signs the contract. He plays with the vigor and authority of a true genius, and appears to enjoy concerts as much as his audiences do.

Rubinstein has been widely quoted as saying he is the happiest man he ever met. He certainly writes that way.

* In Polish his first name is spelled Artur, but Rubinstein, who has been an American citizen for 27 years, now uses Arthur in the U.S.

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