"I play the piano in every country of the world but two," Artur Rubinstein often says. "Tibet, because it is too high, and Germany, because it is too low." To this, he stiffly adds that his Teutonopho-bia is a sturdy vintage '14—under Hitler it merely matured. It was the atrocities in Belgium during World War I that first moved Rubinstein to swear "a solemn and heavy oath" he would smash his fingers before playing again in Germany, and the oath grew heavier in World War
II when only three of the immense family of Rubinsteins at home in Poland es caped extermination.
Last week, without violating his oath, Rubinstein dominated the news in the German music press. In the Dutch border town of Nijmegen, the pianist played to a hall full of Germans, and as all who attended had foreseen, there was more in the air than just music. For the 1,000 Germans who crossed the border of Ru binstein's conscience, the recital was a stirring but pleasant penance—a chance to listen to a great Jewish pianist play Beethoven. For Rubinstein, it was a delicate compromise, a gesture of understanding, a test of the heart.
Psychological Crust. Rubinstein has long fortified his total embargo of Germany and Germans with gallows humor ("There are 90 million Jews in the world today. Why? Because there are 30 million Germans, and each reports he personally saved three Jews during the war"). He still harbors the dark suspicion that the presence of one vestigial Nazi dreaming in the dark of a concert hall while listening to a Rubinstein Appassionata would freeze his fingers into furious claws. But the jokes are worn with time, and the thriving German market for Rubinstein recordings has diluted his horror of German ears. Last autumn, when Frankfurt Impresario Hans Schlote proposed the Nijmegen recital, Rubinstein agreed, comforted partly by Schlote's historically incorrect observation that persons mentally adaptable to war crimes are unlikely to turn up at piano recitals.
Rubinstein has long been an intransigent leader of such musicians as Heifetz and Stern, who also refuse to play in Germany and who have joined Rubinstein in protests against German musicians appearing in the U.S. For them, drawing the line at Nijmegen may have seemed a trifle shaky, but since theirs is a conspiracy of conscience only, no one objected to Rubinstein's plan. "There is a psychological crust that covers memories, and most people are afraid to break it after only 18 years," says Violinist Isaac Stern. "I could not and would not play my music in Germany or Austria, or with any German or Austrian citizen or orchestra. This is less pompous, I would say, than establishing myself as a private denazification court to decide which particular Germans are acceptable."
Nostalgic Pie. News of the Nijmegen recital drew a flurry of editorials in West German papers, and the program handed out in the town's Concertgebouw contained letters from German Baritone Die trich Fischer-Dieskau and Berlin Phil harmonic Manager Wolfgang Stresemann: all said that no civilized German could fail to understand Rubinstein's feelings.