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Back to Mozart. As a stripling, Rubinstein often lived at the mercy of impresarios who wanted him to perform only the crowd pleasers—Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff. "They never listened to me," he growls, "just to the box office." Now, like an aging Romeo, he has "come back to Mozart on my knees." That alone is quite an achievement. "You remember what Schnabel said about Mozart sonatas?" recalls Rubinstein. " 'Too easy for children, too difficult for artists.' " So it is: Mozart demands a fidelity to rhythm that few performers can ever master. It is characteristic of Rubinstein's magic that even having returned so late in life to Mozart, he plays the music impeccably.
Next month he will tackle Brahms's Sonata in F Major for piano and cello with Gregor Piatigorsky. He has never played it before. But Cellist Piatigorsky is not at all concerned. "Artur," he says, "will read the score on the plane to California, and he will make it sink into his mind and into his fingers, and when he arrives, he will know it better than I, who have played it all my life."
Rubinstein's feats of memory are legendary. In 1903 he caused a sensation in Warsaw by performing Paderewski's Sonata in E Flat Minor the day after it was published; he learned Cesar Franck's complex Symphonic Variations on the train en route to a concert hall in Madrid. He can commit a sonata to memory in one hour, and he can play as many as 250 lieder. His friends used to play a kind of "Stump Artur" game in which they would call out titles—excerpts from symphonies, operas, Cole Porter scores—to see if he could play them. "Stumped Friends" would have been a better name for it. "Rubinstein," says Conductor Edouard van Remoortel, "is the only pianist you could wake up at midnight and ask to play any of the 38 major piano concertos."
"When I play, I turn the pages in my mind," he explains, "and I know that in the bottom right-hand corner of this page is a little coffee stain, and on that page I have written molto vivace." He has, in fact, a kind of built-in Hit Parade network that spins music on request through his inner ear. "At breakfast," says Rubinstein, "I might pass a Brahms symphony in my head. Then I am called to the phone, and half an hour later I find it's been going on all the time and I'm in the third movement."
Yet, for all the powers of the mind, the one overriding trait that makes Rubinstein percolate is rooted in his spirit. He is a hopelessly rosy-eyed, warm-blooded, bighearted, card-carrying romantic. On the Old World side, his pianistic pedigree dates back to some of the great masters and to the very origins of the instrument. Violinist Josef Joachim, Brahms's great friend, was Rubinstein's mentor. Rubinstein got his piano training from Karl Heinrich Earth, who was taught by the man (Franz Liszt), who was taught by the man (Karl Czerny), who was taught by the man—Ludwig van Beethoven.