(4 of 10)
Rings & Springs. Early 19th century piano teachers were altogether baffled by the newfangled instrument. All sorts of torturous devices were invented for the purpose of getting the pianist's hands to the keyboard properly. Students' arms were clamped down with iron rails, their fingers wrapped with wires, rings and springs. Beethoven, flailing the keys like a startled bird, helped do away with such practices. He also did away with quite a few pianos, which in his day were rather fragile, spindle-legged affairs with 61 keys. When he performed, an assistant stood by to take out the broken strings.
With the arrival of Chopin and Liszt, romanticism came to full flower. Chopin, who at the peak of his career weighed only 97 Ibs., was an artist of delicate expression: he taught the piano to breathe. Liszt taught it to belch fire. A saturnine dandy with flowing shoulder-length blond hair and a dress coat aglitter with medals, he combined virtuosity with showmanship, worked himself into such a lather that he would sometimes faint. Women hurled their jewels on the stage and fought over the green doeskin gloves that he deliberately left on the piano.
Pinkie in the Brandy. Among Liszt's most notable heirs were Paderewski and Russia's Vladimir de Pachmann.
Paderewski, who sported a shock of golden-red hair that would dent a hedge clipper, toured with an entourage in a private Pullman car. Yet he was so insecure about his playing that he practiced 17 hours a day and often had to be shoved onto the stage. De Pachmann was dubbed "the Chopinzee." He used to dip each pinkie in a glass of brandy before a recital and frequently interrupted himself mid-performance to tell the audience how well he was doing.
The inevitable revolt against such excesses was led by Sergei Rachmaninoff, Josef Hofmann and Artur Schnabel.
Their approach was cautious, logical, austere. Their devotion to classic purity, to the sanctity of the composer's intent, spawned a new school of junior-executive pianists, most of them Americans, noted for their technical brilliance and carbon-copy sameness. Rubinstein, with more regret than scorn, calls them "bank clerks." They practice, practice, practice—and when they go onstage, so remote is their detachment from their audience that they practice some more.
Like a Bee. Somewhere between the last gush of the romantics and the first blush of the moderns, emerged Artur Rubinstein. Like a browser at a rummage sale, he sampled the new and the old and took the best from each. From the new he learned respect for the notes; from the old, devotion to what goes on between the notes. "I approached all those pianists like a bee," he says. "I owe them quite a lot, but I dismissed a lot in them too. If there's anything original about me, it is a composite of all of them." Compared with the best of his contemporaries, Rubinstein may lack some of the technical wizardry of Vladimir Horowitz, the intensely cerebral approach of Rudolf Serkin, or the mystical flights of Sviatoslav Richter. But the sum of his parts adds up to much more.