In prospect, it looked like just another Manhattan debut, of which there are 300 every year. The New York Times did not even send a critic to Carnegie Hall. The Herald Tribune sent its second-stringer, Jerome D. Bohm. He and a tiny audience of ushers and friends of the artist had the 2,800-seat Carnegie Hall to themselves.
A few hours later, Jerome Bohm reported excitedly: "Entirely unheralded, the finest woman pianist since Teresa Carreno* made her North American debut. ... It would scarcely be possible to imagine a more searching, tonally ravishing interpretation."
Patience & Fortitude. Polish Pianist Maryla (pronounced Mariela) Jonas should not have been such a surprise. She made her debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic at nine. Paderewski heard her play, gave her lessons. When Maryla's father objected to a music career for his daughter, Paderewski said quietly: Patience. It is possible that in five, six, seven years she will turn out to be mediocre."
Instead she won an International Chopin Prize in 1932, the Beethoven Prize of Vienna in 1933. She was in bombed-out Warsaw when it fell. The Gestapo agent who found her in the city's ruins tried to persuade her to go to Berlin to play for the Nazis. She refused and was sent to jail.
Seven months later, a Nazi officer who had heard her play let her out, told her that if she could get to the Brazilian Embassy in Berlin, she could get out of Europe. She walked most of 325 miles from Warsaw to Berlin, slept on the roadside, scarcely ever ate, and does not know how many weeks it took her. But she got to Rio. There she was put in a sanatorium, exhausted and sick. She got word that her husband, her parents and a brother had been killed in Poland. She did not go near a piano for months.
"Come Snobs." Polish Pianist Artur Rubinstein, visiting Rio, decided to trick her into playing again. He invited her to Rio's empty Municipal Opera House, asked her to play some chords so he might test the acoustics. She sat down at the piano at 2:30, played until 8. Said she: "It was a put-up job." She played three years in Latin America, earning enough to pay her way to the U.S., and the $1,400 that a Carnegie debut cost her.*
Last week, five weeks after her New York debut, she played again in Carnegie Hall. This time the house was packed and the critics were in their pews. A buxom, platinum-haired woman of 35, her face was heavily rouged to cover the pallor of the past six years. Her U.S. sponsors wanted her to wear a corset; she refused ("I have to feel what I play from the legs up"). Says Maryla: "My first concert is European. Come one artist in old dress, no photogenic, no smiling. Then come complications. The criticisms are too good. Come snobs, I play too pianissimo, too fortissimo, my hair, I am too fat, my dress. My second concert is American concert. Everyone come to see am I really so good. It is not art, it is sport. It is football! If I have goal, bravo! If no goal, goodbye!"
The critics and audience agreed—they whistled for five encores. Maryla Jonas made her goal. It was not goodbye. It was a big hello.