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Gems from Rubinstein's Memoirs

I say "gems" for lack of a better word. It really is just amusing anecdotes involving Rubinstein's contemporaries that I gathered from browsing the index of the second volume of his memoirs. I've finished reading the first, so I might as well spend a few moments reviewing it. 

Rubinstein strikes me as unique amongst great artists in being, from what I can tell, completely free from neuroses. Argerich once remarked (whether of his playing or himself, I can't remember) that Rubinstein struck her as supremely happy, and she was quite right. Rubinstein's motto was: Love life unconditionally, and life will love you back. Or words to that effect. It probably sounds more elegant in his own happy words. What a motto, though. Doubtless it was this that enabled him to retain his noble playing, his art, and his technique till he withdrew from concert life at the age of 90 or thereabouts. Horowitz, of whom Rubinstein was admittedly jealous when he first heard him as young virtuoso, was nowhere near the pianist Rubinstein was in his later years (with the possible exception of his final years - 1986 and later). In this account of the first twenty years of Rubinstein's life, quaintly but charmingly entitled My Young Years, we see Rubinstein the sybarite, Rubinstein the lover, and Rubinstein the musician living life as it was meant to be lived.

I have barely started on the second volume, but I felt the urge to see what he had to say about some of his famous contemporaries. Horowitz first heard Rubinstein in Kiev at the age of 7, apparently; and when Rubinstein heard Horowitz for the first time, he was deeply saddened to behold his technical gifts, but consoled himself with the thought that he was the better musician. He confessed that he had an inferiority complex with regard to his technique, but he had no complexes about his musicianship. Horowitz in those early years was charming but cold and callous. He became a close friend of Rubinstein's briefly, but Rubinstein was quick to see that both Horowitz and the great violinist Heifetz treated him, not as an equal, but as a subject. Horowitz failed to show up the only time he invited Rubinstein to lunch, and was offended when Rubinstein expressed his displeasure at being thus treated.

Another personage with whom Rubinstein had amusing encounters was Rachmaninoff himself. Rachmaninoff in Rubinstein's memoirs seems quite a bit cruder and more neurotic than accounts of him that I read hitherto led me to believe. After Rubinstein had played Stravinsky's arrangement for piano of his Petrouchka (which, incidentally, was composed with the intent of inducing Rubinstein to play his music), Rachmaninoff excoriated him backstage for playing such dirty music in America. In contrast, Godowsky and Lhevinne, who were present in the audience, had only nice things to say to Rubinstein. Another time when Rubinstein bumped into Rachmaninoff on a ship, Rachmaninoff told him that Szymanowski's music was shit. Apparently he had no love for his contemporaries as composers. I think it was in Plaskin's biography of Horowitz that it was revealed that even Horowitz sometimes felt uneasy in Rachmaninoff's company. Once Horowitz went to the composer's house only to find him laughing maniacally as he listened to a record of Cortot playing a Chopin Ballade, because there were so many mistakes. Horowitz was most bemused. It was Rachmaninoff who said that Cortot's interpretations of Chopin's etudes became "more emotional" as the technical demands increased. Rubinstein's final verdict on Rachmaninoff's music was that it lacked nobility. As a pianist, however, everyone admired Rachmaninoff. Even Glenn Gould, who absolutely hated anything Romantic, is said to have collected all of Rachmaninoff's recordings.

 Footnote: To be fair, I think it was awfully mature of Rachmaninoff to ask after Szymanowsi, and say that he was a charming man, even though he thought his music was shit. There are a lot of interpreters whose music is I think shit, though they strike me as nice people. Evgeny Kissin is one of them. What a trashy pianist, what awful music. But he seems nice as a person.

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