A Song to Remember

By Michael Walsh

Arthur Rubinstein: 1887-1982

He was born to play the piano. His huge hands with their wide palms and spatulate fingertips could reach an extraordinary twelve-note span on the keyboard. His vast memory allowed him to store hundreds of pieces of music in his head, ready for performance on a moment's brushup. His quick mind enabled him to learn a new work simply by studying the score on the train or plane on the way to his next concert, where he would play it perfectly. Most important of all, he had the soul of an artist. When Arthur Rubinstein died last week after nearly 96 years of productive, eventful living, the world lost one of the greatest pianists of the century.

Discussing younger performers, Rubinstein once said: "You know, they are fabulous. They play better than I do. They do things I wouldn't begin to attempt. But when they come onstage, they might as well be soda jerks." Even among the surviving major pianists of his own generation, however, he was unsurpassed. Vladimir Horowitz, 78, may have a flashier, more dazzling technique; Rudolf Serkin, 79, may have a more intense emotional identification with the German classics; Claudio Arrau, 79, may have an even wider repertoire. But Rubinstein had everything: in his playing, consummate virtuosity and a pellucid tone were at the service of a natural musical storyteller.

His appeal was phenomenal. The largest-selling classical pianist in history, he made more than 200 records, which sold 10 million copies. Although Rubinstein was a modern pianist in such things as fidelity to the score and a desire that his playing call attention only to the music, never to itself, he was also a direct link to the pianistic tradition of the 19th century; when audiences heard Rubinstein perform, they were listening to a man born six months after Liszt died. No wonder Violinist Isaac Stern last week called Rubinstein "part of the centrality of music in our time."

He was born in the industrial city of Lodz, Poland, on Jan. 28, 1887. His father, who owned a small textile factory, quickly recognized his son's talent. At four, Rubinstein had calling cards that read ARTUR THE GREAT PIANO VIRTUOSO; at eight, he was studying in Berlin. In 1906 Rubinstein made his first trip to America. The notices were mixed; some praised his spirit, but others carped about his technical waywardness, a criticism that haunted him for nearly 30 years. Disheartened, Rubinstein returned to Europe, where he lived the uncertain, itinerant life of an aspiring performer, moving from hotel to hotel, from country to country, dining on lobster and caviar one week and on a sausage and dry roll the next.

Along the way, he seems to have met everyone. He knew Stravinsky, he knew Picasso. He knew Joseph Conrad and Gertrude Stein. He knew fine wine, he knew fine art. Most of all, it seems, he knew women; his two-volume autobiography is almost as much a recounting of amorous conquests as musical triumphs. "It is said of me," he once told an interviewer, "that when I was young I divided my time impartially among wine, women and song. I deny this categorically. Ninety percent of my interests were women."

His career as an international playboy was curbed in 1932 when he married Aniela Mlynarski, by whom he had four children. But it was not entirely ended: forsaking Nela, Rubinstein lived the last two years of his life in Geneva with his fortyish English secretary, Annabelle Whitestone.

Marriage settled Rubinstein in more ways than one. Up to then, he had got by on sheer talent. But after the birth of his first child in 1933, he took up the piano in earnest; for three months, he practiced diligently at a remote mountain cottage in southeastern France. "I didn't want people telling my child after I died, 'What a pianist your father might have been,' " he explained. He emerged from his battle a master of the keyboard; at age 47, his real career was about to begin.

The former prodigy became even more prodigious. At 69, he played a marathon cycle in New York City that consisted of 17 compositions for piano and orchestra, on five programs, within two weeks; in 1961 he gave ten Carnegie Hall concerts in one season. Conductor Edouard van Remoortel was probably not exaggerating when he said that Rubinstein was "the only pianist you could wake up at midnight and ask to play any of 38 major piano concertos." Before blindness put an end to his public career in 1976, he was playing up to 100 concerts a year.

To see Rubinstein onstage was to witness a master in his element. Striding purposefully to the keyboard while acknowledging the welcoming cheers, he would sit down, adjust the tails of his formal coat, tilt his face upward at about a 45DEG angle and stare intently into the middle distance as he composed himself. Then the great hands would rise from his sides and come down on the keyboard. The piano, with its intricate mechanism of strings and hammers, would cease to be a percussion instrument when Rubinstein caressed it; in his hands, it sang.

"At every concert," Rubinstein once said, "I leave a lot to the moment. I want to risk, I want to dare. It's like making love. The act is always the same, but each time it's different." But some things were consistent. His Chopin--and he was peerless in Chopin--was strong-willed and large-boned, robust and masculine, yet sensitive and poetic. His Brahms was as hearty, bluff and ruminative as the composer himself. Rubinstein played Spanish music with the brio of a native (Spain was one of his favorite countries), and Impressionist music like a born Frenchman. Perhaps that was to be expected from a man who seemed at home everywhere and who spoke eight languages. Rubinstein was a champion of modern music in his younger days; two of the most difficult works in the repertoire, Stravinsky's piano arrangement of his own Petrushka and Villa-Lobos' Rude-poema are dedicated to him.

One wintry day in 1908, Rubinstein was alone, broke and hungry in a Berlin hotel room, his career stalled, unable to pay the rent, a love affair in tatters. He took the belt from an old robe, fastened it to a hook on the wall and put a loop around his neck. As Rubinstein pushed a chair from beneath his feet, the worn belt ripped apart and he landed in a heap on the floor. It was then, he later said, that he learned the secret of happiness: "Love life for better or for worse, without conditions."

Those were words he lived by to the end. His motto, in Polish, was "Nie dam sie" (I shall never give in), and he never did. "Music is not a hobby, not even a passion with me," he once said. "Music is me. I think I can say no man has lived his life more fully than I have. My life is made. If I die today, still, I've had it. Nobody can say I've been deprived of anything." Of some men it is said that they lived for their art; Rubinstein's life was his art, and music was its expression. --By Michael Walsh This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.