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Appendix B. Annotated Concertography
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Appendix B Annotated Concertography By Mark Mitchell The following list of works played in concert by Moriz Rosenthal does not pretend to be exhaustive since programs from each of his estimated 3,500 concerts are not extant.1 Moreover, those that do exist often give imprecise information such as “¤ve preludes” of Chopin or “sonata” of Scarlatti. This list is based upon the programs in the Archives of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde (incorporating the Bösendorfer Archives), Vienna, the Music Division of the New York Public Library, George Kehler’s The Piano in Concert , and the collections of Steven Heliotes, Dr. Antonio Latanza (Director, Museum of Musical Instruments, Rome), and the authors, as well as more than one thousand concert reviews. Louis Biancolli, who interviewed (and often reviewed) Rosenthal, set the number of works the pianist had in his repertoire at six hundred. Rosenthal himself calculated that Anton Rubinstein had only two hundred works in his repertoire; Sviatoslav Richter, on the other hand,brought more than two thousand works before the public. Privately Rosenthal played many other works, among them Godowsky’s studies on the Chopin etudes. Beethoven and Chopin were the composers of piano music to whom Rosenthal gave pride of place in his pantheon. “Of all the heroes of musical achievement,” Rosenthal was quoted as saying in the Neues Wiener Journal of March 1, 1914, “Beethoven, Chopin, Schubert, Schumann, Weber, and Wagner are closest to my heart.” Not by coincidence do I place Chopin next to Beethoven in the beginning of this list of noble monarchs. In accordance with a personal deep conviction, which, of course, I do not want to force on anyone, I feel that the great Pole is not lacking anything in musical genius in comparison with the master of the symphony. In spite of his diminutive forms, he has revolutionized music, enlarged the wealth of perception of the modern soul into in¤nitude, created new harmonies [Rosenthal called the Prelude op. 45 “the Bible of new harmonies”], and perfected all artistic means which relate to musical ideas. All this even though his artistic path was almost twenty years shorter than Beethoven’s. Nor did Rosenthal have any truck with received impressions of Chopin: “I have never had very much belief in the opinion that Chopin was a slave to his soul and his senses,” he wrote (“The Genius of Chopin”). “I would far rather believe that he was more in-®uenced by the inimitable chivalry and gallantry of his Polish race.” In the event Rosenthal was no less important an advocate of the music of Schumann and Liszt. However, he disdained Liszt’s sonata! Steven Heliotes: “[Jorge Bolet, who studied with him circa 1935] said that Rosenthal once mentioned Liszt’s sonata and said, sarcastically, as he hammered out the theme (when it makes its ¤rst ‘lyrical’appearance), ‘You call that a composer?’”2 In an interview with the Musical Courier (September 15, 1940), Rosenthal admitted that he tired “of the ‘bad weather’ in Debussy’s work, the ‘stones of sound rather than the bread of melody’ in Ravel,” even as he respected their importance. On a less charitable occasion (Neues Wiener Journal of March 1, 1914) he said, “the works of Debussy and Ravel (not even to speak of cacophonicians à la Schönberg ) seem to me like more or less successful ®im®am.” Rosenthal’s attitude to SaintSa ëns, on the other hand, was humorously ambivalent: although publicly he called him the greatest living French composer—and, in fact, he had four works by Saint-Saëns in his repertoire—in private he seemed slightly antagonized by him. Surely one of the stranger items among Rosenthal’s writings is the following Letter to the Editor of the New York Evening Sun (undated clipping; 1906?): Sir—I was quite astonished to read in your esteemed paper of my having audibly conversed during the recital of Mr. Saint-Saëns at Carnegie Hall and thereby having caused some persons to hiss. You would oblige me by most emphatically contradicting this. There was decidedly no hissing whatever and a few enthusiastic remarks uttered by me to my friend were whispered almost inaudibly. In the event Rosenthal played less than a dozen works from the “répertoire hexagonal.” (In 1906 he announced that he would program works by Fauré, but he seems not to have done so.) Rosenthal made a study of about thirty of Reger’s piano works, and concluded that he did not admire any...