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21 Moriz Rosenthal–Emil Sauer: and Modern Pianism 1927 Edward Prime-Stevenson Mr. Moriz Rosenthal, unobtrusively con¤dent of bearing, dégagé as ever, occupies local musical attention lately, to no small purport. Since Mr. Rosenthal’s previous pianistic campaign hereabouts,where has he roved,busily? Has he been touring not only the Far East, and Australia, but also Mars, Jupiter, the Solar System, the Great Nebula in Andromeda?—always being—probably—best (or next-best) advertised virtuoso of this world. Meanwhile a good deal of water has streamed under the pianistic mill-wheel. That effulgent artist, Mr. Paderewski , not to mention Mr. Vladimir de Pachmann, particularly will be thought of, as planets newly swum into our ken—two potent rivals. But Mr. Rosenthal has not to fear comparisons with anybody. His reputation has been attaining only greater breadth, con¤rmation on merits. Time has added to him more than one indispensable trait of a superior pianist, including fuller interpretative authority . Yet Mr. Rosenthal, so far as concerns his largest public, probably comes back to notice from connoisseurs and setters-up of standards, in the aspect of the grand demon of the clavier, the arch-technicist of an ever intractable and defective instrument!—as the one man alive who seems to ¤nd nothing so hard to play that he cannot make us think it trivial of his effort. He is the pianist whose ten ¤ngers appear to be able to function as twenty; as the almost superhuman artist, concealing his art to the degree of suggesting that there is only®uent, elegant recreation in a player’s dealing with dif¤culties to appall the majority of his profession. Once on a time, an excited Italian swore that he had seen Satan behind Paganini, guiding the violinist’s bow and doing some of his “double-stoppings” for him. When a certain great coloratura singer, of the last century, was warbling away, one evening, in cadenze and ®oridities that seemed beyond the powers of mortal larynx, a gallery auditor called at the end of a trill, From Long-Haired Iopas: Old Chapters from Twenty-¤ve Years of Music-Criticism (Florence: Privately printed for the author by the press of The Italian Mail, 1927; based, in part, on an article published in Harper’s Weekly, November 28, 1896). Edward Prime-Stevenson (1858–1942) was an American writer known chie®y for his novel Imre: A Memorandum (1906), which has been brought out by Broadview Press in a new edition by James Gifford. “Damn her! She has a nest of nightingales in her—stomach!”When Carl Tausig, the steel-¤ngered and infallible Carl Tausig, was playing a Liszt Polonaise, in the presence of its author and of Peter Cornelius, Cornelius exclaimed that Tausig kept on “knocking us all down with his superhuman octaves.”1 A Polish concertgoer went about declaring that Liszt possessed “a secret machine” of some sort, hidden in his pianoforte, to manage with a prodigious readiness the effects of execution demanded by Liszt’s more intricate show-pieces. Ideas of the same sort may well come to the imagination of one who listens to Rosenthal. There is nothing whatever suggesting, as was the case with Paganini , an unearthly physical personality. Quite the contrary. This fattish, comfortable -looking, matter-of-fact type of Teutonic, or Magyar, Hebrew, crosses the platform. He sits down, not behind a ledger or exchange counter, but before a pianoforte. What agreeably everyday, inartistic, unassuming demeanor! But after a few minutes, we realize that the ancient demoniac virtuosity is there! Busy before us with such a thing as Ludwig Schytte’s Concerto in C-sharp Minor; or with the player’s own arrangement of Chopin’s Waltz in D-®at Major , where Rosenthal’s thirds and sixths and octaves take the place of most of the original single notes; or with his own stupendously effective adaptation of Johann Strauss’s dance-themes, concerted into a fabric of gossamer lightness and terri¤c dif¤culties,—taken at lightning-dash speed,—he amazes the hearer,¤rst and last. One has the impression that eight hands, instead of two, are delivering those wonderful coruscations of sound. And the wonder grows with each such exhibition. This plump wizard of the Danube-region appears not even mundane. . . . Are his hands really rather like the pair in your lap? Like hands that never play the piano at all? Apparently so.Yet Rosenthal seems a creature who has his ¤ngers everywhere and anywhere at once...

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