Moriz Rosenthal in Word and Music: A Legacy of the Nineteenth Century

Preface

Preface When Moriz Rosenthal made most of his recordings in the 1920s and 1930s, the recording industry largely restricted its productions of piano music to short works lasting less than four and a half minutes,1 and consequently he was never to leave a permanent witness of his interpretations of the long Romantic masterpieces for which he was most famous like the Schumann Fantasie, the Weber Sonata in A-®at, and the Brahms Paganini Variations. In fact, I never heard him play these works, as I ¤rst met him when he left Vienna like so many distinguished artists to escape Hitler in 1938 (we had the same dentist, who introduced us—or, more precisely persuaded him to listen to me play), and by then he had almost ceased to perform in public. In the eight years that followed until his death in 1946, I remember only one concert in New York, which took place in Town Hall (I recollect that he played the Allegro de Concert by Chopin, the only time I have ever heard that work performed). During those years I studied with him and with his wife, Hedwig Kanner, a famous pedagogue and a pupil of Leschetizky. In spite of the fact that he then rarely performed in public, he certainly retained much of his famous technique, as I heard him play the “Minute” Waltz in thirds and sixths much faster than most pianists could play the simpler original. I saw him fairly often. When I left the Juilliard Preparatory Center, to study with him and with his wife, I was eleven years old. A contract that my parents signed, which I came upon after their death, speci¤ed that I was to have one lesson a week from her and one a month from him. However, I actually had two lessons a week with Hedwig Kanner-Rosenthal, and she almost invariably said after each one, “Now go and amuse the old man.” So I generally saw him once or twice a week for those years. Since he now performed so little, I think he was often bored and enjoyed company. In spite of his immense reputation for caustic remarks about other pianists (“Now you have the tempo, you can put in the thirds,” was his comment on one of de Pachmann’s less successful salon renditions of Chopin’s Etude in thirds),2 he was a very kind and generous man. In fact, during all that time, he rarely told me that I was wrong about something in the music: “I have a different idea of this piece,” he would say gently and go slowly to the piano to demonstrate (he always sat two yards or so away from the piano to listen, not close by). He almost never discussed technique with me, in spite—or perhaps because —of his formidable reputation as a technician: Josef Hofmann (whose technique was second to none) once said that he did not know what piano technique could be until he heard Rosenthal. His emphasis was almost always on phrasing. The only exception was that he taught me to play octave glissandi, showing me how to do them at a controlled tempo, not too fast and not as a kind of characterless smear. The trick was to place the weight on the ¤fth ¤nger, not the thumb, and to make sure that the ¤fth ¤nger was absolutely rigid and powerfully held in position. “Practice it every day for ten seconds,” he told me, “and after a week, you will have mastered it. More than ten seconds, and you will get a blister on your ¤nger.” This kind of controlled octave glissando is necessary only in a few places, above all Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata and Concerto in C, and Brahms’s Paganini Variations. I did learn something more about technique from him, however, by watching his hands, as his method of teaching proceeded largely by demonstration. What was most astonishing to me from the¤rst time I heard him play a few phrases was the economical and visually almost undetectable way of bringing out inner voices and varying the touch within a chord, and to see him play, as well as to hear him, was an inspiring experience. He had an incredible accuracy in playing very wide skips. While on the subject of technique, it should be mentioned that the account in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians about his acquaintance and friendship with Brahms is inaccurate: it did...