The Grand Piano Era

Ignaz Friedman, Frederic Lamond, Harold Bauer, Nikolai Medtner, Ignaz Jan Paderewski, Ferruccio Busoni, Percy Grainger, Josef Hofmann

by David Dubal









The Grand Piano Era offers seventy-one minutes of glittering piano playing in a diverse programme of repertory works and delightfully original compositions by the pianists themselves. All of these artists were extraordinary musicians, pianists of genius, electrical performers; indeed paragons of the piano, and, like troubadours, roamed the world with their musical enticements. Each of the pianists represented here was an iconoclastic and richly fascinating personality who contributed greatly to the prestige of the instrument. The earliest, born in 1860, was Paderewski and the latest, Grainger and Friedman born in 1882; thus they form one generation of a truly golden age of the piano.

Ignaz Friedman was born in Podgorze, near Cracow, where Josef Hofmann had been born six years earlier. An early teacher, Flora Grzywinska did a great deal for his development, and at eight he could transpose Bach Fugues into various keys. After more training in composition and piano at Leipzig, he arrived in Vienna fired with the ambition to become a concert pianist; and, with this goal in mind, to study with the greatest living pedagogue of the piano, Theodor Leschetizky, the teacher of Paderewski and many of the current stars in the world of the piano. At first Leschetizky discouraged him, but, after four gruelling years, he became one of his master's favourites.

Late in 1904, the twenty-two year old Friedman was considered ready for his Vienna debut where he played the Tchaikovsky Concerto No. 1, Liszt's E flat Concerto and the Brahms D minor, a feat more common at the time than now. The concert was a big success, and soon Friedman was playing recitals, concertos, accompanying singers and, with Huberman, playing Beethoven Violin Sonatas, with Casals, Beethoven Cello Sonatas and with both of them Beethoven Trios. One critic said it was a trio "such as has never been before".

Through most of the First World War Friedman lived in Copenhagen. It was in Denmark that the late Danish pianist Gunnar Johansen first heard him as a youngster, relating, "It was colossal. Now years later when I hear his recordings I understand why. He had an individuality like nobody else - nobody plays like Friedman."

In 1940 he was invited to tour Australia and left France just before the Germans entered. At a concert in the summer of 1943, he felt coordination problems in an all-Chopin programme which included the 24 Preludes, some Etudes, Polonaises, Mazurkas and the B flat minor and B minor Sonatas. The next day his left hand was completely numb, and Friedman, who had exulted in public performance, was never again heard on stage. His affliction was diagnosed as a form of rheumatism.

It had been a worldwide career, and in the early 1930s he was the favourite pianist of Japan. In forty-one years he played 3000 concerts. Friedman died on January 26, 1948. He was one of the most wonderful pianists with an unforgettable sound, a soaring imagination and possessing one of the outstanding techniques in an age of great technicians.

Friedman made an American tour in 1920 when he began recording a considerable repertoire for the Duo-Art Piano, including two representations on this CD. The incomparable Don Juan Fantasy based on Mozart's opera is heard in a cut version, since the composition was too long to be contained on one roll, and could not conveniently be divided into parts. The cuts are Friedman's own. The Fourth Viennese Dance is from a set of six Gärtner-Friedman Waltzes, little masterpieces of nostalgic waltz writing on themes from his friend the singer Gärtner.

Frederic Lamond was born in Glasgow, Scotland on January 28, 1868. With his death on February 21, 1948, followed by that of the Portuguese pianist Jose Vienna Da-Motta on June 1, 1948, the last of Liszt's pupils passed away; the final links to Liszt, the greatest inspirational force in the history of piano playing.

By twelve Lamond was organist at his church. His early studies included violin, piano and composition. He left Scotland in 1882 to study at the Raff Conservatory in Frankfurt. Later the boy worked with Hans von Bülow who helped instil in him his life-long admiration for Beethoven. Bülow had inspired in him the desire to study with Liszt who was still surrounding himself with young talents.

It was Liszt's pupil Arthur Friedheim who introduced the seventeen-year-old Lamond to the Abbé Liszt in Weimar. Lamond relates the great moment in his memoirs:

"The meeting took place in the music room of Liszt's house... It breathed an atmosphere of infinite peace and culture. Something of the spirit of Goethe and Schiller hovered over the house... Suddenly the door of the bedroom opened, and there before me stood the man who as a child had received the kiss of consecration from the mighty Beethoven himself; who had been the friend of Chopin; the pioneer for Berlioz and Wagner; the inventor of a new form in orchestral music, namely the Symphonic Poem; the teacher, the preceptor of Carl Tausig and Hans von Bülow, and all the great pianists from the 1840s down to that day in 1885. Here was the outstanding personality who had exercised such an incredible influence on music. It would have been a moving experience to meet such a man today. To the boy I was then, it was simply overwhelming. He read the letter of introduction, turned to me with his commanding yet kindly eyes and said, 'You play among other things the Fugue from Op. 106'. Here he hummed the theme, which sounded from his lips like the growl of a lion, and said, giving me a friendly slap on the shoulder, 'Tomorrow you play the Fugue from Op. 106' - and the interview was at an end. I rushed from that room in an indescribable state of mind."

After a fine Berlin debut in November 1885, Lamond played his first recital in his home town of Glasgow to rave reviews. Soon after, the ambitious young pianist scheduled no less than four recitals in London. The last concert coincided with Liszt's first English visit in forty-three years, and for that concert Liszt was prevailed upon to attend. When it was heard that Liszt would be there, the venue was changed to the larger St. James' Hall. But the event was a mixed blessing. When Lamond brought the cataract-ridden Abbé out on his arm, the 1800 people stood applauding for nearly fifteen minutes, refusing to stop, while Liszt had to constantly keep bowing. By the time Lamond commenced with his first selection, he was a definite anti-climax; although the affection that Liszt publicly bestowed on the youth was not forgotten.

For long periods he lived in Germany, leaving when the Nazis came to power. London became his headquarters for the rest of his long life. Lamond left a fair amount of recordings, many of them exhibit his serious nature, a sense of elegance, a beautiful singing tone, and a smoothly efficient technique. His compositions include piano music, chamber and orchestral scores.

Harold Bauer, one of the most beloved musicians of his time, was born in London in 1873. Musically he dabbled with composition and wrote some marvellous transcriptions; the finest are his sensitive adaptations of Bach and Franck. Much preferring to share the stage, he was an incomparable chamber player, often collaborating with Casals and Fritz Kreisler. One of his most enjoyable activities was his famous two-piano recitals with Ossip Gabrilowitsch.

Finally, he spent much of his career as a piano soloist, but none of this happened until he had given up the violin at the age of twenty. Indeed Bauer had been a prodigy on the violin, publicly performing a wide repertoire. However, he loved the piano, but had absolutely no training except his own unmethodical tinkering.

One day in the early 1890s, a benefactor gave Bauer a sum of money for travel purposes. Paris was his destination, where he lived for twenty years. Meeting Paderewski he played violin for him and also happened to play through a piano piece. Bauer wrote, "Paderewski pulled me by the hair, saying, 'You must become a pianist. You have such beautiful hair.'" Bauer, however, swore that Paderewski's comment had nothing to do with his change of instrument. However, he began laboriously working at the piano, and his progress was amazing. Bauer had been struck by the exceptional violinists who had studied at the Paris Conservatoire such as Kreisler, Thibaud and Enescu, and wrote, "I could not hold a candle to any of these great violinists.

I was not good enough, and I knew it." But soon he had engagements as an accompanist as well as a recitalist. By 1900 the twenty-seven year-old pianist made an American début with the Boston Symphony in the Brahms D minor Concerto.

America quickly took to Bauer, and his career kept growing in the United States and Europe. He seemed to know everybody, and introduced Debussy's Children's Corner Suite in 1908, while at the same time Ravel dedicated his Ondine to him. Ravel, however, could not understand Bauer's veneration for Schumann. Ravel admitted Schumann was a genius, but felt he had poisoned musical taste with his "sickening sentimentality". In the 1930s Bauer started editing his once-popular editions of Schumann for the publisher G. Schirmer. Today they are seldom used because of his arbitrary 'Romantic' editing. Bauer would decide many notational improvements for Schumann, often not telling the student what the original intention was. However, in conjunction with other editions, a pianist may find an altogether original, highly interesting mind at work, especially in the phrasing. As a pianist Bauer was a great communicator who played with few eccentricities, and a wide range of tone. He made many piano rolls for Aeolian's Duo-Art Piano, always editing them himself.

Nikolai Medtner was born in Moscow on January 5, 1880. He died in London on November 13, 1951. As a prodigy he entered the Moscow Conservatory at the age of twelve, eventually studying with three historically important piano teachers, Paul Pabst, Sapellnikov and Safonov, and graduating with the Gold Medal in piano playing. After winning the coveted Rubinstein Prize, he toured Europe to critical acclaim. For the rest of his life he performed in public, but nerves, an introverted personality, poor health and an increasing concentration on creative work made concertising a difficult chore.

His early piano music (Opus 1 was published when he was twenty-two) was easily accepted within the climate of late Russian Romanticism. In 1905 he composed his first Fairy Tales, Op. 8, a title which he frequently used for sets of small pieces which are lyric gems of rare vintage, exquisitely crafted.

By 1909 Medtner was well established in Russia, teaching at the Moscow Conservatory and giving concerts in Germany. In a 1912 letter Rakhmaninov sings Medtner's praise: "I love him very much. I respect him very much and I consider him the most talented of all modern composers. He is - as musician and as man - one of those rare beings who gain in stature, the more closely you approach them."

He left post-Revolutionary Russia in 1921 to live in Berlin. Like Rakhmaninov, after leaving his homeland he felt rootless. Embarking on a tour of the United States in 1924 in New York, he made a few rolls for the Aeolian Duo-Art, one of which is the Danza Festiva heard on this disc. It is the third of eight pieces generically titled Forgotten Melodies.

For a time he lived in Paris, where he wrote a strange book titled The Muse and the Fashion. In 1936 London became his home for the rest of his life.

Superficially, Medtner resembles Rakhmaninov, but an appreciation of his often austere and beautiful music is seldom immediate. With much of Medtner, it needs repeated hearing to impart his musical wisdom in all of its dense contrapuntal expertise and rhythmic subtlety and diversity.

Ignaz Jan Paderewski (1860-1941) was the greatest box-office attraction of any instrumentalist of the late-nineteenth century and the first third of the twentieth century. A figure of supreme interest and, after Liszt and Anton Rubinstein, the most written-about pianist in the history of the instrument. Definitely not in the same class as a technician as such colleagues as Friedheim, Carreño, Rosenthal, Sauer, Busoni and others, Paderewski, however, had a magical glamour, an all-pervading glow, that elusive thing called 'star-quality' which translates to any audience.

In countless articles his alluring charismatic persona was analysed and wondered at. Many pianists have loved their instrument, but none more than Paderewski, who laboured with a passion that defied normal fatigue. One jealous pianist snorted, "He does everything well but play the piano."

However, he did play brilliantly and poetically, and, in his best years until around 1920, he was a virtuoso with an enormous sound flooding the spacious auditoriums he was forced to play in to accommodate huge, growing audiences. Paderewski's encore sessions alone could contain from ten to twenty selections, and, in his renderings of small lyrics of Schumann and Chopin, his auditors sat breathless, lost in nostalgia, often with eyes wet. To compound his success his Minuet in G attained great popularity. Arriving at his destination in a private railway car, the town's brass band often welcomed him with a rendition of the innocuous Minuet, which he came to detest. It mattered little, and he never deprived his audience of the thrill of it, knowing well the sheet music was breaking all sales records. H. L. Mencken recalled as a boy when the Minuet was first available in Baltimore it caused "a sensation... People lined up for the music in the music-store..."

From his first appearance in the United States in 1891 he was idolised, and it was the same everywhere he went, playing in Europe, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Where there was a piano, Paderewski would find it. Once in a very small town, he performed with a painful finger injury. Asked why he didn't cancel, he bluntly answered, "I may never come this way again. I could not disappoint them."

A magnificent orator and a Polish patriot, he had become the symbol of his homeland during World War I. As a diplomat he was admired by Woodrow Wilson and Lloyd George. It was Paderewski who signed for his nation in the Versailles Conference, and, when a liberated Poland emerged, he became the first Premier. After a few years he retired from the brutal politics of post-World War I, returning to his faithful piano. Old and frail, he was still performing when again catastrophe befell his nation in 1939. He died in 1941.

One of the noble spirits of the age, President Franklin Roosevelt honoured him with the burial of a hero at Washington's Arlington National Cemetery. Thousands had attended his funeral service at New York's Saint Patrick Cathedral. Recently his remains were returned to 'a Free Poland'.

Feruccio Busoni, born in the small Italian town of Empoli on April 1, 1866, was one of the towering pianists in history and a versatile, many-sided musician and thinker whose own music has never been more appreciated than today. His scale of influence in his own time was enormous. His ideas and advice influenced composers as dissimilar as Sibelius, Varèse, Walton, Percy Grainger, Schoenberg, Hindemith and Kurt Weill. His pupils were legion, both in composition and piano. Busoni was open to every fresh impulse. His book Sketch of a New Aesthetic of Music had a far-reaching influence. In it he modestly wrote,

"I should like to catch hold of a corner of the coming art of music and, where possible, sew a seam in it myself."

Busoni's activities were vast; he taught a great deal, from 'Lisztian' masterclasses in Weimar, Vienna and Berlin to teaching positions in Helsingfors, Moscow and Boston's New England Conservatory where he premiered his superb distillation of Bach's Chaconne in 1892. For a time he was the Director of the Bologna Conservatory. It is little known that he also conducted, and early in the century he was producing such new music in Berlin as Debussy's Nocturnes, Sibelius' Second Symphony and Delius' Paris, among others.

His tours as a pianist were endless: a restless seeker for perfection, he was relentlessly self-critical. Not for Busoni, an after-recital reception or frivolity. Feeling that the best time to practice was after the concert itself, he would often tidy up details as he searched ever deeper into the great masterpieces of the piano literature. From the beginning of his career his playing was different from others. Brooding philosophical, Faustian, he thought big, felt big and played bigger. The tiniest Chopin Prelude took on a largesse, and, though he was infused with the deepest feeling, he would crush any wayward impulse of sentimentality.

His Chopin was frequently condemned for being too monumental, lacking charm. At a Paris recital after playing the Ballades, an old gentleman in the audience loudly proclaimed, "In the name of Chopin, I protest!" Others felt his Beethoven was too massive, his rhythm too uncompromising. He wrote, "I built up for myself an ideal of Beethoven which has wrongly been called 'modern' and which is really no more than 'live'." One of his enigmatic dictums was, "Bach is the foundation of piano playing, Liszt is the summit, and the two make Beethoven possible."

He loved Bach as a religion. His Bach transcriptions were so well-known that once, at a party, he was introduced as Mr. Bach-Busoni. At the age of twenty-three he produced an edition of Bach's Inventions, fascinating in its fingerings, tempi and details of phrasing. A later edition of the Well-Tempered Clavier bristles with dense and intellectual footnotes. For him Bach was a dilemma, and he tried to bring Bach to terms with the sound of the modern piano. In his reverence for the piano he is a true spiritual son of Liszt. "Take it for granted," he said, "from the beginning that everything is possible on the piano, even when it seems impossible to you, or really is so." "With the piano," he wrote, "a single person can command a complete whole." And it was 'wholeness' that counted most to Busoni. Above all he was an idealist, believing "anyone who will master the language of art must have nurtured his life through the soul."

Born in Brighton, near Melbourne, Australia in 1882 Percy Aldridge Grainger was one of the fascinating and picturesque characters of the twentieth century. A folk-song collector and composer of large output, a concert pianist, whose playing possessed a unique vitality and graciousness and a personal life, bizarre by any standards and whose sado-masochistic activities he found ecstatic and was proud of. In short Grainger was "turned on" by whips. His eccentricities on almost every level of life were incredible and complicated. He had countless theories, many blatantly racist, violent or absurd. And yet there was a great purity in him. When a critic said that his Gum-suckers March was somewhat vulgar, his mother Rose replied, "But there is always something vulgar about Percy."

Throughout his life his habits caused comment, controversy and often commotion. Even in frozen weather he went about without overcoat or hat. In the earlier years of the century merely not wearing a hat was strange, and twice he was arrested for this aberration.

His teen years were spent in Frankfurt, where he studied with the Dutch-born James Kwast. From 1901 he lived in London, performing extensively in England and Europe with much success, but which was greatly magnified when he arrived in America. Early in 1915, performing to a capacity house at Aeolian Hall with Caruso and other luminaries attending, he performed the Bach-Busoni Organ Prelude and Fugue in D major, the Handel Variations of Brahms, a few of his own pieces as well as Chopin, Ravel and Albeniz. The critics went wild. James Huneker called him, "The Siegfried of the Piano", and Henry T. Finck wrote that "in less than half an hour he convinced his critical audience that he belongs in the same rank as Paderewski and Kreisler... The audience was stunned, bewildered, delighted."

Later that year, he began making a large series of piano rolls for Duo-Art, becoming one of the biggest sellers in the Aeolian Company's large roster of pianists. The following year (1916) he played at the White House for President Wilson, and, soon after, enlisted in the United States Army.

In 1918 he wrote a piano setting of Country Gardens, a traditional English tune which became one of the all-time favourite pieces of the amateur pianist for a quarter of a century. Although it brought Grainger extra fame and money, he was unhappy that it eclipsed his entire output. He sarcastically wrote, "The typical English country garden is not often used to grow flowers in; it is more likely to be a vegetable plot. So you can think of turnips as I play it."

In the performance of his own music, Grainger shines. Nobody else has played Mock Morris, Molly on the Shore, Spoon River, Handel in the Strand or the perennial Country Gardens with such rollicking good will. One may see his verve and fearless movements at the keyboard in the video this writer made, The Golden Age of the Piano (Philips Classics) in a film clip of Grainger performing Maguire's Kick, based on No. 1 of Four Irish Dances by Stanford, and which is contained on this CD.

For more information on Grainger's baffling life and personality, I refer the reader to a collection of letters titled The Farthest North of Humanness, and to John Bird's excellent pioneering biography. Ill-health and cancer hindered his last years. His final concert took place at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire on April 29, 1960. On February 20, 1961 he died at his home in White Plains, New York and was buried in Adelaide, Australia's West Terrace Cemetery.

Josef Hofmann was born in Podgorze, Poland in 1876. The most astonishing child prodigy of the late-nineteenth century, he was fortunate in having for a teacher his father Casimir, a remarkable musician. At the age of nine he was performing throughout Europe. In Berlin the child was soloist in the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 1 with the great Hans von Bülow conducting. In 1887 he arrived in America and made a sensation at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Afterwards he played forty concerts in various cities before he was banned from the stage by the society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. An anonymous donor, later identified as the American millionaire Alfred Corning Clark, gave Casimir $50,000 to take the prodigy home for study with the promise that the boy would not play again in public until he was eighteen.

In Berlin he worked at the piano with Moszkowski, who taught him for nearly two years. Like everyone else, Moszkowski was dazzled by the boy's gifts and told Casimir that he no longer knew how to teach him. Soon after, the youngster studied with the venerable Anton Rubinstein. It was to be the great experience of his youth. Although Hofmann had often heard Rubinstein in public, the great pianist would not demonstrate at the lessons, refusing to let Hofmann imitate him. Rubinstein knew how to motivate him. Hofmann related, "Once I played a Liszt Rhapsody pretty badly. After a few moments he said, 'The way you played this piece would be all right for Auntie or Mamma.' And from there Rubinstein would instil the idiom of the piece into his charge, asking, 'Is it dramatic, tragic, lyric, mystic - what!?' ...He would stand at my side and, whenever he wanted a special stress laid upon a certain note, his powerful fingers would press upon my left shoulder with such force that I would stab the keys till the piano fairly screamed for me."

After two years with Rubinstein, Hofmann, now eighteen, was allowed to return to performing in 1894. From that time forward, he played in Europe, Russia, Mexico and the United States with unequalled success. In 1927 he became Director of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, a position he retained until 1938. The year before, he gave a concert at the Metropolitan Opera House celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of his first appearance in the United States. The recording made from that concert has become one of the best-known piano recordings ever made. Hofmann retired from concerts in 1946. He worked on an autobiography which unfortunately was left incomplete at his death in 1957.

As a pianist, Hofmann is one of the great figures of the instrument. Rakhmaninov never tired of calling him the greatest living pianist, "not only technically but in every way."


© 1995 David Dubal

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