Josef Hofmann plays Chopin

by David Dubal









Beneath a rather blandly cool exterior, Josef Hofmann, whom Rakhmaninov and many others considered the greatest pianist of their time, was a complex person, seething with many undercurrents, often of a paradoxical nature. Hofmann came to maturity with the new century, the first years of which, until the War, were the glorious twilight of a golden age of art. It was also the peak of world piano production; a house was not a home without its piano in the parlour. Hofmann, who had been in the public eye since his fabled prodigy days, was, after Paderewski, the biggest pianistic box-office attraction in the world.

In some ways Hofmann represented new 20th-century trends. For many pianists, a composer's musical score had become merely a springboard for waywardness. For his time Hofmann took a no-nonsense approach to the composers' markings and intent. He wrote, "I venture to prove to anyone who will play for me - if he be at all worth listening to - that he does not play more than is written (as he may think), but, in fact, a good deal less than the printed page reveals." To some his playing appeared cold and unemotional. What audiences of the era had not yet realised in Hofmann's playing was its unerring rhythmic command. It was a new kind of symphonic rhythm that seemed brash and mechanical. Here was a new modern school of playing, and Hofmann, as well as Rakhmaninov and Busoni, were accused of lack of feeling. It is interesting that the leading piano connoisseur of the day, James Huneker (1862-1924) felt little empathy for these three giants.

Hofmann, the person, was indeed of the new century. He could hardly look more different than his dishevelled master, Anton Rubinstein, whose lion mane symbolised the "long haired musician" invented by Liszt himself. Hofmann was a 'modern' young man, and his short hair, neat and business-like dress and clean-cut look was frequently noted with approval by journalists, nor was there anything flamboyant about his behaviour on stage or off. He shook hands heartily, proudly, showing off the bulging muscles of his small hands. An avid sportsman, he was a tireless hiker and mountain climber, a good swimmer and rower, a yachtsman, an excellent billiard player and a fine tennis competitor. (Imagine a Chopin or Anton Rubinstein on a tennis court.) Above all, Hofmann was a gifted inventor with eventually more than sixty patents to his credit from piano mechanism improvements to shock absorbers. Supposedly, the idea for the wind-shield wiper came from him, inspired by watching the movement of his metronome. By 1904 he had built from scratch his own elaborate automobile and drove throughout Europe with his friend, the pianist Constantin von Sternberg.

Like most performers of the era, he also composed, but in this respect the 20th century eluded him. His best compositions are mostly salon miniatures, well-crafted and melodically distinctive but of little originality. Around 1910 he was asked, "What contemporary composers write good piano music?" He replied, "Speaking very generally, there seems to be not very much good music for the piano just at present. By far the best come from Russia." Was Hofmann ignorant or did he consider 'negligible' the recent productions of Debussy, Ravel, Albeniz, Granados, Reger, Cyril Scott, Szymanowski, Busoni and others? To his wife he said, "Modern music spoils the old for one, and yet gives nothing to replace the joy afforded by the old school. No melody, nothing which touches the heart."

Josef Hofmann was born in Podgorze, Poland, near Cracow on January 20, 1876. His father Casimir was a remarkable musician, a composer of ballets and operas, a good pianist and a fine conductor. Mrs Hofmann, the sturdy under-pinning of the family for a time flourished as a singer at the Cracow opera. Josef had his first lessons at three and a half from his talented five year old sister Wanda. Casimir's own sister was soon responsible for the boy's lessons, and his progress was so swift that the busy Casimir began teaching his son himself. Hofmann was forever grateful to his father as a teacher and a mentor. He later wrote, "I was fortunate in having a father who realised my musical possibilities and from the very beginning was intensely interested in my career, not merely as a father, but as an artist guiding and piloting every day of my life... I am sure that my father was the author of a great deal of the success that I have enjoyed."

At six, the boy made his debut at a charity concert. He was more than a sensation, and words were hard to find to describe the miraculous skills of the boy wonder. Of course comparisons with Mozart would follow the boy for years, and his early music seemed charming and promising. Casimir was flooded by requests for the child to appear in public, and, although the family sadly needed the revenue, he refused the engagements, letting Joseph appear only occasionally for charity affairs.

Anton Rubinstein, the most celebrated of all performing pianists, who loathed prodigies and their parents alike, was astonished when he heard Hofmann at seven, calling him, "a musical phenomenon", telling the influential impresario Hermann Wolff, that "this prodigy I believe in, hear him." Wolff, who had organised Rubinstein's "Historical Recitals" in the capitals of Europe, had to prevail upon Casimir to let him manage Josef's career.

But Casimir knew the boy was not yet ready for the stress of such a step, and emphatically refused his persistent offers. Instead, he worked his son harder than ever, building an invincible technique, giving the boy a severe regime of scales, which were to become among the fastest and most even scales of any pianist. He once said, "a well-played scale is a truly beautiful thing, but few people play them well because they do not practise them enough. Scales are among the most difficult things in piano playing and how the student who aspires to rise above mediocrity can hope to succeed without a thorough and far-reaching drill in all kinds of scales, I do not know. I do know, however, that I was drilled unrelentingly in them, and that I have been grateful for this all my life."

Finally, when Joseph was nine, Wolff had his way, and Hofmann began a long European tour; wherever he appeared it was concluded that this natural and unconceited child was the foremost prodigy of the age. During his concerts, he played a varied repertoire including his own music, and exhibited his gift for improvisation with members of the audience providing themes for him to embroider.

For his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic, Wolff teamed him up with the great pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow, Rubinstein's closest rival as a pianist and one of the finest conductors of the period. At a rehearsal of the Beethoven First Concerto the boy told Bülow that the cellos were not playing a certain passage correctly. Bülow, a Beethoven specialist, was palpably annoyed, as the naïve Josef reproduced on the piano the passage correctly. Bülow succumbed, in embarrassment, to his orchestra, although the concert proved to be a sensation.

Hofmann's hearing was so acute and his absolute pitch so perfect that his feats of ear astounded everyone. In later years he found the rarefication of his absolute pitch "to be a nuisance." He said, "nor do I believe that the so-called acute sense of hearing, or highly developed sense of absolute pitch, has very much to do with one's real musical ability. The physical hearing is nothing; the spiritual hearing - if one may say so - is what really counts."

Following the child's triumphant procession through Europe, Wolff arranged for an American tour, which was inaugurated with a flourish on November 29, 1887 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, backed up by a 100-member orchestra. The dimple-chinned boy was quaintly dressed in a striped sailor shirt, knee-breeches and stockings, and as The New York Times reported, "looked, if anything, younger than he is." The programme, besides three orchestral works, consisted of the Beethoven Concerto No. 1, Variations by Rameau, Hofmann's own Berceuse, a Chopin group and Weber's Polacca in Liszt's arrangement for piano and orchestra.

The revered critic of The New York Times, W.J. Henderson, wrote, "...The audience was plainly surprised at his appearance, and a general exclamation resulted... He was in looks a bright, healthy, strong, normal boy, with sturdy legs and arms... when he concluded the Beethoven Concerto, a thunder of applause swept through the opera house. Many people leaped to their feet. Men shouted 'Bravo!' and women waved their handkerchiefs. Pianists of repute were moved almost to tears. Some wiped the moisture from their eyes. The child had astonished the assembly. He was a marvel... Josef Hofmann played, not only like an artist, but like a master. The tenderness of sentiment, the poetic insight into the meaning. The symmetrical conception of the movement as a whole, and the ability to make the music not only arouse the intelligence but move the heart of the hearer, displayed by this child, were simply wonderful. And these things cannot be taught... Suffice it to say, for the present, that Josef Hofmann, as a musical phenomenon, is worthy of the sensation which he has created. More than that, he is an artist and we can listen to his music without taking into consideration the fact that he is a child."

Shortly after the concert, Josef was taken to meet Thomas Edison and recorded several cylinders on Edison's new recording machine. These first musical recordings in history are unfortunately lost.

Josef blithely went on to play forty lucrative concerts, with another forty scheduled, when the rather new 'Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children' used the boy as a test case for cruel treatment. As with most things institutionalised, the individual concerned rarely matters, and the youngster was prevented from playing further concerts in the United States. Hofmann always insisted that he had been having a grand time, and experienced no strain whatever.

Playing to people had become as natural for him as a bird singing. Thrust from the stage and downcast, Josef and his parents prepared to return to Berlin, when Alfred Corning Clark, a New York business man, emerged as from a movie script, offering Casimir $50,000 on the condition that Josef would not appear in public again until he was eighteen and that Casimir devote himself exclusively to the boy's education. At home, Casimir taught his son until he could offer him no more. Josef had been studying theory and composition with Urban, and was given to the elegant pianist-composer Moritz Moszkowski for piano instruction. Josef worked well under Moszkowski, who helped build his repertoire, especially in Schumann and Chopin. He adored the boy, dedicating to him his sparkling E major Concerto. Hofmann, in turn, played, with incomparable verve, several of Moszkowski's delightful pieces throughout his career. After nearly two years, Moszkowski confessed to Casimir, "The boy knows so much more and plays so much better than I do, I don't know how to teach him."

Fortunately, the great Anton Rubinstein was living in Dresden. Rubinstein in 1862 had founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory, but had never taught privately. Rubinstein heard Hofmann, now sixteen, and gladly accepted him. For two years Hofmann travelled weekly from Berlin to the Hôtel de l'Europe where Rubinstein stayed while in Dresden. The mighty pianist never played during a lesson, but uncannily awakened Josef's musical curiosity, intellect and daring. "His manner of teaching," Hofmann wrote, "was such that it would have made any other teacher appear to me like a schoolmaster... Rubinstein would always ask me the same question: 'Well, what is new in the world?' and I would reply, 'I know nothing new, that's why I came to learn something new - from you.' He would follow every note of my playing with his eyes riveted on the printed pages. A pedant he certainly was, a stickler for the letter - incredibly so, especially when one considered the liberties he took when he played the same works! Once I called his attention modestly to this seeming paradox, and he answered, 'When you are as old as I am now, you may do as I do - if you can." Once I asked him for the fingering of a rather complex passage. 'Play it with your nose,' he replied, 'but make it sound well.' He meant help yourself! The Lord helps those who help themselves!"

Hofmann, now eighteen, could now begin concertising again. One day, during the intermission of a Rubinstein concert in Berlin, Rubinstein bluntly told his pupil to prepare his Fourth Piano Concerto in D minor, which Hofmann had not been allowed to play. Rubinstein wanted it learned in two days, as he was to conduct in Hamburg, three days hence. Hofmann vigorously protested that this was not possible, whereupon Rubinstein took his hand, saying, "My boy, for us there are no difficulties." Nor would Rubinstein coach him on it. "It is not necessary," he said, "we understand each other!" The concert was a great success, with Rubinstein embracing his pupil on stage. Hofmann said, "I was not in the seventh, but in the eighth heaven!"

The Hamburg concert took place on March 14, 1894. Afterwards Hofmann casually asked Rubinstein when he would play for him again. His master's answer was a shock, "Never!" Hofmann wrote, "In my despair I asked him why not? 'My dear boy,' Rubinstein replied, 'I have told you all I know about legitimate piano-playing and music-making - and if you don't know know it yet, why, go to the devil!' The youngster understood that he was now to become his own person. The two never met again. Eight months later on November 19, 1894 Rubinstein died of heart failure. Hofmann wrote, "The world appeared suddenly entirely empty to me; my grief made me realise how my heart had worshipped not only the artist in him but also the man."

Two days after the news of Rubinstein's death, Hofmann played at Cheltenham. He remembered in the Chopin Sonata No. 2, "as I struck the first notes of the Funeral March the whole audience rose from their seats, as if commanded, and remained standing with lowered heads during the whole piece - in honour of the great departed."

For the next twenty years Hofmann ceaselessly played in Europe, America and Russia, where he was considered Rubinstein's successor. His tours throughout Russia were legendary. In 1913 he played, within as many days, twenty-one recitals in St. Petersburg alone, in the vast Salle Noblesse, seating 3,200, playing 255 compositions before 68,000 people. Such statistics give a good idea of the hunger for piano playing at a time when world piano production was at its zenith. With the coming of the war and the 1917 Revolution, Hofmann never again played in Russia.

In 1905 he married Marie Eustis, a socialite from New Orleans, eleven years his senior. Her father had been the American Ambassador to France during the Grover Cleveland administration. Marie had studied piano with the eminent Liszt pupil, Giovanni Sgambati. During their first years together she travelled everywhere with him, often under difficult conditions. In her diary she described the Hofmann mania in Russia. "The Hofmannistes," she wrote, "were surrounding our sleigh, they cried 'Down with America, he belongs to us!' I hope I won't be murdered by some jealous girl. They are all crazy enough to do anything." She wrote, at a concert, "I was nearly crushed in my front seat by people trying to get nearer him. One girl grabbed another by the throat and choked her because she touched Josef's shoulder."

In the United States his position was unassailable. Edward Bok, the Philadelphia millionaire and publisher asked Hofmann to contribute a Piano Questions column for the Ladies Home Journal which the pianist conscientiously answered from 1901 until 1914, and which was a popular feature of the magazine.

In 1924 Mary Curtis Bok established the Curtis Institute of Music, where Hofmann taught a few gifted pianists, one of them being Shura Cherkassky. In 1927 Hofmann became the school's director, proving to be a fine educator and administrator, bringing to the faculty a group of distinguished musicians including Efrem Zimbalist, Fritz Reiner, Marcella Sembrich and Leopold Auer. However, his Directorship cut into his concertising, and, when he returned to England in 1933 after many years absence, the audiences were small.

For years, Hofmann's marriage had been in decline. Hofmann's eye for a pretty girl had repeatedly brought him trouble at home. Once, he had been named as defendant in a law suit regarding a married woman, which caused much embarrassment. With the arrivals of their three children, Marie opted to stay home with them, while Hofmann strenuously objected, wanting her with him on tour. After an indiscretion, he wrote to her in self-defence,"There is no doubt that I am different from other people, but how else could this be? First, I was born a different animal from others; second, I was brought up differently than others; and third, I've lived a different life than others. Why wonder then and accuse me of certain lacks, when I have so many other qualities which average people do not possess? One cannot be perfect in every respect. One quality usually develops at the expense of another." By 1927 he had fallen in love with a music student thirty years his junior, and, after twenty-two years of marriage, Marie divorced him.

As Hofmann grew older, the always-stoic pianist became taciturn and moody, turning to alcohol to erase his unhappiness. As a performer he was always moody, and like many Romantic pianists never played twice the same. But, as the years rolled on, the drinking took its toll and his performances had a dangerous unpredictability.

In the 1930s he still possessed most of his superlative musical and technical powers. The highlight of that decade was his Golden Jubilee Concert of 1937, held at the Metropolitan Opera House, fifty years and a day since his American debut. It was the concert that capped off the career of the sixty-one year old pianist, and mirrored Hofmann's unprecedented place in American musical life. The President of the United States, Franklin Roosevelt, who could not attend, wrote, "My regret is the keener because I first heard you play when you were a boy and I was a boy; few, therefore, have followed your career for a longer period, and none with a deeper sense of appreciation than I." Hofmann donated the proceeds of the Jubilee Concert to the Musicians Emergency Fund; and the Musicians Committee for the concert was made up of 140 musicians, many of still-legendary status. Godowsky, Iturbi, Rakhmaninov, Paderewski, Rosenthal, Horowitz, Szigeti, Heifetz, Hess, Martinelli, Stokowski, Toscanini, Lehmann, Salzedo, Farrar, Bampton, Elman, Flagstad, Barbirolli, Lhevinne, to name some at random, were at the gala event. It was truly a golden age of performers.

In 1938 Hofmann resigned his position at the Curtis Institute, though continuing to perform. His last Carnegie Hall recital took place on January 20, 1946. The concert was a hardship, and Hofmann, aged seventy, retired, an exhausted man. He had been tied to the piano almost from infancy, and music unfortunately had lost the vital freshness necessary for a musician's staying-power. He withdrew from the world to his workshop of inventions, dying at the age of eighty-one in Los Angeles on February 16, 1957.

During the last years of Hofmann's career the performance of music changed radically. Hofmann's kind of Romantic playing was rapidly disappearing. Instead of a performer's individuality being prized, it had almost become suspect. Instead of a mysterious alchemy where the performer 'divined' a score, shedding new insight on it, performers became 'respectful' to the composer, in much more conservative, simplified playing, telling the story supposedly exactly as the composers wanted it. This was indeed opposite to what Mahler once said, "What is best in the music is not to be found in the notes."

Hofmann, who had begun his career labelled a 'modernist', was now brutally criticised by some critics. The Chopin scholar, Arthur Hedley, hated the Golden Jubilee recording, "...insane prestissimos, the wild fluctuations of rhythm (otherwise known as rubato) - in a word the depths have been reached." B.J. Haggin thought Hofmann's performances, "are contrived for their own effect of shock and excitement by their unexpectedness, their exhibition of daring wilfulness and perversity." In his memoirs, My Many Years, Arthur Rubinstein wrote, "...His chief interest lay in dynamics, in a slowly prepared crescendo ending in a volcanic outburst at the climax, and he felt great satisfaction in frightening the audience by using the violent contrast of a pianissimo followed by a sudden fortissimo smash... And yet, he was a pianist of great stature, because, a musical personality emerged at every concert which I cannot lightly dismiss." It is Rubinstein's last sentence that tells the story.

Today, Hofmann's playing is again prized for what it was: the playing of a great musician and personality. When listening to Hofmann, we are shocked by his colossal daring, his impish humour, his sense of irony; his are extraordinary 'commentaries' upon the music. He possessed a unique individuality fortified by one of the massive techniques of all time. His fingers were steel, his trills and passage work stupendous, his chords chilling, the sound can only be called 'Hofmannesque'. He was sensuous, poetic, demonic, maddeningly perverse at times and there is an irresistible magnetic force in his playing. There is no doubt that he was one of the most thrilling pianists in history.

From 1918 he recorded a great deal for the Aeolian Company's Duo-Art Reproducing Piano. Of the process he wrote, "The performance of the Duo-Art has its source in the mind of the artist and is as much a product of his imagination as when he plays in person."


© 1995 David Dubal

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