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Josef Hofmann
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| Josef Hofmann like many pianists of his generation, was solidly trained in composition and pursued this art from infancy to maturity.
Most of his music is negligible, some contains an aroma of other composers, but there is a group of highly playable virtuoso pieces, such as Kaleidoscope (available on NI 8802 The Polish Virtuoso).
There is one work of larger time dimension called Chromaticon for piano and orchestra which to my ears is horrid stuff, and which only its creator would want to play.
Nobody else to my knowledge has ever touched it.
Hofmann told the world that Chromaticon and a few other pieces were the endeavours of a certain Michel Dvorsky, a pale invalid languishing in the South of France.
Hofmann's hobby was creating inventions, the windshield wiper was his most successful, Dvorsky his least (Slavonic linguists might have spotted that Dvorsky is Russian for Hofmann!).
Gerald Stonehill writes: Musically, the most important of Hofmann's inventions was his device for measuring the exact touch of the pianist (see A Technical Outline of the Reproducing Piano).
This invention was already in use, for recording Duo-Art rolls, in 1924, five years earlier than The Journal of the Acoustical Society of America published a description of The Spark Chronograph 'for measuring intensity of percussion instrument tones' by Dr.
Hickman of the rival Ampico system.
But, by 1929, due to The Depression, the era of the reproducing piano was already in terminal decay. This extremely small, muscular man, with powerful, compact hands which could barely stretch an octave, was however, a supreme artist on the piano, using the instrument to create an unforgettable art. His playing pretends to no great depths of thought. The most profound music such as the more recondite sonatas of Beethoven, the density of Schubert's sonatas, the grace and serenity of Mozart Concerti or Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, or indeed any music demanding intellectual rigor and penetration of the higher type evaded his touch. Hofmann was not a modern interpreter working with all one's might to reflect the glory of the greater artist. On the contrary, he was the artist and the music had to fit, or adjust to, his taste. It is this that consciously or unconsciously intrigues us, and why connoisseurs of pure piano playing can never get enough of Hofmann. Whole evenings are spent with other Hofmann 'crazies' listening to and raving about his every inner voice, or sighing through his seductive portamento in the fioratura of a Chopin Nocturne. The only lament of the evening is that there is not enough of him recorded, and, unfortunately, what we have is usually just past his prime -which was from around 1900 to 1930. And so Hofmann 'nuts' speculate as to how he must have sounded in his greatest days. After all, Rakhmaninov himself called him the greatest pianist of his age. What playing we have reveals plenty, even though recording for him was a straitjacket, and could never compare with the "live" event, the heat of action where adventure could happen. Hofmann was well aware that the great fun of being exclusively a performer was over forever. Pedantry, accuracy, interpretive scruple would take centre stage and rule classical music. The recording would document forever wrong notes, lapses of taste, shaky tempi, hands not played together and much else. No wonder musicians are cautious and often dread their 'live' performances being taped. But we have mostly come to know Hofmann through his 'live' recordings, sometimes unknown to himself. We know nothing of his own thinking of these pirated recordings, but we know he was unhappy with the records he made in the studio. Oh, to return to his glory days of the mighty Russian tours of 1900 to 1913 culminating in the twenty-one recitals he performed for nearly sixty-eight thousand in attendance at St. Petersburg in 1913, where, in a burst of piano fever he brought forth two hundred and fifty-five compositions. What would we not give to hear many of those works which, as the years flew by, he deleted from his recitals. Yet what remains suffices to keep the memory of him vivid. His best-known performances are from his fiftieth-anniversary concert commemorating his first appearance in the United States. This concert of 28 November 1937 shows all of his best and worst characteristics. The playing represents Hofmann's wilful, individualistic and self-centred approach to the composer, a style of playing which was beginning to falter before a more respectful approach to the composer. The Chopin scholar Arthur Hedley, writing about the "Golden Jubilee" recording, decried the playing. "Those who wish to see summed up upon a single disc the end-product of eighty years of "tradition" need go no further than the Jubilee record of 1937, before an enraptured New York audience. Everything is there: the insane prestissimos, the wild fluctuations of rhythm (otherwise known as rubato) in a word, the depths have been reached." Hedley diplomatically adds, "I am not suggesting that Hofmann invariably played Chopin like this." But the die is cast. Those elements of playing that disturbed Hedley are latent in all of Hofmann's playing of any composer especially after 1930. Yet the pianist Abram Chasins (a Hofmann pupil on NI 8811 The New Golden Era) who worshipped Hofmann, was convinced that "Hofmann's art was the adventure of technical perfection and imaginative insight ... " For critic Harold Schonberg, Hofmann was "perfection plus". He dismissed the Hofmann dissenters as "old-maid critics". There is no doubt that Hofmann's art was distinct from all others. His technical grasp of the piano was awesome, and he commanded an enormous dynamic range. Although he considered himself small as compared to his teacher Anton Rubinstein, he too had that elemental power and tornadic temperament which when unleashed, was charged with thunder and lightning. But many of his performances do not translate to the prosaic medium of recording. Those shattering surges, which on first hearing, sweep one away, become - upon repeated hearings - nightmarish, and, worst of all, expected. Hofmann, driven by a fierce kinetic power, was the master of the unexpected. His trills and passage work are unique. His playing in the D flat section of the F minor Ballade of Chopin is an ever-widening vista; it seems to grow beyond the music, and the coda of the work is a feat of technique beyond normal pianistic understanding. Hofmann was always the craftsman, "Technique" he said, "is a chest of tools from which the skilled artisan draws what he needs at the right time for the right purpose." Hofmann came to maturity with the new century. He had been in the public eye since his fabled prodigy days, and he was compared inevitably to Mozart. If today his playing may appear wilful and wayward to some listeners, in his own time he seemed cold and unemotional to many. Along with Busoni and Rakhmaninov he represented a new school of pianism; more intellectual, more symphonic in rhythmic sweep, and by no means as immediately attractive as the playing of Paderewski and a host of Leschetizky pupils. It is worth noting that the finest critical mind of the time, James Huneker (1862-1924), showed scant interest in Busoni, Rakhmaninov and Hofmann and doubtless would not have cared for their "spiritual heir", Vladimir Horowitz, considered at the time a "modernist", and who died being labelled "The Last Romantic". For his day, Hofmann took a no-nonsense approach to the composer's 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." Josef Hofmann was born in Podgorze, Poland, near Cracow, on 20 January 1876. His father Casimir was a good pianist, conductor and an ambitious composer of ballets and operas. Hofmann's mother was the stable under-pinning of the family and, in her youth, had sung at the Cracow Opera. Josef had his first piano lessons at the age of three and a half from his five-year-old sister Wanda. Casimir soon discovered that his tiny son was a musical phenomenon, and took over the direction of his studies. Hofmann was forever grateful to his father as a teacher and mentor. He later wrote, "I was fortunate in having a father who realized 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 the age of six, the child made his début at a charity concert. The concert proved a sensation and critics raved at the wonder of the boy's pianistic skills as well as his gift for improvisation. Casimir was flooded by requests for the child to appear in public, and, although the family needed the money, he refused the engagements, letting Josef appear only occasionally for charity affairs. Soon Anton Rubinstein, the most famous performing pianist of the age, who loathed prodigies and their parents alike, was struck with Josef's gifts, "This prodigy I believe in," he told his own manager Hermann Wolff, "Hear him!" Wolff did and wanted to manage the boy's career. But Casimir, ever watchful, knew that his son was not quite ready for the stress of such a step and refused Wolff's persistent offers. Instead, he worked his son ever harder, building an invincible technique, concentrating on a severe régime of scales. It was no accident that Hofmann's scales were to become among the fleetest and most "even" 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 appears 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 Josef was nine years old, Wolff had his way, and Hofmann began an extended European tour, where it was concluded that this child was the foremost prodigy of the age. For his début with the Berlin Philharmonic, Wolff teamed him up with the great pianist-conductor Hans von Bülow. At a rehearsal of the Beethoven First Piano Concerto the boy told Bülow that the 'cellos were not playing a certain passage correctly. Bülow, a Beethoven specialist, was palpably annoyed, as the naive Josef reproduced the passage correctly on the piano. 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 extended American tour, which was inaugurated with a flourish on 29 November, 1887 at New York's Metropolitan Opera House, backed up by a one-hundred member orchestra. The modest, 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 was hefty; besides three orchestral works, it consisted of the Beethoven Piano 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 leapt 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 ... He is an artist, and we can listen to his music without taking into consideration the fact that he is a child." Amongst the huge crowd amazed by the prodigy, was a young piano student by the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, as the president of the United States, would send Hofmann a congratulatory message for his Fiftieth Anniversary recital. Shortly after his American début, Josef was taken to meet Thomas Edison and he recorded several cylinders on Edison's new recording machine. These first musical recordings in history are lost. Josef blithely went on to perform forty concerts, with another forty scheduled, when the rather recently formed "Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children" used the boy as a test case for cruel treatment. As with most things institutionalized, the individual concerned rarely matters, and the youngster was purged from the concert stage in the United States. Hofmann always insisted that he had been having a grand time, and experienced no strain whatsoever. Playing concerts had become as natural for him as a bird singing. Thrust from the stage and downcast, Josef and family prepared to return to Berlin. At the final moment, Alfred Corning Clark, a New York business man, emerged as from a movie script, offering Casimir $50,000 on the condition that his son would not appear in public until he was eighteen years old. Back in Berlin Josef studied with the popular virtuoso-composer Moritz Moszkowski, who helped build the boy's repertoire. After 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." Around that time, Anton Rubinstein was living in Dresden. Rubinstein who in 1862, had founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory, and who seldom taught privately now accepted the sixteen-year-old Hofmann. For two years he travelled weekly from Berlin to the Hotel de l'Europe, where Rubinstein lived while in Dresden. Studying with Rubinstein was the towering experience of his youth. Hofmann, now aged eighteen, could once again begin concertising. After a performance in Hamburg on 14 March 1894 with Hofmann performing his master's D minor Concerto, with Rubinstein conducting, Hofmann casually asked Rubinstein when he would play for him again. The 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 it yet, why, go to the devil!" Hofmann understood that he was to become his own artist. The two never met again. Eight months later, on 19 November 1894, Rubinstein died of heart failure. "The world appeared suddenly entirely empty to me;" Hofmann wrote, "My grief made me realize how my heart had worshipped not only the artist in him but also the man." For the next twenty years Hofmann performed in Europe, America and Russia. With the coming of the First World War and the 1917 Revolution, Hofmann never again appeared in Russia. In 1905 he married Marie Eustis, a socialite from New Orleans who had studied piano seriously. During their first years together she accompanied him on his tours from Mexico to Moscow. 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 (Duo-Art performances available on NI 8811 The New Golden Era). In 1927 he became the school's director, proving to be an able administrator, bringing to the faculty a group of distinguished musicians such as 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, he was surprised to find the audiences were small. After twenty-two years of marriage, Marie divorced him. As he grew older, the pianist became more abrupt with people, his usual stoic personality turned moody and taciturn, taking refuge more and more in alcohol and finding solace in his various inventions rather than in music. In 1938 Hofmann resigned his post at the Curtis Institute, but continued to perform in the United States during World War II. His last Carnegie Hall recital took place on 20 January 1946. The concert was a hardship, and Hofmann at the age of seventy, retired, an exhausted man. He had been tied to the piano almost from infancy, and music unfortunately for him had lost its freshness and vitality. Over the years his repertory dwindled in size, and he ceased composing. He had never shown any sustaining curiosity in twentieth century music. 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 comes from Russia." In 1909 his friend Rakhmaninov dedicated his Third Concerto to him, but Hofmann never performed it. Was he ignorant or did he consider "negligible", the recent productions of Debussy, Fauré, Ravel, Albéniz, Granados, Reger, Cyril Scott, Szymanowski, Busoni and others? To his wife he wrote, "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." From 1946 he withdrew from the world to his workshop of inventions, dying at the age of eighty-one in Los Angeles on 16 February 1957. From 1918 he recorded a good 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." These CD transfers show Hofmann at the peak of his powers spanning the years 1919 through 1929. The Music Liszt: Hungarian Rhapsody, No. 12 in C sharp minor One of the most frequently performed of Liszt's nineteen Hungarian Rhapsodies, No. 12 is one of the finest of these gypsy essays. Liszt's chordal pomp and extraordinary sense of pianistic colour are a never ending wonder for students of the piano. Liszt: Valse Impromptu in A flat major This piece of fluff is a total delight. Completed in 1850 it began life in 1842 as a Petite Valse Favorite. Here is light music of the highest type set in a liquid pianistic setting. Liszt: Waldesrauschen Waldesrauschen "Forest Murmurs" from Zwei Konzertetüden (1862-63) is a magical scene in a wooded glade. Ravel surely studied its shimmering pianistic layout when he planned Ondine. Liszt: Tarantella This piece is the third and most exciting of Liszt's Suite Venezia e Napoli, which forms a supplement to Volume II of the composer's Années de Pèlerinage (Italy). The first two are titled Gondoliera and Canzona. As Louis Kentner wrote, "In the Tarantella we are in a world of Neapolitan sunshine, vibrant, glowing, passionate; in this piece virtuosity runs riot, as it should." Liszt: Liebestraum Liebestraum is the third of three transcriptions of Liszt's own songs, written between 1847 and 49. Liszt published them as piano pieces in 1850 entitled Liebesträume: Three Notturnos. No. 3, by far the most famous, is a passionate love poem. The title of the song is O lieb, so lang du lieben kannst (Oh love as long as thou canst love). Scarlatti (arr. Tausig): Pastorale & Capriccio Polish pianist and composer Carl Tausig was Liszt's favourite piano pupil. A virtuoso of the highest rank, his effective arrangements reveal that he was also a fine musician. Schumann (arr. Tausig): El Contrabandista (The Smuggler) This Tausig transcription is a famously difficult test piece. Virtuoso technique is needed to tackle the brilliant ornamentation. The lines from the first stanza of the song of this Spanish Romance read: 'Oh, I am El Contrabandista, I make myself respected!' Beethoven: Turkish March from The Ruins of Athens This arrangement by Anton Rubinstein was a frequent Hofmann encore and is a rollicking good tune. Beethoven: Rondo a Capriccio Subtitled Rage over a Lost Penny, this piece demands high finger energy. The late opus number is misleading, because the composition is of a much earlier vintage from around 1797. After Robert Schumann played through it, he wrote, "It would be difficult to find anything merrier than this whim; I laughed heartily over it the other day." Beethoven: Sonata in C major In four movements, composed in 1795 and dedicated to Haydn, Beethoven's Sonata in C major was influenced by Clementi's C major Sonata and out-does the Italian master in virtuosity. Beethoven often performed it in Vienna's aristocratic homes. The Adagio is a heavenly movement in E major, showing how Romantic the early Beethoven could sound. © 1999 David Dubal |
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