A genius who was not to be born

On June 26, 1945, delegates representing 50 countries, signatories to the Charter of the United Nations, gathered in San Francisco. Only the delegation of the Republic of Poland was missing. Nobody expected that anyone would claim Poland’s rights, whilst the one who did so was… Maestro Rubinstein himself. — In this hall in which great nations gathered to make this world better (…) I do not see the flag of Poland for which this cruel war was fought (…). So now I will play the Polish national anthem. And please get up! — the resonant voice of the pianist sounded ominously in the local opera before the start of the ceremonial concert.

When he finished playing, he straightened up and looked at the hall filled to the brim. Applause and ovations were endless. He also saw the faces of the Soviet delegation headed by Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov himself. The Soviets did not hide their rage and bitterness — they stood at attention at the national anthem of the hated country.

Artur Rubinstein, at the request of a publisher from the People’s Republic of Poland, agreed to remove from his book fragments on Poles’ resistance against Soviet rule — “Everyone knows that anyway” — he commented. The famous virtuoso died 35 years ago and in January 131 years will pass since the date of his birth.

It was spring 1886. 33-year-old Felicja, Artur Rubinstein’s mother wakes up with morning nausea. She is having chronic headaches and a feeling of strange swelling at abdominal level. She is looking out from the second floor window of the tenement house, which stands at the main street of the city. From the distance, from the room where children were usually staying, despite the early hour, are coming voices of 15-year-old Jadwiga, one year younger Staś, and little Hela and Frania as well as laughing eight-year-old Tadeusz who, as usual, was nagging Ignaś, the youngest of the whole bunch.

Felicja opens the shutters, pulls into the lungs the city’s air contaminated with chemical plants’ fumes. The tenement house at Piotrkowska Street in Łódź, where the Rubinsteins live, is an impressive, solid, three-storey construction in the front, has a four-storey outbuilding and on the ground floor — a string of various warehouses, a small bank and a Roszkowski’s pâté store.

Artur’s mother already knows that she is with child. The next days in the house of Felicja and her husband Izaak were not the happiest ones. The woman is afraid of childbirth and the very thought of the next pregnancy, the seventh one, scares her. She does not want any more children.

In a burst of emotions, she desperately tries to get in touch with a friendly doctor who is known in Łódź and the surrounding area for “helping” women to get rid of “troublesome ballast”. On the day on which she decides to end the pregnancy, she meets her sister Salomea (known in the family as “Salka”) who successfully convinces Felicja to her point of view and urges her to give birth to the baby. Felicja gives birth to it on Friday, on the winter Sabbath day of January 28, 1887.

Artur instead of Leon

Felicja took the birth very hard. When the little boy got out into the world and the exhausted and sweaty mother completely wasted away, the room in a blink of an eye filled with a shrill cry.

• Nothing prevented me from getting to this valley of tears Artur Rubinstein used to say jokingly in many interviews. The boy was born healthy. He was round, had a slightly oval head, and fingers so nimble that they moved almost at the speed of light. No one, looking in that frosty evening at the newborn, expected him to grow into one of the greatest and most talented pianists of all time.

• Your name will be Leon- Izaak said when he saw his new son for the first time. — No! — Immediately protested the eight-year-old Ignaś, who smiled in a characteristic way, and then stamped his foot in a demonstrative way. — He must be called Artur! — he shouted, looking at his father. Izaak Rubinstein looked with surprise at the offspring and then at the other members of the family and asked: — Artur? Why should we call him that?

• Since Artur, the son of our neighbors plays the violin so beautifully; maybe he will grow into a great musician! — Ignaś answered immediately. And instead of Leon, a little boy was named Artur.

Singing for a piece of mazurek

Artur always felt that he has not much time to lose. In numerous interviews and memoirs he emphasized, with a slight spite and innate charm, that his musical career did not start from piano lessons (although since the instrument appeared in the living room of Felicja and Izaak Rubinstein, he felt like he was in paradise) but from … the sirens of factories awakening Łódź workers for work and chants of Gypsies who one day emerged in the courtyard of the tenement house at Piotrowska Street.

“My first musical experience was shaped by the sombre, tearful wailing of hundreds of factory sirens (…) when the city was still shrouded in darkness. Soon, however, I began to consume a much more pleasant musical fare: in the courtyard of our tenement house appeared Gypsies who were singing and dancing with their dressed-up monkeys and the so-called one-man orchestra was playing for them many strange instruments. Added to this, were the monotonous calls of Jewish antique traders, Russian ice cream sellers, as well as Polish village women, singingly praising eggs, vegetables and fruits they brought” — Rubinstein recalled in his diary “My Young Years”.

From the earliest years, Artur knew that he would not become a merchant or pharmacist or a jeweler or an attorney or an heir of the workshop producing homespun cloth owned by his father. — When there was no piano, I made myself a parrot — Rubinstein used to say when someone asked him about the anecdote with mazurek (Easter cake).

Always, when he reminisced it, he loved to drag on his cigar … it looked as if he travelled in time together with the released smoke into a tenement house with large windows at Piotrkowska Street. — When I wanted to get a piece of Easter mazurek, I sang a popular melody — he used to say. Jadwiga, Artur’s oldest sister, when he “sang for a piece of cake”, was taking piano lessons with fat Mrs. Kijańska.

Without false modesty

“At that time my brother was less than three years old” — she once remembered — The parents bought the instrument mainly thinking of me and of the education of Jadwiga and Hela (…). Artur was supposed to sing, not to play — she joked repeatedly. But when Artur mastered the piano, first with one hand and then with both of them, it was known that he would not become a singer…

The short, tiny boy with Semitic features quickly proved that there is not only great potential, but above all, great talent hidden in him. — When I was four years old, I played the “Peasant and Poet” overture for four hands with my sister (…). For my fifth birthday I was given by someone business cards with the inscription: “Arturek (diminutive for “Artur”) pianist, virtuoso” (…). “Of course, I was delighted with them and distributed the cards among my friends and even strangers left and right (…). I have never had false modesty in me. I was self-confident. I was at the peak of my capabilities, I really had everything what a musician needs” — he said at the age of seventy.

In what he repeated many times, there was only a handful of truth. Maybe he was confident, but it seems that it was only when he played in front of audience, when in limelight he was grinning from ear to ear, sometimes making the most bizarre faces and making uncoordinated movements or when sitting comfortably in the armchair, he smoked his favorite Cuban cigars. But when the curtain fell, the stage lamps went out and the applause became just a memory of the last evening, Rubinstein often wondered if people love him only for his talent or for what kind of man he is.

• Where does the obsession that people do not love you for yourself come from? — cried his old friend Mildred Knopf in 1978 after a grim phone call from ninety-year-old Rubinstein. — You, with your reason and loyalty, grace and beauty and, ah… I could continue endlessly, but you probably will not believe me anyway (…), you let these nonsense torment you (…). Try not to think about it a lot, please, really try to break away from the past and live with the awareness of how many people enjoy being able to be with you only for yourself.”

The wonderful boy in Berlin

• We will go to Salka, to Berlin. There, let Artur learn — Felicja said, just after Izaak Rubinstein went bankrupt, and the Chancellor of the German Empire, Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schönhausen, resigned from his function. The mother packed her son’s clothes, took the suitcase with her own belongings, bought the train ticket and got in, holding little Artur by the hand. Just before his departure, Rubinstein said goodbye to his father.

• He was calm as always, he did not show the slightest emotion — his son Artur was talking about Izaak. When the train crossed the German border no one expected that Rubinstein would not return to Poland for good. Felicja, however, a few days after arriving to Germany, began to plan the return to Łódź.

And so Artur got under the care of Johanna Rosentower (with whom he lived) and, among others, professor Theodor Altmann (with whom he was delighted) as well as professor Henryk Barth (in his memoirs he recalled him as a tall, heavily built man, bearing a long beard à la Brahms of the color of salt and pepper). — Unforgettable was the day when I met Theodor Altmann! He seemed to me high (I was still short, of course), heavily built and quite corpulent man about forty-year-old, with a large round face; on his nose he wore a pince-nez in a steel frame, tied with a black ribbon. His hair was cut short, in German style, but a warm, intelligent glint in his eye made me love him at first sight — he recalled.

During the time of his education, Artur played a lot in front of the Berlin audience. He made his debut on December 1, 1900 in the Berlin Beethoven-Saal. The news of the “wonderful boy” spread throughout Europe. First, however, he went to Warsaw, to Aleksander Rajchman, the director and founder of the Warsaw Philharmonic. Two years later, on April 1, 1902, Rubinstein played in front of the Polish audience in the capital, under the baton of then 32-year-old Emil Młynarski.

Inert and overwhelmed

The young pianist was on the lips of the most eminent, world-renowned musicians. It seemed that Rubinstein “was in seventh heaven”. However, after his success in Germany and Poland, his drive for playing weakened. Music began to bore him. He was making the impression that he did not play with passion, but “cleaned the teeth of the giant.” He was inert and overwhelmed by his spectacular career.

• There was applause, but it came mainly from my friends in the room; later, in the dressing room, their words of appreciation sounded like condolences — so his failed recital at Beethoven-Saal, which took place on February 12, 1903, was recalled by the artist. The German press also cut Artur to ribbons. “Vossische Zeitung” wrote: “the spiritual development of the talented pianist does not follow his technique. We hope that by becoming a young man, he will see higher goals than just workshop proficiency.”

After the difficult recital, Artur could not come to terms with the fact that he disappointed the audience, and worst of all, himself. Laziness was something that Rubinstein could never accept and really disgusted. At that time, he promised to himself that he would never neglect the exercises again and that he would support his talent every day, not with admiration for himself, but with hard multiple-hours’ work. Till the end of his days, he repeated: — If I skip one day [of exercises], I feel it immediately. If I skip two days, my fingers feel it. And if I skip three days, the audience feel it.

Escape to Switzerland

And when everything indicated that he would handle the new reality and enter adulthood with raised head, he received a message from his mother. Felicja Rubinstein declared that she would come to Berlin to live with him. He was terrified: he could not stand the thought that his benefactors would also maintain his mother.

There was also one more issue which was very important for young Artur. He was afraid that “if mother came to the city, he would have to move away from the Kurts (he was no longer living with Rosentower)”, where he experienced his first sexual fascinations. He decided to get away from his mother as far as possible and he was helped in it by one of the sponsors of his studies, Martin Levy as well as Ignacy Jan Paderewski.

Artur went to Switzerland to Paderewski. In Riond-Bosson, Artur spent a few lovely days. He was bowling in the garden and playing billiards with his host. They had long chats. Paderewski’s piano technique was not by nature his strongest asset, the pianist and composer had to practice a lot constantly — in contrast to Rubinstein, whose natural abilities were almost limitless, but he had a tendency to neglect working on his technique. Artur used to hear his host master his skills every day for long hours by the sweat of his brow.

Distrustful and uncertain

• To get a woman, you do not have to be pretty. All you have to do is convince her that you love her more than all other women in the world. I admit that it’s easier to express with music. Don’t you know the old saying: “Mothers are always afraid of piano teachers, and husbands of female singers are always afraid of tenors? — this was the way Artur Rubinstein many times answered questions that concerned his admiration for women he met on his way.

One of them was Aleksandra Wertheim. When Artur met her, he was only seventeen, she was thirty years older. Only after several decades did he confess to his daughter Ewa that “in that time of pre-marital freedom he never fell asleep in a woman’s bed because he could not stand the thought that he would snore or that his hair would get tangled or that his stomach would growl or he would look messy.

So he lay with his eyes open until morning to control himself. — It made me very sad that he was so distrustful, so insecure with regard to people — Ewa recalled. And someday, many years later, when he had hernia operation in the American Hospital in Paris, he would not let his mother visit him for three or four days because he did not want her to see that he looked a little blandly and did not control everything.

Homeland and Providence

On June 26, 1945, delegates representing 50 countries, signatories to the Charter of the United Nations, gathered in San Francisco. Only the delegation of the Republic of Poland was missing. Nobody expected that anyone would claim Poland’s rights, whilst the one who did so was… Maestro Rubinstein himself. — In this hall in which great nations gathered to make this world better (…) I do not see the flag of Poland for which this cruel war was fought (…). So now I will play the Polish national anthem. And please get up! — the resonant voice of the pianist sounded ominously in the local opera before the start of the ceremonial concert.

When he finished playing, he straightened up and looked at the hall filled to the brim. Applause and ovations were endless. He also saw the faces of the Soviet delegation headed by Vyacheslav Mikhailovich Molotov himself. The Soviets did not hide their rage and bitterness — they stood at attention at the national anthem of the hated country.

• From my own experiences and observations, it appears that Providence, Nature, God — or what we would otherwise call the Creative Force — blesses those human beings who accept and love life without making any demands. And I’m certainly one of them with all my heart. I have found out — thanks to developments that could only be described as miracles — that whenever my “self” subconsciously craves something, life will anyway fulfill it … — these are the words of Artur Rubinstein.

The musician was not religious, although he knew very well the rules and orders resulting from Judaism. When in one of the last interviews one of the journalists asked him about his attitude towards the faith, he replied: “Do not worry about me. When I go to heaven, I will not have any problems. I am a Jew, so if Moses is at the gate, he will let me in.

Hope in Gierek

He was at the peak of his career when in September 1966 he came to Warsaw to give a wonderful recital: Schubert’s last sonata (B flat-major) and Schumann’s Carnival made up the first part, and two pieces of Debussy, one of Chabrier and three of Chopin made up the other.

A year and a half later, in the spring of 1968, for a few years he fell out of favour with the Peoples’ Republic of Poland authorities due to the letter published in the New York Times in which he protested against the cancellation of performing “Dziady” (poetic drama by Adam Mickiewicz) and the anti-Semitic campaign launched in Poland by the communists. In the Polish press he was “condemned as a demagogue” (as he told a journalist of the New York Times). — I would not come there for the fear of being arrested — he commented during his visit to the country in 1975.

He also expressed his hope that Edward Gierek, the new First Secretary of Polish United Workers’ Party, would be “a little different” from his predecessors. Two years earlier, his book “My Young Years” was published in the Peoples’ Republic of Poland — They read in it that I like this country very much, that I love it deeply — commented the pianist. He admitted that at the request of his Polish publisher he agreed to remove fragments on Poles’ resistance against Soviet rule. — I said they could remove them — he said. — Everyone knows that anyway.

At the end of May 1975, the pianist played in Poland for the last time. His performance in the Philharmonic of Łódź went down in history. The audience greeted him with a standing ovation and sang “Happy birthday”, and after the concert they rushed to the stage and Rubinstein had to hide in the dressing room.

Panorama in a pine forest

• I always thought of myself as a musical instrument — not a violin or a piano — but as an “essence” of music. I never walk, never dream, never fall asleep without music in my head. Music is “my form” — used to say the pianist.

On December 19, 1982, Artur Rubinstein lay in bed. He was pale and his skin resembled a wrinkled parchment. He had a high fever and breathed with difficulty. He suffered, hardly gasping for air. When ambulance with oxygen arrived, it was too late. At December 20 at 6:30 PM he stopped breathing. He was almost 96 years old at the time of his death.

He was always afraid of dying and could not imagine that his body would ever be placed in a grave. Therefore, according to Rubinstein’s wishes, his corpse was incinerated and was to be scattered in one of the parks in Israel. However, according to the Associated Press agency, local rabbinate stated that fulfilling the pianist’s request would mean subordinating the public park to “religious laws governing graveyards”.

Rubinstein’s friend, Teddy Kollek, the mayor of Jerusalem, “sought to fulfill the artist’s will for the whole year. The compromise was reached, as a result of which a small area was separated as Rubinstein’s ​​grave.” On December 21, 1982, at the sound of Bach’s music, the ashes of the artist rested in the place called the Rubinstein Panorama, in the pine forest planted within the city limits in honor of the pianist seventeen years earlier…

- Evelyn Rubinstein