Ignacy Jan Paderewski

For understanding these artists,

What she said was, I don't know if all musicians are such politicians as Paderewski was, so I doubt it very much.

It was a reference to the late pianist Paderewski, who was also a pre-war premier.

Not long before we arrived in Poland, there had been a national referendum.

Signs telling people how to vote were still evident on whatever walls were standing.

A shabby piano at home, kicked below by many childish feet, but mellow and sweet, like an old violin.

And herself sitting practicing over and over the part of Paderewski's minuet, where, as everyone knows, the fingering is rather difficult.

And outside the open window, leaning on his broom, worthless Johnny Fraser staring in with friendly eyes and an extremely dirty face.

To 22's unbounded amazement, she flung down the cushion and made for the little ward linen room.

World's fairs closed for the season at Flushing Meadows and the Golden Gate, and the phony war opened for the season along the Maginot Line.

Although a Paderewski concert for Polish relief could fill Carnegie Hall, America first rallies were packing Madison Square Garden.

Lindbergh gave them the word.

These wars in Europe are not wars in which our civilization is defending itself against some Asiatic intruder.

O is for Oliver, casting aspersion on Omar, that awfully dissolute Persian, though secretly longing to join the diversion.

P is for Peter, who hollers no no through the keyhole to Payne, Paderewski, and Poe.

Q is the Queen, so noble and free, for further particulars look under V. R is Rubenstein, playing that old thing in F, to Rollo and Rembrandt, who wish they were deaf.

S is for Swinburne, who, seeking the true, the good, and the beautiful, visits the zoo, where he chances on Sappho and Mr. Sardou and Socrates, all with the same end in view.

O is for Oliver, casting aspersion on Omar, that awfully dissolute Persian, though secretly longing to join the diversion.

P is for Peter, who hollers no no through the keyhole to Paine, Paderewski, and Poe.

Q is the Queen, so noble and free, for further particulars look under V. R is Rubenstein, playing that old thing in F, to Rollo and Rembrandt, who wish they were deaf.

S is for Swinburne, who, seeking the true, the good, and the beautiful, visits the zoo, where he chances on Sappho and Mr. Sardou and Socrates, all with the same end in view.

The late von Bülow, for instance, was well now universally conceded to be the representative Beethoven player of the age, for no better reasons, so far as I can discover, than that he was generally admitted to be a failure in the presentation of what most works of the modern school, and that cold, calculating, cynical intellectuality was the predominant feature of his personality and his musical work which made him the driest, most unideal, uninteresting pianist of his generation in spite of his phenomenal technique, memory, and mental power.

On the other hand, Paderewski, with all his infinitely magnetic personality, his incomparable beauty of tone and coloring, his blended nobility and refinement of conception, is described as a perverter of taste, a destroyer of traditions and precedents, because forsooth he plays Beethoven too warmly, too emotionally, too subjectively.

Les grâces, messieurs, what does it all signify? Are we then to accept perforce as final, in spite of our better instincts, the dictum of the long-since petrified Leipzig school which holds technique of the hand and head not only as the supreme but as the sole element in musical art, which relegates all emotion and its expression to the despised limbo of sickly sentimentality, and which epitomizes its highest encomium of an artist in the words, He allows himself no liberties.

That is to say, he plays merely the notes with the faultless precision and soulless monotony of a machine.

or his later works, declaring that anyone who had sense enough to play them at all would know that it was demanded without being told.

True, Beethoven's works have been edited well nigh to death since his time, but of course without his sanction or revision.

And as no two editions agree, who shall decide which is infallible? And why, I ask, is not the audible interpretation the piano of a Liszt, a Rubinstein, or Paderewski just as likely to be legitimate as the printed interpretation of a Bülow or a Lebew.

Has not one artist as good a right to his conception as another? And in heaven's name, what possible reason is there for assuming in regard to an intensely emotional composer-player like Beethoven that the coldly, stiffly, scholastic reading of his works is more in accordance with his original intention than a more warm and subjective one? Moreover, even if there were a complete, corrected, authorized edition of Beethoven carefully revised by the composer himself, anyone who has ever written out, proofread, and finally published the simplest original composition knows well by experience how utterly impossible it is to indicate definitely with our imperfect system of marking just how each strain should be rendered.

He comes to dread the trains as we might a prison van.

Paderewski resorts to a private car, but even this luxurious mode of travel may be very monotonous and exhausting.

The great distances must certainly account for some of the evidences of strain which deform the faces and exhaust the minds of so many virtuosos.

The traveling salesman seems to thrive upon miles of railroad travel, as do the crews of the trains.

Some years later, this man succumbed to alcoholism.

The pianist of today.

Contrasted with a type of this kind may be mentioned such men as Sohr, Rachmaninoff, D'Albert, Paderewski, Godowsky, Backus, Rosenthal, Power, Joswi, Scharwenka, Gabrilowitsch, Hofmann, Bauer, Levine, to say nothing of the ladies, Bloomfield-Zeigler, Carreño, Gutzon, et al., many of whom are intellectual giants.

Most all are exceedingly regular in their habits, and at least two are strong temperance advocates.

A shabby piano at home, kicked below by many childish feet, but mellow and sweet, like an old violin.

And herself sitting practicing over and over the part of Paderewski's minuet, where, as everyone knows, the fingering is rather difficult.

And outside the open window, leaning on his broom, worthless Johnny Fraser staring in with friendly eyes and an extremely dirty face.

To 22's unbounded amazement, she flung down the cushion and made for the little ward linen room.