his youthful years. "Among the liveliest autobiographies ever written by a non-literary artist"

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THE JUNE SELECTION

By ARTHUR RUBINSTEIN

EDITORIAL BOARD Clifton Fadiman • Gilbert Highet John K. Hutchens • Wilfrid Sheed Paul Horgan, Associate An exuberant self-portrait of the artist as a young man.. .“the women he enjoyed, the food and wine he savored, the friends he loved and sometimes lived on, the scrapes he got into and out of"

report by Clifton Fadiman

Arthur Rubinstein is a one-in-a-hundred-million human being who happens also to be among the greatest of pianists. What he calls “a primitive but truthful account” of his first thirty years ends with a characteristic sentence: “Whenever my inner self desires something subconsciously, life will somehow grant it to me.” His autobiography is a celebration of the gifts life granted to a man whose genius lay in his receptivity. To us of another day the motto by which he learned to live sounds singular: “Love life for better or for worse, without conditions.” This spirit so suffuses his pages that it makes for a book that many will love without conditions. Rubinstein is, of course, a phenomenon. As these words are written, he has just celebrated his eighty-sixth birthday and is the envy of platoons of younger pianists. He can not only outplay them: he can outtalk them in six or seven languages, outcharm them, outwork them,

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Madrid, 1917. Arthur Rubinstein dressed as a matador, the cape hiding the fact that his trousers won’t close. ©1973 by Book-of-the-Month Club, Inc. above left Isaak and Felicia Rubinstein, the au­ The artist as a very young man: Rubinstein in 1905, thor’s parents, above right Arthur Rubinstein, age just before his first Paris concert, an event he describes 13, at the time of his Berlin concert debut. as a “demi-success’.’

and one might almost expect him to outlive kov’s My Musical Life. While full of musical them, for if there is one human being alive who history and detail, it deals just as completely has not the slightest incentive to die, it is Arthur with the women he enjoyed, the food and wine Rubinstein. he savored, the friends he loved and sometimes A great musician, he is not as great a writer. lived on, the odd characters he encountered, the In literary style, Debussy outclassed him. In the scrapes he got into and out of (not always ability to dramatize, Berlioz was his superior. creditably). Yet for all its old-fashioned, deliberate prose, True, he sees things through the eyes, and My Young Years will, I think, take its place feels them through the fingers, of a pianist. But among the liveliest autobiographies ever written what finally emerges from his thousands of exact by a non-literary artist. memories is a portrait of a vanished era, one We should make clear at once that though which, from our vantage point, seems like the its leitmotif is music, its appeal is not limited to last flowering of civilization. It was an age in the musical. Indeed, one might properly classify which royalty and aristocracy, whatever one it as a picaresque autobiography, more akin to may think of them, actually counted; an age that those of Casanova, Cellini and Rousseau than still retained the romantic notion of the artist­ to such a work, for example, as Rimsky-Korsa­ genius as Byronically beyond good and evil; an 2 1. Joseph Joachim, director of the Imperial and Royal Academy of Music in Berlin, and Rubinstein’s benefactor. It was he who enabled the 10-year-old boy to leave home for study at the Academy. 2. Heinrich Barth, senior piano professor at the Academy and Rubinstein’s demanding teacher. 3. Arthur Rubinstein with William Knabe and family, 1906. Mr. Knabe’s piano firm sponsored the young pianist’s first American concert tour earlier that year.

age of outward splendor, elaborate manners, ing a full social life, having already evinced an rigid protocol, joyous adventurism, ridiculous amorous talent which, at least in his teens and but diverting snobbery; an age in which, if you 20s, demanded almost as much time and energy had money or knew how to beg or borrow it as did the piano. We follow him from his child­ (Rubinstein did), you could really have a good hood in Poland through his boyhood adventures time. It was designed for the young Rubinstein, in Berlin, his travels through all the capitals of and he for it. In every respect it stands in utter pre-First World War Europe, his first encounter contrast to our own era, and in that fact lies its with the United States, and his adventures in central power to seduce the reader. England, Spain and Italy during the early years Rubinstein, born in Lodz in 1887, displayed of the war. As his chronicle ends, he stands on his astonishing talent at 316. At 11 he was lead­ the threshold of his greatest accomplishments 3 one and remembers them all: Josef Hofmann, his mentor Joseph Joachim, Nikisch, Ravel, Dukas, Szymanowski, Albeniz, Saint-Saëns, Casals, Chaliapin, Gabrilowitsch, Koussevitzky, Stravinsky, De Falla, Glazunov, Thibaud from the musical world; the King and Queen of Spain, the Duke of Alba, and dozens of other exalted personages; Diaghilev during his great period; the Paul Drapers in London; Colette; the famous soprano beauty Lina Cavalieri; John Singer Sar­ gent.... Czarist St. Petersburg, gay Warsaw, Vienna in the time of Franz Josef, Edwardian London, Chicago and New York during their nonage as culture cities, Proustian Paris at one of its apo­ gees, Rome, Berlin, Madrid—Rubinstein was at home everywhere, often not knowing the source of his next meal, playing for the haut monde, shrewdly exploiting the patronage system, han­ Arthur Rubinstein, 1914. This portrait was thrown out dling a series of love affairs in a style that can as garbage by the Nazis when they occupied Rubin­ only be called male chauvinistic, making his way stein’s house in Paris during World War II. The picture as much with his wit as with his musical talent, was saved by a Frenchman and returned after the war. a charming, candid egoist, with no trace of the saint in him, conquering the world by making as an interpreter of music. But we do not ask for love to it. more. This story stands by itself, a portrait of Musical executants, it is often said, are not, the artist as a young man. any more than actors, generally superintelligent. And a most lively young man he was, engaged Rubinstein is an exception. He has read widely at one time in making loye to a mother and her and insists on thinking in areas remote from two daughters; at another in resisting (with no music. For example, his political instinct was difficulty) the advances of a casual homosexual such that he was disenchanted with Germany at in Naples; at another visiting (remarkable en­ the opening of the First World War, and swore counter this) Paderewski in Switzerland: “one that he would never play in Germany again—a of the most unhappy human beings I had ever resolution to which he has adhered for sixty met”; at another mollifying Emmy Destinn, who years. It is his nimble intelligence that makes insisted on her claims as a woman rather than a this long, fascinating record more than the auto­ singer. (One notes that the language in which he biography of a great pianist, that gives it a place describes his amours is so chaste and well-bred among the significant memoirs of the century. as to be, by contrast with our tumescent con­ Rubinstein restores freshness to a tired word. temporary vocabulary, rather exciting.) He is a personality. For music-lovers My Young In this book names are not dropped. They are Years is obviously a must. For others surely a rained. Rubinstein, a social genius, knew every­ near-must. 4