Music Comes to America

VOLUME 163

NUMBER 5

MAY 1939

BY CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN

ON the last day of August, 1872, Anton Rubinstein boarded the steamship Cuba at Liverpool. Ten days of misery lay ahead, days of racking illness for a man who was not used to illness. Rubinstein was in his cabin before the ship left the docks and stayed there until the sheltering arm of Sandy Hook shut out the terrible blue rollers, the bang and slide and bump that destroyed a man’s sight, hearing, soul, and digestion. Worse even than the ship’s motion was the throb of the screw, insistent, unremitting. Before Anton’s head was safely on the pillow the engines announced their theme: —

Over and over the rhythm repeated itself, the same words, the same even, maddening four-four time. Moaning in his bunk, Anton told himself he would go crazy before the ship docked, and then what of his contract with Maurice Grau? What of William Steinway awaiting him in New York City?

He had braved this voyage for several reasons. First of all, he needed money. Anton was forty-two; since he was six he had been making money on the concert stage — not little money, but huge sums — and had been spending it royally after the Russian manner that entertains its friends at dinner by dozens and gives gladly into any outstretched, needy palm. Anton had not saved a cent. Regularly he sent money to his old mother in Odessa; he had two young children to educate, and for the past six years he had had a wife at home who was anything but thrifty. Vera Rubinstein, née the Princess Chekuanov, had come to her husband with more name than dowry; settling quickly into the pose of the mondaine who had sacrificed a worldly career to marry an artist, she chose to play her rôle from a background of solid comfort. On his return from a European tour, Anton invariably found bills that ate up every franc, every thaler, he brought home. Last year, for instance, Vera had announced that she could not live in St. Petersburg; Anton must buy her a villa in the country, at Kamenni Island or Peterhof, where the fashionable world was found.

Anton needed money, and money was to be garnered in the New World. With Jacob Grau in Vienna he had signed a contract to appear 200 times in America for $200 a concert. William Steinway had advanced the sum, and Grau’s nephew Maurice, who was only twentyone and whose experience in managing artists had so far been limited to the management of the Aimée Comic Opera Troupe, was to plan the itinerary. Anton was not undertaking the tour alone. Henri Wieniawski was to share the platform; he too came over on the Cuba, vainly endeavoring to practise his violin against the pitching and plunging, vainly endeavoring to rally his old friend Anton with champagne brought from Paris.

Copyright 1939, by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass. All rights reserved.

Both artists were prepared for strange experiences in the New World. Although Petersburg knew better, the rest of Russia still was convinced that the tiger, the crocodile, and the Red Indian infested the very doorways of American houses. Two Massachusetts Yankees wrote home from Moscow about the old Prince who refused point-blank to believe they were Americans. He took them to the theatre and pointed to one of the orchestra fiddlers, a coal-black Alabama darky. ‘ That is an American!’ said the Prince.

Except for Galitzin and one other, no Russian musician had as yet ventured to North America — the term ‘United States’ was seldom used. Thalberg had been across in 1865, and his stories of the New World still circulated about Vienna. But old Henri Herz in Paris, owner of the Salle Herz and the piano factory, was the one from whom to learn about Americans. He had come over in 1845 and toured for six years, ravishing both Americas with his rapid-fire finger technique. The first necessity for such a tour, said Herz, was an American manager. Ullmann had directed every detail of the Herz tours, and Ullmann knew how to fill a theatre. In Philadelphia, for instance, he had advertised a concert hall illuminated by a thousand candles, and when a member of the audience had protested that there were eight candles too few, Ullmann commanded Herz to send eight candles to the complainant. Barnum himself urged Herz to play upon a platform on which Jenny Lind was to appear suddenly, floating downstage as an angel from heaven. . . .

Anton Rubinstein had laughed at these tales, but somehow he had been touched by them. These Americans were only children, eager, unsophisticated. It was a shame to exploit them; they needed to be taught, to be treated with honesty, to have good music introduced to them simply, with no trickery. Surely good music was its own advertisement! From the outset of his career, Rubinstein had scorned advertisement. In Paris, for instance, he had broken all the rules by announcing his début in small letters on the billboards. And he had succeeded; after one concert the Parisians had flocked to hear him play.

Here in America, Anton told his manager, he would submit to no tricks; moreover, he would not play down to his audience. He would fulfill every term of the contract; sick or well he would be on hand for each of those two hundred performances. But he would make his own programs. He would play Beethoven and Mozart and Schumann and Liszt, and he would play composers from the eighteenth century that America had never heard of. Maurice Grau replied gloomily that, except for New York and Boston, America had not heard of Liszt and Chopin, let alone Couperin and Friedemann Bach. What America really liked, Grau knew, was spectacles — monster concerts with sixteen people playing eight pianos, monster choruses singing with two orchestras combined. America thought of music in connection with State Fairs, when a man brought his family in from the farm along with his prize cattle, and wandered from giant cabbages to the hall where foreign artistes were assembled.

Maurice Grau was afraid to tell this to Anton Rubinstein. Seasick or no, Anton would have turned around and gone home on the same boat. Grau told neither his fears nor his hopes to this wild Russian genius he had captured to bring home to William Steinway. America had never seen or heard a man like this. Anton Rubinstein could play like the Angel Gabriel. He took the abstraction out of classical music and made it into something a man could understand, something instantly familiar. Anton Rubinstein made Beethoven sound like something any American had heard before he was born, music that had rocked him to sleep in the cradle, music to which he had marched to Appomattox and back again, music to which he had buried his mother.

Rubinstein could play like that, and moreover he looked the part — looked like the common man’s dream of a musician, with his mane of hair, his great heavy shoulders, his falling-down socks and his wild string tie. . . .

II

The chances of success, Grau told himself, were a good seventy to thirty. But he had to tell himself this very often. In 1872 the United States was incredibly naive concerning the arts. Only twentytwo years had passed since Jenny Lind, escorted from her ship by seven hundred red-shirted, trumpet-blowing firemen, had made her Castle Garden début under the illuminated inscription, ‘Welcome, Sweet Warbler.’ New York had enjoyed this whole-heartedly, but had been forced to pay for it by severe ribbings from across the water. A Monsieur Tajan-Roget, filling Clinton Hall for two monster lectures on Les BeauxArts, told the citizens they had no taste. New York required its artists to be pretty and virtuous. America, which called itself a New World, was already ruined artistically by its love for le soft. How, for instance, had the city received Rachel, the great tragedian, last winter? The public had refused to see her act, had called her immoral when her only fault was that she was old and wrinkled. . . .

What Monsieur Tajan-Roget, and his confrères who came to excoriate the Americans in lucrative lectures, did not realize was the background that caused America to long for le soft. It was a background harsher than anything in the experience of the lecturing gentlemen. Foreign visitors, driving up New York’s elegant street called Broadway, could not see the forest west of the city gates. There was good reason for the ungodly reputation art bore in this New World. Outside the walls of one’s house were a hundred enemies: rain and cold, drought and heat, trees to be felled — more trees and more. For hundreds of miles west of the Alleghenies, the forest was still an enemy to be conquered. What time had man or woman for those things called Art and Music? No wonder they were condemned as immoral, to be indulged in only by the lazy and the wicked.

What deceived foreigners was the amazing material luxury of New York and Philadelphia. As early as the 1840’s, Henri Herz had marveled at the ‘consommation d’eau qui se fait en Amérique,’ where each house was provided with its bathroom and where, every Saturday, Philadelphia’s servants washed the façades of the houses with pumps, ‘as if they were afraid of fire,’ His ship had scarcely been tied to the docks when reporters from Mr. Greeley’s and Mr, Bennett’s newspapers rushed up and asked him how he liked New York. ‘Attendez au mains que je débarque,’ said Monsieur Herz, antedating the reply of a whole century of visiting artists.

One-man concerts being as yet unheard of, Herz was supported, on the platform, by a whole bevy of assisting ‘artists’ whose turn ranged from sleight of hand to patriotic addresses by ‘female orators.’ Women’s rights, temperance, bloomerism, Fourierism: music had many competitors. No wonder Herz and his successors had recourse to ingenuity to fill their halls! Volovski, the Pole, advertised that he could play four hundred notes in one measure. Ole Bull came down from Norway with a bow arm as long as Paganini’s and played miraculous double stops on a flattened fiddle bridge, charming America to the very edge of the Oregon forests. Whole families drove into town by oxcart the day his concert was advertised. Leopold Meyer played the piano with his fists and his elbows, sometimes with his cane. He made the piano ring bells, he invented thunderclaps in the bass, he waved at the ladies with his right hand while his left executed roulades. Then he went home to Europe — and returned to America ten years later to garner some more easy money. He was surprised to be received with coldness, even hisses.

‘This is a marvelous player,’ wrote a New York critic, ‘if only he would play good music.’

Ten years had worked wonders. Chicago was very far west, yet as early as 1835 the town had its Old Settlers Harmonic Union, where men could sing songs to such instruments as its members brought in their pockets. Chicago, with its mud and its fierce lake winds and its cattle, had a Sacred Music Society in 1842, a Choral Union in ‘46, a Mozart Society in ‘49, and a Männergesangverein in ‘52. America, groping for music, had been rewarded with foreign pianists who played with their elbows. Disgusted, America began to make music for itself. Louis Gottschalk appeared upon the platform in 1852 — the first native American pianist of real ability and education. In Russia a Grand Duchess asked him if Barnum was not one of America’s greatest statesmen. Gottschalk toured all during the Civil War and his countrymen came to hear him, marveling that a man could speak American and wear his hair short and yet play the piano. One autumn day of 1865, traveling from Erie to Lockport, his train went off the tracks.

‘The first time in six months,’ said the conductor proudly.

‘For me, the forty-eighth time in three months,’ amended Gottschalk wearily in his diary.

Up in Boston, Lowell Mason told the city fathers that if America desired music America must teach its children to sing; and the fathers heard him, and from east to west public-school children were taught to read music. Mason’s son William went down to New York and began to work with Theodore Thomas, who had enterprise enough for ten ordinary men. Programs of serious chamber music were introduced, and, more daring still, Thomas interlarded the ‘serious’ programs with Strauss waltzes and told his audience that good music need not always be dull.

America still believed that pleasantsounding music was either ‘low,’ in the class with blackface comedians, or dangerous, savoring of Latin decadence, of Paris gentlemen who wore gloves on their hands and lived upon the sweat of other men’s brows. Folk music already had a place in America, but art music had no part in the republican movement — the movement against kings and titles and all that went on in palaces where dukes had kept musicians like slaves to do their bidding, and ladies made beauty and immorality synonymous terms. The notion that ‘classical music’ could be not only pleasing but inspiring was foreign to any but a few eastern-seaboard cities.

The year before Rubinstein sailed for New York (1871) a young man named Henry Finck, ambitious for an education at Harvard College, bounded the new east-bound train at San Francisco. ‘In our Oregon home,’ wrote this boy who was later to be one of America’s greatest music critics, ‘Liszt was unknown — we did not have the right kind of piano or necessary technique for his pieces. What is stranger, we did not know Chopin.’ All the way east to Pittsburgh, whistles blew frantically to get the buffalo off the track; Indians crowded the stations, and one night young Henry was wakened by hands fumbling over his body, searching for his money belt. Arrived in Boston, he strolled into Ditmar’s Music Store and saw a collection of ‘Nocturnes’ printed between bright red covers, signed by one F. Chopin. Finck carried the new red book into a basement room at college and played the Nocturnes to himself, weeping, trembling, wondering if god or devil had written this rich, wild music. . . .

It was fortunate for America when Anton Rubinstein accepted Mr. Grau’s offer in Vienna for that winter of 1872. Already New York knew his orchestral music, — as composer, the name of Rubinstein was classed with Brahms and Raff, — music not quite so disagreeable as Brahms’s and not quite so pleasing as Raff’s. Nothing like this advent had happened to the New World: the Marios, Grisis, Jenny Linds, Ole Bulls, were miracles, marvels. But Rubinstein was not a miracle. He was a hardboiled, cultivated musician of the first water, Director of a great Conservatory, a man on familiar terms with czars, queens, and operatic tenors. Anton Rubinstein believed in music and believed in America.

III

The Cuba landed in New York on the morning of September 10. Rubinstein, morose, shabby, shattered by ten days of seasickness, was’ led from the docks by Wieniawski, fiddle case in hand. Wieniawski never looked shattered; he was as soigné as Anton was careless. With his dark moustache and imperial, his dark clothes and the ribbon in his buttonhole, Henri Wieniawski appeared every inch the artist, but every inch the man of the world.

In a haze of mid-September heat, the two drove to the Clarendon Hotel on Fourth Avenue at Seventeenth Street and left their baggage, then went at noon to call upon their sponsor, William Steinway, returning immediately to their hotel to practise. The first concert was scheduled for September 23.

A day passed, two days, and in the evening, trying to practise with his windows open on the noisy street, hot gaslight pouring on his damp face, his coat off, his collar open, Rubinstein, pausing for a cigarette, heard below his window, against the roar of wheels and the sharp sound of horses’ hoofs, another sound. Music! Why, they were playing Meyerbeer’s ‘Torch Dance’!

Rubinstein and Wieniawski, hurrying to the window, saw in the street below a whole orchestra playing away for dear life, and playing very well, like a professional symphonic ensemble. It was Carl Bergmann, leading the Philharmonic in a serenade. Only one other visiting artist had received this honor — the Sweet Warbler herself, Jenny Lind. The street was crowded with listeners almost to Union Square. They played the Rienzi Overture — how could America know that Rubinstein hated Wagner? Wieniawski grinned sardonically, then was silent as the orchestra swung softly into the Andante from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony.

Anton was touched. He desired to thank the musicians. After the serenade some of them came to his room, and Rubinstein, in default of words, sat down to his piano and played the music he loved best — Chopin.. Beethoven’s March from the ‘Ruins of Athens,’ Liszt’s magnificent transcription of the ‘Erlking.’ Young Maurice Grau, who was present, had never heard music like this. Moreover, he had never met a man like this.

‘Rubinstein sat, genial yet grave. . . . I never saw anyone with such magnetism. He had a perfectly enchanting smile. When he was pleased his rugged Tartar face would become quite sunny and fascinating.’

Monday evening, September 23, was as hot as New York can be in September. Steinway Hall was packed to the doors. People stood on the stairs, overflowed down the steps into the street. From all over the country, artists had come to hear Rubinstein and Wieniawski. Carl Bergmann conducted the Philharmonic Orchestra, and various singers were included on the program. When Rubinstein, raising his hands, crashed down upon the opening chords of his D Minor Concerto, the audience, according to eyewitnesses, went suddenly quite crazy. They stood up and began to shout. . . . And, indeed, more than one tough-minded critic has borne witness to the amazing magic of Rubinstein’s attack. If Leopold Auer and Sir George Grove were struck dumb by it, what of America that had known only the Messieurs Herz, Thalberg, Jaell, and Wallace?

That night, besides his own D Minor Concerto, Rubinstein played Handel, Beethoven, Mozart, Schumann, and for encore his own ‘Melody in F,’ ‘Valse Caprice,’ and his enchanting ‘Barcarolle in G.’ But when, at the close, he was recalled again and again, Anton’s bows were remote, he gazed stonily over the heads of a howling, frenzied audience. Obviously, this was not a man to cajole the groundlings. He had come to play the piano. He had played it, and now his evening, quite evidently, was finished. Flowers were presented, masses of roses; someone mounted the stage to offer a silver wreath on a white satin cushion. Anton looked at it and shook his head, unsmiling.

Maurice Grau, in the wings, knew what was the matter. So did William Steinway. In the very middle of the D Minor Concerto, while Rubinstein was trying to play pianissimo, a terrible howl had arisen from under the open windows on the east side of Steinway Hall, while on the west side was heard a fearful pounding. Anton had turned to the wings and thrown at Steinway a beseeching glance, and the latter had rushed out and bribed two colored gentlemen to cease their employment: one was splitting kindling, the other was training his dog to jump rope.

Next day Anton called upon Mr. Steinway, in his arms a large canvas bag filled with gold and silver. They had told him in Europe, explained Anton, that most Americans were rascals, their paper currency quite worthless since the War of the Rebellion. His contract had arranged, therefore, that he should be paid semimonthly, in advance — and all in specie.

‘What,’ said Anton helplessly, ‘shall I do with all this money?’

Gravely Mr. Steinway suggested that the Bank of the Metropolis would exchange these coins with no loss to the owner. Anton returned to Seventeenth Street much cheered.

Five times Rubinstein and Wieniawski played in New York, always with success, then prepared to go on tour. It was to be an ordeal and Rubinstein knew it. His contract called for no less than seven concerts a week. Daily, before his departure, Anton stopped at Steinway Hall, hoping for Russian mail, and the afternoon before he was to leave for Boston — October the tenth — a bulky registered letter was handed to him. It contained letters from his wife and children and a batch of new photographs of the family. With tears in his eyes, ‘Friend Steinway,’ said Anton, ‘I am so happy that I must play for you.’ The doors were closed; Anton sat at the piano until midnight.

‘We were spellbound,’ wrote Steinway. ‘Such heavenly playing I had never heard before. At the risk of being called sentimental, I must say that on that memorable night, while Rubinstein played the “Erlking,” it appeared to us as if we heard the voice of the little child, the clattering of the horses’ hoofs, the wild entreaties of the Erlking, as plainly as if we had witnessed it all ourselves. As I went home that night I thought truly that was a day that could never be repeated in all the course of my life.’

IV

And now the Rubinstein Troupe, as it was called, started off for Boston. There were the singers, Liebhart and Ormeny, and various instrumental players — one of these was Wulf Fries, the cellist, whose place in the Boston Theatre Orchestra was taken by young Henry Finck during the tour. Boston led America in what was frankly called ‘culture,’ and Boston had a right to lead. Longfellow, Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, flourished; William Dean Howells had just taken over the editorship of the Atlantic Monthly. The new president of Harvard College was a fiery young man called Charles Eliot, who actually believed in the arts as education and said so, hurling into the news such pronouncements as ‘Music, rightly taught, is the best mind-trainer on the list. We should have more of the practical subjects like music and drawing and less grammar and arithmetic.’

Rubinstein stayed at the Tremont House, practising vigorously in his room, besieged by would-be pupils. He was extraordinarily generous with these. One girl especially he taught every day, pacing the room while she played, running his hands through his hair, often impatient, often angry. At such times his eyes darkened, changed color completely; he would push his pupil from the piano stool and, sitting down, play himself, breathing heavily, his eyes half closed, and always, when he rose, dissatisfied with his performance.

Boston gathered to watch ‘this Russian genius’ come down the steps of the Tremont House; Boston wrote descriptions in the paper, mentioning his seedy clothes, his string tie hanging down over his coat, his untied shoelaces, his socks that fell over his shoes. Anton’s impatience grew daily. ‘Damn many concerts!’ he wrote William Stein way in German on October 14, the day of his first Boston appearance.

After Boston, the tour began in earnest. Every night Rubinstein played in a different town, frequently boarding the train immediately after his concert — Buffalo, Toronto, Montreal, Detroit, Cleveland. In Chicago the drinking water was so muddy the citizens laughed and said it was nourishing as food. There was cholera in the States that year. ‘Slowly and steadily,’ said the Boston Globe, ‘the disease is moving along our great arteries of travel from South to North.’

Asiatic cholera was no new thing to Anton Rubinstein. He feared it less than he feared the sheer weight of business that pressed upon him, the greedy, ever-present audience that waited, night after night, demanding his best, demanding music and more music. A kind of horror descended upon him.

‘Each day I feel unhappier,’ he wrote William Steinway from Cincinnati. ‘I think often of breaking my contract. The tour makes no end and becomes daily more difficult, more unbearable. We play so often in the same town that now I even have reached the end of my repertoire and must study and memorize new pieces. I cannot give the public always the same.’

Anton Rubinstein, with the longest repertory in Europe, learned new pieces for the citizens of Detroit — and Maurice Grau, his manager, watched and marveled.

‘The moment he arrived in his hotel room,’ wrote Grau, ‘Rubinstein would begin to practise. He never slighted a single audience, no matter how small, by neglect or carelessness. He studied and worked, studied and worked continuously. How his constitution stood the immense strain is remarkable. Yet his was the most lovable disposition imaginable.’

Over in Rome, Franz Liszt, hearing about the tour, called it a ‘steeplechase de concerts.’ But if Rubinstein did not complain to his manager of hard work, he complained of other things. He resented fiercely the personal publicity of an American tour, resented the sight of his photograph in shop windows and on wall boards, and was pacified only when in a far-western town he and Grau came upon the portrait of the Reverend Henry Ward Beecher plastered from end to end of the city. It was an awful portrait; it made Mr. Beecher look like a murderer.

‘Is it a priest, then, who will lecture?’ asked Anton in wonderment. ‘His face looks even more dreadful than mine. It must be that such portrait advertisement is not so insulting as I had thought.’

Absurd things happened, wild things that could never have occurred in Europe. There was the evening — recounted afterward by Anton himself at a dinner party at Madame Clara Schumann’s — when Rubinstein, resting in a little room backstage, looked up to see a head thrust in the door.

‘Don’t you think, Boss,’ said a goodnatured voice, ‘that it’s about time to have your face blacked for the show?’

Poor, bewildered Madame Schumann gasped when she heard this story. ‘And did you do it?’ she asked. ‘Did you paint your face black?’

It was a far cry from Madame Schumann’s dinner table to Memphis, Tennessee. Anton would bear anything so long as he heard occasionally from home.

‘My mother in Odessa has written that she received the last money I sent her — but there is no letter from my w ife. Who knows what goes on at home — sickness, accident? All kinds of thoughts go through my head.’ So wrote Anton to William Steinway as the troupe went southward. New Orleans seemed actually civilized; one spoke French there, gentlemen bowed when they were introduced, colored servants fetched one’s hat, smiling, not addressing one by the friendly title of ‘Boss,’ ‘Pardner,’ or ‘Professor.’

Baltimore, Philadelphia . . . Anton was tired. His musical memory began to fail. Once, playing his D Minor Concerto that he knew better than his name, he forgot in the middle; but shaking his locks, as the newspapers reported, ‘he wove appropriate harmonies and sequences with his great paws, and, like a true lion, kept on to the end.’ Over and over, in city after city, Anton played his encores, played them in a kind of rage, as though the audience were his enemy and he must battle or perish. His own ‘ Valse Caprice’ was a favorite everywhere; when he jumped his left wrist over his right to reach the E flats, lifting his hand high, the audience waited breathlessly to see if he would strike the proper black keys. Frequently he missed them, but nobody minded. In Philadelphia’s Academy of Music, when Anton finished playing the ‘ Appassionata,’ a habitually staid audience rose to its feet shouting ‘Bravo! Bravissimo!’ — strange foreign words that came suddenly from the heart, uncalled, like a child’s cry of delight. Backstage, dripping with sweat, his shoulders sagging, Anton told his manager he would give no more encores that night. ‘I have played enough.’

Maurice Grau shook his head. ‘These people have paid to hear you, Mr. Rubinstein.’ Anton ‘catapulted on to the stage,’ says a contemporary report, ‘ as if shot from a cannon, and roared into the Chopin “Berceuse,” playing it very fast, beating the bass hand as in a wild barbaric dance. He was in a frenzy.’

Anton was tired. He began to quarrel with Wieniawski. Rumor has it the two artists never spoke to each other except during rehearsal, although on the stage they played together divinely, as if cast in one mould. They played the ‘Kreutzer Sonata’ without notes, with a fire and a fury that electrified America. Wieniawski performed many of his own compositions, and always he played like the Slav he was, sliding and swooping, adding fireworks to every cadenza. Musically, Anton was outspokenly his champion, declaring that no violinist but Paganini had ever equaled him. This was high praise in a violinistic era that enjoyed such stars as Joachim, Ernst, Ole Bull, de Beriot, Spohr, Sivori, Lipinski, David, Leonard, Alard, and Sarasate.

Wieniawski was jealous: Anton received more applause and more money. The violinist began complaining to the newspapers. Anton, as always, kept his personal grievances to himself; he hated American reporters because they asked intimate questions. Moreover, it was the fault of the newspapers, he said, that the American people looked too lightly upon the serious art of music. It was their fault that the Rubinstein concerts were discussed in print under the heading of ‘Amusements’; it was they who had permitted the publication of letters demanding the inclusion of popular music in the Rubinstein programs. Openly, Rubinstein told the gentlemen of the press that he liked neither their tactics nor their ideas. The young people of America, quite obviously, considered music a mere accomplishment or adornment, ‘as important as fine or fashionable dress,’ said Anton indignantly, ‘but not more important.’ It was the duty of musical critics to change such an attitude, not to foster it. . . .

This was a musician who looked seriously upon his chosen profession. ‘ Sturdyminded,’ Maurice Grau called him, and, above all men, Grau had reason to know. Manager and artist had frequent battles concerning program making. It was nothing short of suicidal, said Grau, to play all-classical evenings. But, as the tour progressed, Grau noticed with surprise that the more severe Rubinstein made his program, the higher rose the gate receipts. Anton desired to give a matinee by himself, without orchestra, without singers, without Wieniawski’s violin. A ‘recital,’ he called it—the word was as yet new to America. For a long time Grau dissuaded him, declaring that America was not ripe for one-man concerts, that it would be too severe fare for even New York to digest.

In January 1873, two concerts were advertised to be held in New York’s Academy of Music, on Irving Place: —

THE GREAT COMBINATION OF THE THEODORE THOMAS CONCERT COMPANIES AND POSITIVELY THE LAST JOINT APPEARANCE OF RUBINSTEIN WIENIAWSKI AND THEODORE THOMAS WITH HIS UNRIVALLED ORCHESTRA

So far, so good. This was the kind of announcement America was used to; often it included the words ‘colossal, stupendous, magnificent.’ But this time, underneath the first announcement appeared another: —

RUBINSTEIN’S MATINÉE D’ADIEU AT STEINWAY HALL, MONDAY AFTERNOON, JAN. 13, 1873, AT TWO O’CLOCK

Maurice Grau read the words and trembled.

The grand ensemble concerts went off very well, both in Brooklyn and in New York. Grau had expected that. But what was Grau’s amazement when the Monday Matinée d’Adieu gathered in the largest gate receipt of the entire tour to date — $3100. Rubinstein was jubilant. Now he could dispense with orchestras and singers, dispense with Wieniawski too, if that gentleman agreed. He could play Beethoven and Chopin and Liszt to his heart’s content ; he could cease amazing the public and begin to teach it. Suddenly pleased with the New World, Anton sat down and wrote a set of variations on ‘Yankee Doodle,’ dedicating them to his American friend, William Mason.

Mason accepted the ‘Yankee Doodle’ fantasia gravely. He spent much time with Anton in New York, listening sympathetically to the bewildered questions of the Russian. Anton became very angry when people said to him, as they often did, ‘You, of course, do not need to practise, being a born genius who gets everything by nature.’

‘How can they say this to me,’ cried Anton, ‘after I have worked so hard?’

The dumb piano on a Rhenish steamer long ago, the big square piano at home in Moscow, with Maman standing, ruler in hand. . . . Pianos in hotel rooms in Paris, London, Amsterdam. Pianos begged from dealers in Vienna by a boy of sixteen: ‘Sir, may I use your instrument in the early mornings, before customers arrive at the shop?’ Pianos in dingy boardinghouses, broken ivories, broken pedals, pianos out of tune and jangling. . . . Czerny, Diabelli, Clementi, scales, exercises, Gradus ad Parnassum! . . . Pianos in gaslit American rooms — hot, steamy rooms filled with flies. A man’s shoulders aching, eyes aching, a man wet with sweat from scalp to ankle. . . . ‘You, Mr. Rubinstein, of course do not need to practise . . . ‘

V

Anton was tired. January weather was bad that year, the streets heavy with melted snow, but all the world ploughed through it to hear Rubinstein play. Hitherto, Boston had never given the Rubinstein Troupe a gate of over a thousand dollars, but when, after the New York Matinée, Rubinstein repeated the one-man program in Boston, he took in $2600. Never before had America so much as intimated that it would like to hear a one-man recital. Grau wrote down to William Steinway excitedly, but Rubinstein shrugged his shoulders. ‘You have underestimated the power of good music,’he told his manager.

In April, Anton conducted, in New York, his ‘Ocean Symphony’ with Theodore Thomas’s Orchestra. They played all six movements; the performance required a full hour and the audience loved it, applauding wildly after each movement. That same night Wieniawski played the Bach ‘Chaconne’ — a severe piece, rough, rhythmic, but austere. America was being educated — and America liked it and said so with loud, heart-warming applause.

Up and down the eastern seaboard traveled Anton Rubinstein, playing, practising, memorizing. In spite of all success, it was, he declared, a nightmare existence. ‘ God preserve the artist from falling into such slavery,’ he wrote, ‘and from being at the entire disposition of an impresario. It is all over with art then; only the shop remains. One becomes an automaton, and the dignity of the artist is lost.’

May arrived, and, with it, sight of the end. Anton was to sail for home on May 24. Suddenly new life poured into him. Before he left New York City, he would show America what real piano music meant! Calmly he informed Maurice Grau that he desired to give, not one farewell New York recital, but seven. He handed the programs to his manager, and his manager, blanching, ran his eye down the list and found not one relief. Not one Spanish dance with castanets clicking, not one rollicking folk tune, even! Bach, Handel, Scarlatti, Mozart, for the first recital. And for the second, nothing at all but Beethoven Sonatas! Six of them in a row, with their opus numbers staring up. . . .

‘Do they accept this kind of program in Europe?’ Grau inquired desperately. Rubinstein replied that they were beginning to. Bülow played all-Beethoven recitals, Madame Schumann all-Schumann programs. For himself, he had only recently been converted to such programs, but he believed in them from the historical-musical point of view, and he felt sure it would do New York good to undertake such an afternoon.

‘Undertake,’ thought Maurice Grau, was exactly the word. He began to feel slightly sick at his stomach, but there was no gainsaying a Rubinstein who had made up his mind. Subscribers received an advance brochure; in its proud superlatives is something touching. Evidently Grau burned the gaslight late the night he wrote this notice: —

Before giving the several programs of these seven recitals, it is impossible to refrain from calling attention to the vast knowledge, herculean power, and unmatched skill they require in their execution, and to hazard the doubt that any other executant than Anton Rubinstein would venture on their consecutive presentation.

On the afternoons of May 12, 14, 16, 17, 19, and 20, Rubinstein played at Steinway Hall to an audience that grew daily more fervent and respectful. Immediately after the sixth recital, Anton went up to Boston for his last appearance there. He played, bowed his adieux — and was swamped by a sudden rush to the platform. People tore at his clothes, desiring a handkerchief, a button, for souvenir. Women embraced him, weeping, and the theatre rocked to shouts of ‘ Come back soon, Rubinstein! Come back again to us!’

Dazed, but pleased in spite of himself, Anton took the night train for New York, and next evening met for the last time his American public in a whole program of his own compositions, ending with the brand-new ‘Yankee Doodle’ variations. Then he came down from the platform, wiped his brow with a large, torn handkerchief, and told a lady reporter from the Tribune that he was through forever with being a pianist. He was going home to Petersburg to write sacred operas. Perhaps America would produce them — America that had no established religion to combat and no politico-religious censorship. Warming to his theme, Rubinstein told the lady reporter he would like his children to be American citizens. ‘America,’ said he, ‘is the land for those who love liberty.’

On May 24, Rubinstein sailed for home, taking with him sixty thousand well-earned dollars and the good will of a continent. Long after he was gone, America talked about him. G. W. Bagby, famous dialect humorist of the Bill Nye school, wrote a monologue called ‘How Ruby Played,’ and from Boston to New Orleans young lady elocutionists seized upon it as the perfect recitation for church socials. Old ladies may be found to this day who can ‘recite’ it, word for word, and it may be purchased in a brisk, yellow-backed booklet entitled One Hundred Choice Selections. From Texas, Joe Brownin comes to New York, hears Rubinstein play, and tells about it in the vernacular of his day.

The piece is valuable because it describes a quality of Rubinstein’s playing that was peculiar to him and that affected not only simple persons of the Joe Brownin type, but listeners of the most worldly and intellectual kind. While Rubinstein played, Joe Brownin saw pictures — actual faces floated before him, the figures of men and angels. And so did William Steinway see pictures, and Sir George Grove saw them, and that hard-boiled critic, James Huneker. Moreover, in his description of Rubinstein’s violent physical motions at the piano, his indifference to the audience, Brownin did not exaggerate one item.

‘Well, sir,’ says Joe, ‘Rubin had the blamedest, biggest, catty-corneredest pianner you ever laid eyes on: somethin’ like a distracted billiard table on three legs. The lid was hoisted, and mighty well it was. . . . When he first sit down, Rubin ‘peared to keer mighty little ‘bout playin’, and wisht he hadn’t come. He tweedle-leeded a little on the treble, and twoodle-oodled some on the bass — just foolin’ and boxin’ the things’ jaws for bein’ in his way. . . .

‘I was just about to git up and go home, bein’ tired of that kind of foolishness, when I heard a little bird waking up away off in the woods, and call sleepy-like to his mate, and I looked up and see that Rubin was beginning to take some interest in his business. It was the peep of day. The light came faint from the east, the breezes blowed gentle and fresh, some more birds waked up in the orchard. People begun to stir, and the gal opened the shutters. . . . Next thing it was broad day and the whole world as bright and happy as a king. Seemed to me like there was a good breakfast in every house in the land, and not a sick child or woman anywhere. It was a fine mornin’.

‘And I says to my neighbor: “That’s music, that is.”

‘Presently the wind turned; it began to thicken up, and a kind of grey mist came over things; I got low-spirited directly. Then a silver rain begun to fall. . . . The moonlight came, and splendid marble houses rose up, with fine ladies in the lit-up windows, and men that loved ‘em, but could never get a-nigh ‘em, who played on guitars under the trees, and made me that miserable I could have cried because I wanted to love somebody, I don’t know who, better than the men with the guitars did. . . .

‘All of a sudden, old Rubin changed his tune. He ripped out and he rared, he tipped and he tared, he pranced and he charged like the grand entry at a circus. ‘Peared to me that all the gas in the house was turned on at once, things got so bright, and I hilt up my head, ready to look any man in the face, and not afraid of nothin’. He lit into them keys like a thousand of brick; he set every livin’ joint in me a-goin’, and not bein’ able to stand it no longer, I jumped spang onto my seat, and jest hollered: “Go it, my Rube!”

‘Then he changed his tune again. . . . I heard the church bells over the hills. The candles of heaven was lit, one by one. . . . I tell you the audience cheered. Rubin, he kinder bowed, like he wanted to say, “ Much obleeged, but I’d rather you wouldn’ interrupt me.”

‘He stopt a moment or two to ketch breath. Then he got mad. He run his fingers through his hair, he shoved up his sleeve, he opened his coat tails a leetle further, he drug up his stool, he leaned over, and, sir, he just went for that old pianner. He slapped her face, he boxed her jaws, he pulled her nose. . . . He knockt her down and he stampt on her shameful. . . . She bellowed like a bull, she bleated like a calf, she howled like a hound. The house trembled, the lights danced, the walls shuk, the floor came up, the ceilin’ come down, the sky split, the ground rokt —

‘Bang! He lifted himself bodily into the a’r and he come down with his knees, his ten fingers, his ten toes, his elbows, and his nose, striking every single solitary key on the pianner at the same time. The thing busted and went off into seventeen hundred and fifty-seven thousand five hundred and forty-two hemi-demi-semi-quivers, and I know’d no mo’.’

Anton Rubinstein would have liked Joe Brownin; he would have desired, moreover, to teach Joe to play the piano. When Anton played in public, he gave his best, whether it was for Joe Brownin or for Leopold Damrosch and Theodore Thomas. He was in America nearly nine months, playing for thousands of people who did not know music, talking eagerly with music’s leaders, urging them to organize efforts in the cause of musical education. Every American musician whose orbit touched his went away disturbed, inspired. In Central Park Garden, Theodore Thomas soared off with his orchestra to programs no impresario would have dared before the Rubinstein concerts paved the way. As to Anton’s ‘Ocean Symphony,’ New York cried for it. Every Thursday night Thomas played it, raising the admission price to pay the extra players required in an orchestration as elaborate as Berlioz’s. In spite of the higher price, Thursday audiences proved the largest of the week.

Always serious about music, always the crusader, Anton Rubinstein, the complete professional, knew what he was doing and did it. Whether he played Mendelssohn, Field, Moscheles, Scarlatti, cr Beethoven, the New World heard him and wakened to things it had dreamed of but had never known.