When Arthur Rubinstein died in 1982 at the age of 95, the 20th century lost one of the most loved of musical performers. And the love was a reciprocal affair; Rubinstein loved his audiences as much as they loved him. "You mustn't tell Mr Hurok," he liked to joke about his manager, "but the fact is I would go on giving piano recitals just for the fun of it, whether I got paid or not." And even Hurok famously under-estimated the pulling power of Rubinstein's musical personality. The 10 recitals the pianist planned for New York in 1961 were, Hurok felt, more than a recital or two too many. But the 74-year-old Rubinstein stuck to his guns, promised the proceeds to a range of charities - to show he wasn't driven by greed - and completed the series without repeating a work.
Rubinstein liked to remember the Polish town of Lodz, where he was born in 1887, as a sort of fairy-tale place. He allowed his imagination to transform the chimney stacks of the factories into "castles with glorious towers", the policemen into "ogres" and the people in the streets into "princes and princesses in disguise". It was a fine strategy for eliminating foulness from recollections of an industrial town which got by at the end of the 19th century without a sewage system.
Another major distraction, of course, was music, and the piano which was introduced into the family household when Arthur was just two-and-a-half. By the age of three, he claimed, he knew he wanted to be a musician. At four, he was taken to Berlin, to the eminent Hungarian violinist and composer Joseph Joachim, dedicatee of the Brahms Violin Concerto. Young Arthur made a good impression, accurately repeating at the keyboard a melody from Schubert's Unfinished Symphony after a single hearing, and harmonising it straight away, close to Schubert's original. But the experiment of having him study the violin was unsuccessful. He broke it into bits after two weeks. "I was decidedly meant to be a pianist, I needed polyphony; a melody without harmonic support meant nothing to me."
His early life was in many ways as charmed as the fairy-tale scenario he created for Lodz. He was, as he once put it, "patted on the head by most of the kings and queens of Europe", and he was quick to work out that most of what he wanted from life could be acquired through the leverage of his pianistic talent.
He was fortunate that his parents steered him clear of the path of the concert-giving child prodigy. But all was not roses. When he left Poland to study in Berlin at the age of 10, he left behind, not just Lodz, but normal family life, too. Five years later, when his mother wanted to live with him in Berlin, he was successful in preventing her. At the very least, he had managed to prevent her interfering with the affair he was already having with his landlady.
About his early years, he said, "I loved women, cards, and brandy too much, and I almost never practised." This is hardly the most effective prescription for a rising pianist in any age. However, his Berlin lessons under Heinrich Barth had been strict and thorough enough for an early reviewer to remark that his training had favoured "artistic legitimacy and inner musicality over virtuosity". Yet he broke with Barth at the age of 17, and never seems to have experienced a fully satisfactory feeling of security about his playing. "I was too eager to accumulate as much repertoire as possible to worry about flaws; helped by the generous use of pedals and my innate virtuosity I was able to get away with murder, figuratively and musically". And the insecurity persisted. He never dared record the Chopin Studies, although some did feature in his recitals.
While still in his teens, he launched an independent career - his Parisian agent had him auditioned by the composers Ravel and Dukas and the violinist Thibaud - and he mixed with the great and the good of the musical world. He met the composers Grieg and Scriabin, the great Russian bass Chaliapin, wined and dined with the moneyed Vanderbildts, Astors and Goulds on his first US tour, and managed to fritter away the proceeds of over 40 concerts before returning to Europe. And when Strauss's Salome was mounted for the first time in Paris in 1905, he was involved in the rehearsals and could be hired to play the whole opera, from memory, at 500 francs a time. And all this, plus the challenge of a duel with an irate, cuckolded husband, before the tender age of 21.
In 1926, much to his surprise, he met the woman he wanted to marry. Aniela Mlynarski, known as Nela, was over 21 years his junior, and, although he proposed quickly, he lost her confidence. His reputation for philandering was well known in Warsaw (where he had numerous affairs, including ones with the sisters and mother of one of his friends), and when he failed to stay in touch, Nela drew her own conclusions. He had to wait for her first marriage to unravel in divorce before he finally tied the knot with her. His biographer, Harvey Sachs, confirms him as a cad, by reporting that even on his wedding day, he spent time in the arms of another woman, an ex who needed consolation at the prospect of his marriage.
In 1934, two years married and already a father, he took his family off to the Haute-Savoie, where he immersed himself in a regime of all-day practice. "I felt suddenly an intense physical pleasure," he said, "when I succeeded in playing the etude in thirds by Chopin in a clear decent way without pedal and without getting too tired." He was aged 47, his self-confessed days of "dropping enough notes during a concert to make up a whole new programme" were over, and the career by which he is best-known today was still ahead of him.
If there's one name associated with Rubinstein's today, it's that of his compatriot, Chopin. It wasn't always thus. "I was the first to fight for the straight, Mozartian Chopin," he explained, "and, mind you, I was heavily attacked in my dear Poland. The Polish critics and Polish public said, `Yes, Rubinstein plays with lots of talent but his Chopin is absolutely dry' - because I didn't give way to all those things. I tried to get the music straight. It doesn't need anything. What Chopin has written into the music is good enough." And his Chopin recordings, particularly those of the 1930s, have a tautness of spring and firmness of rhythm that was then very new, and almost anti-romantic by the standards of the day. Rubinstein went on to record Chopin in bulk again in the 1940s and in the stereo era.
His reputation in Spanish music was well earned. He brings a magic to Albeniz that you'll rarely find equalled, and in the Miller's Dance from Falla's Three-Cornered Hat manages to evoke the strumming of a supercharged orchestra of violent guitarists. His playing of French repertoire could be no less fine, of Faure and Poulenc in particular, and his handling of Ravel's Valses nobles et sentimentales is matchless.
The German romantics, Brahms and Schumann in particular, brought out the qualities for which is he most renowned; the noble, golden tone, and the implacable firmness of rhythm, apparently effortless, and achieved without rigidity. Making music was something he made sound like one of life's simplest pleasures. What has often been described as his love of life radiated from his playing to the very end.
Although the "approved, commercially released recordings" which make up 94 CDs and 82 volumes of RCA's Arthur Rubinstein Collection contain a multitude of duplications, the repertoire ventures rewardingly beyond the solo and concerto repertoire to which many of the players of Rubinstein's generating were restricted on disc. He recorded a lot of chamber music, with his great violinist friend Paul Kochanski in the 1930s, the "million-dollar" trio with Heifetz and Piatigorsky a decade later, and with musicians of a younger generation, violinist Henryk Szeryng from the 1950s on, and the Guarneri Quartet in the 1960s and 1970s.
Rubinstein enjoyed the recording studio. "I adore making records," he said. "It thrills me. I have a feeling of perpetuation." The process brought out the critic in him. "Now I'll take my lesson," was his invariable comment when he went to hear playbacks. And he was one of those artists who chose to perform differently for the microphone. "The recordings," his long-time record producer, Max Wilcox, explained, "are usually less flamboyant, clearer, steadier in tempo and, at least for me (a prejudiced audience) an even more satisfactory statement of the composer's personality as opposed to the performer's personality. This was really what he tried to do in recording sessions where Rubinstein, the pure musician, was clearly in charge." Happily, Rubinstein cleared some of his recorded concert material for release, performances from Carnegie Hall in 1961 and Moscow in 1964.
As a raconteur, he had few equals. His skills with words in a multiplicity of languages were, like music, one of his ways of making himself loveable. He could of course be sharp at times. He said of the flamboyant Paderewski, who helped him in his early years, "his greatest success was in his bowing". And his advice on how to become a great pianist was tart: "Try to be born again with talent . . . You must have talent and then all you have to do is improve on it." And that's what he did himself, until failing eyesight finally terminated the longest love-affair of his life, between himself and his public, an audience so wide that no single pianist seems likely ever to fill the gap left by his death in 1982.
The complete Arthur Rubinstein Collection is available, with book and display case, in a special-priced limited edition. 29 selected volumes are being released this month. The full set, all at mid-price, will be available by September 2001.
Full details, volume by volume, are available at www.bmgclassics.com/classics/rubinstein, or from BMG at 01-677 9006
