Arthur Rubinstein

Arthur Rubinstein was born on January 28, 1887, in Łódź, a textile manufacturing city then under Russian rule, the youngest of seven children in a Jewish family of modest means ^[1]. His father ran a small handloom workshop, and nothing in the household suggested a musical dynasty. Yet the boy showed an unusual ear almost from infancy, reportedly singing back melodies before he could speak in full sentences and refusing instruction on the violin because he preferred the piano ^[2].

His talent was striking enough that the family sought expert opinion. At the age of four he was presented in Berlin to the violinist Joseph Joachim, the venerable friend of Brahms, who agreed to supervise the child's musical education when he was old enough ^[1]. Rubinstein gave his first public performance in Łódź at seven, and by ten he had moved to Berlin to study in earnest. There his principal piano teacher was Heinrich Barth, a strict pedagogue in the tradition of Liszt's circle, while Joachim oversaw his general development and Robert Kahn and Max Bruch guided him in theory and composition ^[2].

Berlin gave the boy a thorough grounding, but he chafed under Barth's discipline. Any Arthur Rubinstein biography has to reckon with his own candid admission, made repeatedly in later life, that he disliked methodical practice and relied for years on facility, memory, and charm rather than rigorous preparation ^[3]. The tension between enormous natural gifts and casual work habits shaped the first half of his career.

Rubinstein made his formal debut in Berlin on December 1, 1900, at age 13, playing Mozart's A major concerto, K. 488, with the Berlin Philharmonic under Joachim's direction ^[1]. Engagements in Germany and Poland followed, and in 1904 he settled in Paris, where he met Maurice Ravel, Paul Dukas, and the young Jacques Thibaud, and where the music of Debussy opened his ears to a world beyond his German training ^[2].

His American debut came in 1906 at Carnegie Hall with the Philadelphia Orchestra, part of a tour of some 75 concerts ^[2]. The reception was polite rather than triumphant; critics acknowledged the talent but found the playing uneven, a verdict Rubinstein himself later endorsed. The years that followed were financially precarious. In his memoirs he described a moment of despair in Berlin in 1908 when, deep in debt and alone, he attempted to hang himself with a belt that broke, an episode he credited with giving him an unconditional love of life afterward ^[3].

Spain and South America changed his fortunes. Tours beginning in 1916 made him a genuine star in Madrid and Buenos Aires, and he formed lasting friendships with Spanish composers. He gave early and frequent performances of music by Manuel de Falla, Enrique Granados, Isaac Albéniz, and the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos, who dedicated his Rudepoêma, one of the most difficult works in the piano literature, to Rubinstein ^[4]. He was also an early advocate of Stravinsky, who arranged three movements from Petrushka for him in 1921. Few facts about Arthur Rubinstein are more telling than this record as a promoter of living composers at a time when many virtuosos ignored them.

The turning point in Rubinstein's artistry came in the early 1930s. Newly married and aware that gifted younger pianists such as Vladimir Horowitz commanded a technical polish he lacked, he withdrew for months of concentrated study, by his own account practicing six to nine hours a day for the first sustained period of his life ^[3]. The pianist who emerged kept the old warmth and spontaneity but added discipline and accuracy. His return to the United States in 1937 was a triumph, and from then until the mid 1970s he ranked among the most sought after concert artists in the world ^[1].

Chief among Arthur Rubinstein achievements is his advocacy of Frédéric Chopin. He rejected both the sentimental, rubato-heavy Chopin style of the salon tradition and the percussive brilliance of some rivals, insisting instead that Chopin was a master of large forms whose music should be played with directness, structural clarity, and full tone ^[5]. His recordings of the mazurkas, nocturnes, ballades, scherzos, polonaises, and both concertos, many of them made more than once for RCA Victor, became reference versions for generations of listeners ^[4].

His discography extended far beyond Chopin. He recorded the major concertos of Beethoven, Brahms, Grieg, Schumann, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky, chamber music with Jascha Heifetz and Gregor Piatigorsky (a partnership the press nicknamed the Million Dollar Trio), and a wide range of Spanish and French repertoire ^[4]. Honors accumulated in proportion: multiple Grammy Awards, a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 1994, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom presented by Gerald Ford in 1976, and membership in the French Legion of Honour ^[6]. In 1974 an international piano master competition bearing his name was founded in Israel, a country whose orchestra he had long supported ^[7].

Rubinstein was as famous for his appetite for living as for his playing. Fluent in eight languages, a connoisseur of wine, cigars, and conversation, he moved easily through the artistic and social circles of Paris, London, Hollywood, and New York, counting Picasso, Cocteau, and Chaplin among his acquaintances ^[3]. He appeared as himself in Hollywood films of the 1940s, including Carnegie Hall, and his hands supplied the piano playing for several movie soundtracks ^[2].

In 1932 he married Aniela (Nela) Młynarska, a dancer and daughter of the Polish conductor Emil Młynarski. The couple had four children, among them the actor John Rubinstein ^[1]. The marriage endured for decades despite Rubinstein's acknowledged infidelities, but it broke down in the 1970s when, nearing ninety, he left Nela for Annabelle Whitestone, a young Englishwoman who had worked for his concert agency and who later married the novelist Patrick O'Brian after Rubinstein's death ^[3].

His Jewish and Polish identities ran deep. Rubinstein refused ever to perform in Germany after the First World War, a resolve that hardened into a lifelong boycott once the Nazi regime murdered members of his family in the Holocaust ^[2]. He became a naturalized American citizen in 1946, yet at the founding conference of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945 he pointedly performed the Polish national anthem to protest the absence of a Polish delegation ^[6].

Age slowed Rubinstein remarkably little. He played marathon series of concerts into his eighties, including ten recitals at Carnegie Hall in a single 1961 season covering some 89 works, and he continued recording for RCA into the mid 1970s ^[4]. Critics noted that while some velocity inevitably faded, the tone, rhythm, and interpretive authority remained intact, and many of his late recordings, such as the Brahms concertos with Eugene Ormandy and Daniel Barenboim, are still admired ^[5].

Failing eyesight finally forced the decision he had long postponed. Suffering from macular degeneration that left him nearly blind, he gave his farewell recital at Wigmore Hall in London in 1976 at the age of 89, in the same city where he had first played more than sixty years earlier ^[1]. Retirement did not mean silence: he dictated the second volume of his memoirs, My Many Years, published in 1980, a sequel to My Young Years of 1973, both written in a conversational English that matched his platform personality ^[3].

Rubinstein spent his final years between Paris and Geneva with Annabelle Whitestone. He died in his sleep in Geneva on December 20, 1982, at the age of 95 ^[1]. Following his wishes, his ashes were taken to Israel and buried in 1983 in a forest area overlooking Jerusalem later named for him ^[7].

Rubinstein's influence rests first on sound. His recorded legacy, running to well over a hundred albums for RCA, preserved a way of playing that valued natural phrasing, singing tone, and rhythmic backbone over display, and his Chopin in particular reshaped how the composer was understood in the twentieth century ^[4]. Pianists as different as Emanuel Ax and Daniel Barenboim have cited him as a formative model, and RCA's comprehensive reissue of his recordings in a 94 volume Rubinstein Collection in 1999 confirmed the catalogue's continuing commercial and artistic life ^[5].

Institutions carry his name forward. The Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, held in Tel Aviv every three years since 1974, has launched the careers of laureates including Emanuel Ax and Krystian Zimerman's generation of contemporaries, and remains one of the most respected contests in the field ^[7]. In Łódź, the city of his birth, a philharmonic hall bears his name and a monument on Piotrkowska Street commemorates its most famous musical son ^[6].

Beyond the awards and namesakes stands the example of a career that fused seriousness with joy. Rubinstein liked to say that he was the happiest person he had ever met, and audiences believed it because the happiness was audible. For listeners discovering the great pianists of the recorded era, he remains an obvious starting point: an artist whose long life connected the world of Joachim and Brahms to the age of stereo, and whose playing still communicates without any need for historical explanation ^[3].