A BRAHMA OF THE KEYBOARD

In a half-forgotten study of Flaubert’s masterpiece, L’Education Sentimentale, which he rightly calls A Tragic Novel, George Moore compares the great Frenchman to Brahma “creating the passing spectacle of life to relieve his eternal ennui.”... Now, Leopold Godowsky is not Brahma, and he has never suffered from ennui, thanks to his tremendous capacity for work; yet I can’t help picturing him as a sort of impassive Asiatic deity seated before the keyboard of his instrument calmly surveying the eternal spectacle of music and its many masques. All schools, all styles, he knows, but upon this vast knowledge he has no desire to make any personal comment. Passionless, passionate, objective and subjective, his crystal-clear comprehension of the musical universe has made him apparently assume the attitude of an omniscient spectator, though he is neither one nor the other. Louis Ehlert asked Karl Tausig—probably the greatest of all piano virtuosi—why he did not offer up a small sacrifice to the human needs of the masses. The Pole replied: “I am not sentimental; neither my life nor my education intended me to be so.” Ehlert persisted. “How would it be if you were to give us an historical representation of the sentimental?” he suggested. Tausig shook his head and shrewdly smiled. He never made concessions to public taste, and he was called inhuman, cold, objective. His master, Liszt, was the reverse, overflowing with the milk of human music, spontaneous and prodigal in his play. Tausig the obverse of the medal; yet I believe that Liszt and Tausig were the piano Dioscuri, and not Liszt and Chopin. Chopin as a pianist has a niche all his own.

In an article several years ago and in the magazine section of The Times, I wrote that Leopold Godowsky is a pianist for pianists, as Shelley is a poet for poets. But everybody reads Shelley nowadays, and no doubt compares him unfavorably with the ear-splitting verse of the cacophonous young poets of the hour. Leopold Liebling took exception to my ascription, and I fancy he is right; every musical person listens to the alluring playing of Godowsky quite impervious to the fact that there are aspects of his art which will always escape them. In his playing he is transcendental. This doesn’t mean that he is frostily objective; he is human, emotional, and has at his finger ends all styles. It is the fine equilibrium of intellect and emotion that compels our admiration. No one plays Chopin like Godowsky, no, not even that tricky kobold, Vladimir de Pachmann. Paderewski is more emotional, Josef Hofmann extorts a richer, a more sonorous tone from the wires; nevertheless, Godowsky is a Chopinist in a class apart. He doesn’t drip honey in the nocturnes as does Ignace Jan, Premier of Poland; he can’t thunder the polonaises like his friend Jozio from Cracow; but these qualities he gives us in his own scale of tonal values. He is a powerful man with muscles that are both velvet and steel. When he wishes he, too, can sound the orchestral note; but, then, he seldom wishes this. His feeling for the limitations of the piano recalls the words of Rafael Joseffy: “I’m not a brass band”; Joseffy, who, in his abhorrence of a smeary touch produced his legato with the aid of the pedals, and what an aristocratic floating touch was his! What poetry! What atmosphere!

Setting aside his Chopin interpretations, which we take for granted, as he is Slavic, have you heard Godowsky play Mozart, or the neglected Haydn; or Schubert, Schumann? Of his Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms I shall not write. I can only repeat—all schools are at his beck, and if they are “perfect pictures, perfectly framed and hung,” as Joseffy said of his beloved master, Tausig, there is also the personal equation, for me, full of magic. Sensationalism, the pianistic fracas, posing for the gallery, all the bag of cheap tricks this great pianist eschews. He is master of the art of playing the piano beautifully. His exquisitely plastic phrasing, artistic massing of colors, above all the nobility of his conception—little wonder I call him a Brahma of the keyboard, far-fetched as the simile may sound. To Godowsky all other pianists could go to school, if for nothing else but the purity of his style, his kaleidoscopic tintings, his polyphony. And it must be admitted that pianists I have spoken to about him admit his power. He does not boast the grand manner of Josef Hofmann, yet Hofmann is reported to have told his manager that he enjoyed listening in a room to Godowsky more than playing to crowded and enthusiastic multitudes at his own concerts. Truly a fraternal and noble sentiment! If it comes to sheer sensationalism, then Godowsky easily leads them all, Rosenthal not excepted. I refer you to his paraphrases of Chopin, Weber, and Johann Strauss, and the supreme ease with which he conquers them. Brahma, indeed. Although as he plays he looks more like Buddha under his Bodh tree conjuring beautiful sounds from sky and air and the murmuring of crystalline waters.

It must be nearly twenty years ago, anyhow eighteen, that I entertained Vladimir de Pachmann in my Dream Barn on Madison Avenue at Seventy-sixth Street. The tenth floor, a room as big and as lofty as a cathedral. Alas! where are such old-fashioned apartments to-day? After eating a duck, a kotchka, cooked Polish fashion, and borsch, beet soup, with numerous Slavic side-dishes, preceded by the inevitable zakuska—those appetite-slaying bonnes bouches—De Pachmann fiercely demanded cognac. I was embarrassed. Not drinking spirits, I had inconsiderately forgotten the taste of others. De Pachmann, who is a child at heart, too often a naughty child, cried to heaven that I was a hell of a host! He said this in Russian, then in French, Italian, German, Polish, Spanish, English, and wound up with a hearty Hebrew “Raca!” which may mean hatred, or revenge, certainly something not endearing. But the worst was to come. There stood my big Steinway concert grand piano, and he circled about the instrument as if it were a dangerous monster. Finally he sniffed and snapped: “My contract does not permit me to play a Steinway.” I hadn’t thought of asking him, fearing Chopin’s classic retort after a dinner party at Paris: “Madame, j’ai mangé si peu!” Finally I saw the hole in the millstone and excused myself. When I returned with a bottle of abominable cognac the little man’s malicious smile changed to a look of ecstasy, and he was not a drinking man ever; but he was accustomed to his “petit verre” after dining, and was ill-tempered when deprived of it. Such is human nature, something that Puritans, prohibitionists, and other pernicious busybodies will never understand. And then this wizard lifted the fall-board of my piano and, quite forgetful of that “contract,” began playing. And how he did play! Ye gods! Bacchus, Apollo, and Venus and all other pleasant celestial persons, how you must have revelled when De Pachmann played! In the more intimate atmosphere of my apartment his music was of a gossamer web, iridescent, aerial, an æolian harp doubled by a diabolic subtlety. Albert Ross Parsons, one of the few living pupils of Tausig, in reply to my query, How did Joseffy compare with Tausig? answered: “Joseffy was like the multicolored mist that encircles a mighty mountain; but beautiful.” So Pachmann’s weaving enchantments seemed in comparison to Godowsky’s profounder playing.

And what did Vladimir, hero of double-notes, play? Nothing but Godowsky, then new to me. Liszt had been his god, but Godowsky was now his living deity. He had studied, mastered, and memorized all those transcendental variations on Chopin studies, the most significant variations since the Brahms, a Paganini scaling of the heights of Parnassus; and I heard for the first time the paraphrase of Weber’s Invitation to the Valse, a much more viable arrangement than Tausig’s; also thrice as difficult. However, technique, as sheer technique, does not enter into the musical zone of Godowsky. He has restored polyphony to its central position, thus bettering in that respect Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt. I have called attention elsewhere to Godowsky’s solo sonata, which evokes images of Chopin and Brahms and Liszt—only in the scherzo. Instead of exhuming such an “ungrateful,” unpianistic composition as Tschaikovsky’s Sonata in G, pianists of caliber might more profitably introduce the Godowsky work. He is too modest or else too indifferent to put it on his programme. It “lies” so well for the keyboard, yet there is no denying its difficulties, chiefly polyphonic; the patterns are intricate, though free from the clogging effects of the Brahms sonatas. De Pachmann delighted his two auditors from 10 P. M. to 3 A. M. It is safe to wager that the old Carrollton never heard such music-making before or since. When he left, happy over his triumph—I was actually flabbergasted by the new music—he whispered: “Hein! What you think! You think I can play this wonderful music? You are mistaken. Wait till you hear Leopold Godowsky play. We are all children, all woodchoppers, compared with him!” Curiously enough, the last is the identical phrase uttered by Anton Rubinstein in regard to Franz Liszt. Perhaps it was a quotation, but De Pachmann meant it. It was the sincerest sentiment I had heard from his often insincere lips. We were all three surprised to find a score of people camping out on the curved stairway and passages, the idealist, a colored lad who ran the elevator, having succumbed to sleep. This impromptu Godowsky recital by a marvellous pianist, for De Pachmann was a marvel in his time, must have made a grand hit with my neighbors. It did with me, and when Godowsky returned to New York—I had last heard him in the middle nineties of the previous century—I lost no time in hearing him play in his inimitable manner those same works. A pianist who can win the heartiest admiration of such contemporaries as De Pachmann and Joseffy and Josef Hofmann—I could adduce many other names—must be a unique artist. And that Godowsky is.

When he isn’t teaching or playing with orchestra or in recitals Mr. Godowsky spends his leisure in pedagogic work. There is a wide-spreading education scheme which has St. Louis as headquarters, the name of which I’ve forgotten, though the name doesn’t much matter, as musicians the country over know it. For this Mr. Godowsky is editing the classics and romantics of piano literature. He is also composing the most charming music imaginable for the earlier and middle grades of students; music that has genuine musical values, with technical. Imagination and instruction blended. Pegasus harnessed to the humbler draught horse. If you think of Schumann’s various albums for the young you may surmise the spirit of the Godowsky curriculum. I have been reading through his Miniatures for four-hands (Carl Fischer, New York), three suites, twelve numbers in all, in which the treble is for the pupil of extreme simplicity yet demanding attention to the melodic line, and amply developing the rhythmic sense. With their fanciful titles, tiny mood-pictures, these Miniatures are bound to attract all teachers of the instrument. Leopold Godowsky is a master pedagogue, as well as a master of masters among virtuosi. He belongs to the race of such giants as Paganini, Liszt, Tausig—and he is “different.”