Patrick Bade
Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz

Patrick Bade | Vladimir Horowitz and Jascha Heifetz | 07.10.22

Visuals displayed and music played throughout the presentation.

- When Jascha Heifetz met Groucho Marx- now how’s that for a opening line? And it’s true, they did meet. I’m not quite sure where or when, but Jascha Heifetz said to Groucho Marx, he told him that he had been earning a living, as a violinist, since the age of seven. And Groucho Mark returned on that, Marx, he said, “Oh, well I suppose you were just a bum before that.” Now I’m talking about nine different musicians tonight. I’m going to play you nine musicians. There’re seven Jewish men, one Jewish woman and one goy. The goy, of course, is Rachmaninoff. And another thing that they have in common was that they nearly all started as infant proteges. Now, this is a pattern. I remember once talking about this to an audience at the London Jewish Cultural Centre and saying, “What’s behind this?” And the whole audience came back to me with one voice saying, “Jewish mothers.” So maybe there is, maybe there’s an element of truth in the cliche about forceful Jewish mothers and their adored sons. So he had established an international career by the time he was 12. He played in Berlin. Fritz Kreisler heard him and he was so astonished.

He said, “Well, we violinists, we might as well all sit down and break our violins over our knees. None of us are going to match this incredible talent.” So at the age of 16, at the height of the First World War, and in the middle of the Russian Revolution, he arrived in New York. And there was a lot of excitement, about his debut in Carnegie Hall. And all of musical New York was there, including the great pianist, Leopold Godowsky, who you see on top left. And the violinist, Mischa Elman. And there’s a very famous story about this. And the audience went, “Wow.” They couldn’t leave their ears. They’d never heard virtuosity like this before. And at the end of the concert, Elman turned to Godowsky and he said, “Hmm, let’s get out of here, it’s too hot.” And Godowsky said, “Not for pianists.” So I’m going to give you a blast of Heifetz at his most staggeringly virtuosic. And this is a piece that was created for him by Franz Waxman, who’s chiefly known of course as a Hollywood composer. Very, very fine composer. And this is clearly borrowed from Bizet’s “Carmen,” but arranged to show off Heifetz’s staggering technique.

Well, it’s refusing to play. You can, you’ll have to check that one out on YouTube. You can find that easily. There’s a… better move on.

And this is Josef Hofmann. I mean, quite a number of the people I’m going to play tonight didn’t leave Russia as a result of the Russian Revolution. They’d left before. And there is actually a difference, I would say, between the fate of Russian singers and Russian instrumentalists- the instrumentalists by their nature are peripatetic. Their careers are international. It’s a bit different for singers who are, as I said, connected with their language and tend to want to put down roots in a particular place. So I can’t say that any of the people I’m going tonight, to play you tonight, that their careers suffered as a result of their exile. Of course, some personally they suffered because they couldn’t go back to their homeland. But, so my next artist is Josef Hofmann. And both Rachmaninoff and Horovitz said, maintained that on a good night, Hofmann was better than either of them.

The trouble was that as his alcoholism took over, the good nights became fewer and fewer. He was born in Krakow in 1876, and like several other pianists I’m going to play you tonight, he was a pupil of the great Anton Rubenstein. And he was already so famous in 1913 that he was offered the keys to St. Petersburg as an honour. That’s pretty amazing for a young, a very young Jewish man in Tsarist Russia. So he came to America before the Revolution, but during World War I, and he had a very successful career there as a virtuoso pianist. And he also became the Director of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. Now, he made a number of acoustic records, but later in his career, he stopped making records. I really don’t know why. And so all we have really are transcripts of radio broadcasts. And I’m going to play you the second movement of Chopin’s second piano concerto.

And there are a couple of fluff notes here, but I’ve never heard the piano made to sound like this. I mean, the piano is essentially, it’s a percussive instrument. The sounds are made by a hammer coming down on the string. So the great art of the pianist really is to make this percussive instrument sing. And boy, does Josef Hofmann make the piano sing in this piece. And the incredible filigree delicacy of the passage work. It’s absolutely amazing.

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Now, my next pianist is Arthur Rubenstein, who’s born in Lodz in what’s now Poland and- or is it “Wodz,” is it, I think it’s pronounced now in Polish. Anyway, somebody will no doubt correct me. And he, again, brilliant, brilliant child virtuoso and established an international career very early on. He arrived in America actually as early as 1906. And I recommend to you his autobiography, “My Younger Years.” It’s an extremely entertaining book full of absolutely wicked and outrageous anecdotes. He’s quite a naughty boy, actually, Arthur Rubenstein. And of course later a great socialite. He was never, first and foremost, a virtuoso, like Horovitz or like Hofmann. He was famous for his musical sensibility rather than for dazzling virtuosity. Now I’m going to play you, I’ve tried throughout this talk, I hope, do hope my CD is not going to continue to misbehave. But I’ve tried as far as possible to find very rare recordings that you’re unlikely to have come across before. So I’m going to play you Arthur Rubenstein in the second movement of Saint-Saens’s second piano concerto.

It was a piece that was particularly associated with him and he recorded it several times. But you may not have heard this version because it was never published commercially. He refused to allow it to be published because there were certain blemishes and mistakes in the orchestral accompaniment. But it’s still a wonderful performance. And I adore this piece. I absolutely adore this piece and I’ve known it from a very early age. When I got to my, I used to get records for my birthday and Christmas every year. When I had my seventh birthday, my mother said, “Oh, I’m sick of Berlit Sequoias, I’m sick of all those screaming sopranos. You’re not allowed to have a soprano for your birthday present. You must have a piano concerto. And she played me, from her own collection on 78s, all the great piano concertos. Beethoven and Liszt and Rachmaninoff and all of them.

But the one I chose, the one I loved best was this, the Saint-Saens second piano concerto. I still love it. It’s a perfect piece for a seven year old. You might buy it for your grandchildren ‘cause it’s so tuneful and it’s so happy and it’s so jolly. And what I particularly love about it, is the way in a flash it goes from moments of apparent great solemnity into outrageous frivolity. As one critic said about it, "One moment it’s Bach and the next moment it’s Offenbach.”

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This is Ossip Gabrilowitsch, who was born in St. Petersburg and who was taught by the two most distinguished piano coaches of the late 19th, early 20th century. Anton Rubenstein in Russia. And then he went to Vienna where he studied under the great Theodor Leschetizky who also had a hand in creating the techniques of many of the greatest pianists of the first half of the 20th century. But he wasn’t really, he was greatly admired and very successful as a concert pianist, but he was admired as an all-round musician. And he also had a very distinguished career as a conductor. And round about 19, must have been 1910, you can see he was a very, very handsome man. And Alma Mahler, she caught, he caught her eye, and they had, how do I put it, an amorous encounter. And she describes it in her autobiography, very much in rather gushy Mills and Boons terms.

She said, “Ossie,” as she called him, “Ossie and I were leaning out of her window and looking over a moonlit meadow. The moon shone on our faces. We turned for a long time towards one another. We moved closer, dot, dot, dot.” And then they obviously had a passionate kiss. That’s as far as it went because Gabrilowitsch was a great friend and admirer of Mahler, who at the time was writing “Das Lied von der Erde.” And he didn’t feel that he could betray his friend. But soon afterwards he married- I think I have a picture of them, yes- He married Clara Clemens, who was the daughter of Mark Twain. Just before the First World War, 1911 to 1914, he got a conducting position in Munich with the Konzertverein in Munich. Of course, when war broke out, suddenly he’s an enemy alien 'cause he’s still got a Russian passport. And rather interestingly, he was released through the efforts of the Papal Nuncio in Germany. He was called Eugenio Pacelli, who will be better known to you as a rather notorious Pope, not really a great friend of the Jews, Pius XII. Here is Ossip Gabrilowitsch in, rather again, unexpected piece for a great Russian virtuoso, playing “Shepherd’s Hey” by Percy Grainger.

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When the Nazis took power in 1933, of course he was safely in America, but he was one of those musicians, I mean, there were those who just were like ostriches, they didn’t want to know anything about it. And they thought, “Well, art and politics, they’re completely separate.” He understood that that was, could no longer be the case. And he agitated for a boycott of Nazi Germany. And famously he persuaded Toscanini not to conduct at the Bayreuth Festival of 1933. He wrote a letter to him, which has been published in a number of books. He said, “Would you, under these circumstances, you Arturo Toscanini, the most celebrated artist in the world, lend the glory of your reputation, your international reputation, to the Bayreuth Festival? A decisive gesture from you would now be a great historical deed. The world has the right to expect this noble gesture from you.”

So, this is a well known incident. It’s in Harvey. That letter is published in the Harvey Sachs’ biography of Toscanini, which is the more or less the official biography of Toscanini. What is not known is that Toscanini initially rejected Gabrilowitsch’s plea. And I know that, and I’m not sure if any scholars know it, but because I have a friend who’s a great collector of autographs and manuscripts, and he has this letter and he allowed me to scan it so that I can show it to you. And it’s from Gabrilowitsch to a rabbi. And clearly at this point, Toscanini, he said, “No, I’m going, I’m going to Bayreuth.” And you can see this letter is, you know, also, and he’s really upset about the fact that Toscanini is still determined to go to Bayreuth. So here is our one non-Jewish musician. This is Rachmaninoff. And of course he did leave quite specifically because of the revolution. As an aristocrat and a landowner, he was very, very much in danger. And he had an adventurous escape via Finland and Scandinavia, and arrived in America, in New York, at the very end of 1918 to a new life. And I think for 10 years anyway, he more or less gave up aspirations to be a composer.

He needed to earn a living, he needed to support his family. So he became a professional, virtuoso pianist. And he toured constantly, constantly, doing enormous numbers of concerts and was very much admired by critics, by public, by other pianists. So I’m going to play you a piece, a recording, a very famous recording, of Rachmaninoff. If you’re into historic recordings, you probably will know this one. This is his interpretation of the Chopin B-flat Minor Sonata. And a very famous moment in that. This is the funeral march. The centre of the funeral march is almost like an aria. It’s a very beautiful melody. And then after that central episode in that movement, the funeral march itself comes back and in Chopin’s score it’s marked ppp, it’s pianissimo. And I suppose you could say it’s rather cheeky, not everybody would approve of it. But you know, Rachmaninoff is a, he’s a composer. He takes a very creative approach to his interpretation of other composers’ work. So he changes that pianissimo to a thundering blood-curdling fortissimo. And it really is, I think, well, whether you approve of it or not, it’s an electrifying moment.

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And this is my one woman soloist, Wanda Landowska. She was Polish. She was born in Warsaw to a bourgeois, wealthy, assimilated Jewish family. There’s another odd Mark Twain connection here, because her mother was the first person to translate Mark Twain’s novels into Polish. And early on, she started off as a pianist, but quite early on in her career, she discovered the harpsichord. And harpsichords had been relegated to museums. Nobody in the 1890s or 1900 thought that the harpsichord was a viable instrument for public performances. Performances of keyboard music of the Baroque period were always given on pianos. But she was determined and you can- it was a one woman mission and she succeeded. You can say the fact that now, that the harpsichord is fully reestablished in the concert hall is down to her efforts.

And not only did she record Bach and Vivaldi and so on, on the harpsichord, she also commissioned new works for the harpsichord. So there were harpsichord concertos written specifically for her by Manuel de Falla and by Poulenc. And I think she recorded the Fire concerto. But oddly, although she loved the Poulenc concerto and she included it quite often in her concert performances, she never recorded it commercially. So it was very fascinating to me when a CD set came out a few years ago of recordings from Copenhagen Radio Archives. And there was an engineer who worked for the Danish Radio who was a passionate amateur of music. And he recorded many of the great instrumentalists and singers too, actually. And he did something completely illegal because obviously he was breaking copyright laws. He not only recorded them privately, but he preserved these recordings and we must be very grateful to him for this. So I’m going to play you the slow movement of the Poulenc harpsichord concerto that was written specifically for Vanda Landowska.

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Can’t resist repeating the quip of Sir Thomas Beecham about the harpsichord sounding like skeletons copulating on a corrugated iron roof. But she made it sound beautiful and she built up, she settled in France and she was really a pillar of French musical life in the interwar period. She had a house outside of Paris where she put together a remarkable collection of historic keyboard instruments. She fled in 1940 to the States, I suppose another person who was saved by Varian Fry, unfortunately having to leave behind her collection of harpsichords and keyboard instruments, which was entirely looted by the Nazis, and very few of which she got back again after the war. But she spent the rest of her life in America. So this is Nathan Milstein, and he was born in Odesa in 1903.

Incredible talent came out of Odesa. You just think what was in the water supply in Odesa that so many great musicians, Sviatoslav Richter, David Oistrakh and so on, many, many more, came out of Odesa in this period. And in fact, he shared a teacher with David Oistrakh, then moved on to St. Petersburg and was taught by Leopold Auer. And so this is another, oh- certainly he escaped from Soviet Russia in the 1920s, in the mid 1920s together with Vladimir Horovitz. And the two of them formed a duo and they toured Europe and eventually landed up in America. This is another recording that comes from the Danish Radio Archive. So it maybe one again that you are not familiar with. It’s a pretty spectacular piece of virtuoso playing of a piece by Paganini.

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Well, beat that. And staying with the Danish Radio Archives, I’m going to play you a piece by Vladimir Horowitz or played by Vladimir Horowitz. Well, unexpected maybe, not typically a piece that you would expect him to play. It’s the “Doll’s Serenade” from Dubussy’s- oh, what’s the, “Children’s Corner Suite.” So he is also Ukrainian. He was born in 1903 in Kiev, into a very wealthy assimilated family. And as I said, he formed a duo with Nathan Milstein and they arrived in America together. But he made his solo debut at the Carnegie Hall in 1929 playing the Tchaikovsky first piano concert. And it could have been a disaster. The conductor was Sir Thomas Beecham. And according to Horovitz, Beecham actually simply didn’t know the piece. I mean, Beecham is a mysterious character, really. A bounder and a scoundrel. A bit of a Boris character, a bit of a, you know, cutting corners, pretty economical with the truth.

But anyway, despite the fact that they weren’t totally together in this performance, it was a triumph for Horovitz and it established him as the leading virtuoso pianist in Russia. Rachmaninoff thought that his interpretation of his third piano concerto was better than his own. And they actually became very firm friends. He was one of Rachmaninoff’s closest friends for the rest of his life. He famously said there are three kinds of pianists, Jewish pianists, homosexual pianists, and bad pianists. He probably ticked the first two boxes. Most people think that he was homosexual, but he married Wanda Toscanini, the daughter of the great conductor. And yes, they did have a child together and it was actually a very, very happy marriage. So here is Horovitz playing Debussy.

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Now my last piece I think is going to break your hearts, partly ‘cause it’s so unbelievably beautiful. This is the young boy. He was very young when he recorded this, violinist Josef Hassid. But it’s also because it’s such a poignant and a tragic story, his short life and career. I’ve cheated slightly by included him because everybody else was born within the former Russian Empire before the Revolution. But he was born in Poland in 1923. So Poland was actually already an independent country and quite separate from Tsarist Russia. It was early on, recognised as a phenomenal talent. There was that very famous Belgian violin competition that was won, it was won by Ginette Neveu, David Oistrakh was the runner up, and he was, had a very good chance of winning too. But he had a memory lapse during one of the performances that did for his chances.

But he and his father arrived in London. And he made his debut here at the Wigmore Hall and there was very great excitement. Gerald Moore, Fritz Kreisler again praised him hugely. He said, “It’s the kind of talent that only appears once every 200 years.” And Gerald Moore, who accompanied him in his concerts at Wigmore Hall, said in his memoirs that Josef Hassid was the greatest instrumentalist that he ever worked with. He was just a boy at this point. But that he was obviously a troubled and complex character and he fell deeply in love with a young girl. And she fell in love with him. But the problem was that he was Jewish and she was Christian and both families disapproved and the relationship was broken up. And this caused him to have a complete breakdown. Apparently he attacked his own father and he was put, he was institutionalised. And a couple of years later, they decided to perform a lobotomy on him. We now know, of course, a completely discredited operation, and it went wrong and it killed him. But anyway, here he is in the gorgeous “Meditation” from “Thais.”

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Yeah, isn’t that truly heavenly? Anyway, I’m going to see what you’ve got to say.

Q&A and Comments

Ah right, “Picky, picky, piano hammers don’t come down on the string. They come up the string.” Okay, but it’s still hammering the string. Let me see.

Q: “Did Mischa Elman play left-handed?” A: It’s, I don’t think he was left-handed. That’s probably a transposed photograph.

“Mischa Elman came to Israel and took my pianist friend to accompany him on a world tour. His name was Josef Zeiger and his specialty was Chopin and they visited us in South Africa.” That’s wonderful, I love these connections with history. “There was a time when great pianists were either Russian or Jewish or both. Now it seems that pianists from the Far East have the edge.” Yes, well I think Yuja Wang is totally amazing, amazing pianist. Have to jump to the bottom, let’s go back again. Thank you. Thank you very much, Rod. Let me see, it’s Milstein. Yes, that was pretty amazing piece of virtuosity, wasn’t it? Yeah. And this, “Milstein visited,” this is Nitsa, saying that saying that Milstein visited her school in Israel in the mid fifties. Oh, thanks Nitsa.

“As a medical student of the 1970s, I was taught by Liverpool-based Douglas Miller, then in his eighties, who was actually taught by Godowsky.” Well I think I can almost beat that Nicholas, because when I was, no, I would’ve been 21, I think. I was introduced to Godowsky’s daughter, Dagmar Godowsky, who of course was a silent film star who played with Valentino. And I had a few conversations with her, but unfortunately, at that point, I hadn’t read her totally outrageous autobiography. That’s another book I really recommend to you. Absolutely hilarious. I do wish I could go back in time and have another conversation with her. “The piece-” It’s on everything is on your, the list that you get sent. So it’s the Paganini was the “Caprice No 5 in E-sharp Minor.”

Q: “Isaac Stern?” A: Yes, he doesn’t quite fit into the framework of the musicians I was talking about today. As I said, they, all of them, apart from Josef Hassid, were actually born in Tsarist-controlled Europe.

Thank you Nanette. “The final piece?” Are you, who’s playing now? That must been Josef Hassid, I think. This is Barbara, who interviewed Jascha Heifetz when he was a Regents Professor at UCLA. “I went to his home studio where he had both a Strad and a Guarnerius on the piano. I asked which he preferred and without a beat, he said, "Guarnerius.”“ That’s very interesting. Josef Hassid, who had the lobotomy. "Cantigas Women’s Choir performed for an audience of womens inmates in maximum security prison. It was a hostile audience until our accompanist Vanis played the "Mediation.” That’s so interesting. I mean, it’s wonderful to experience something like that. And of course the “Meditation,” what a tune, where does a melody like that come from? Last one is Josef Hassid. As I said, you can always get the list of everything. It should be sent. It will be have been sent to you this morning.

Thank you very much for your kind comments. “Ossip was the founding Director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.” Yes, he was their chief conductor for many years. “Horowitz’s wife, Wanda Toscanini, that she had one-” That’s true, they had one daughter. Michael says, “Recommend "Ladies in Lavender.”“ "Rubenstein gave a recital at RAM as I was a student there. Never forgot it.” I only saw him once, playing Beethoven “Emperor,” right at the end of his career. Milstein is truly staggering, isn’t it? And yet, you know, Milstein, I mean he’s not, I don’t think virtuosity is, but again, some- he’s not as famous as a virtuoso, as Heifetz was. This is Sharon Harris. “When her mother lay dying, her heart was slowing down. I put on the "Meditation,” played softly on her pillow as she passed on.“ That’s very moving, thank you.

This is Ellen and Ronette, "Went to a concert of Mischa Elman as a child in Port Elizabeth for one shilling, special price for children in the front row.” I dunno if I will answer this riddle easily.

Q: “What do you call a Russian entering Israel without a violin?” A: Oh, a pianist, that’s a nice one.

Yeah, yes, I’m sorry I had a few technical faults with those recordings. I think I must have got something onto the surface of the CD. “Michael Brittan, a member of the group, wrote a new book about Jascha Heifetz, published quite recently.” I don’t know the visual artist, Milstein, “I wonder if he’s related?”. “There is a CD of Josef Hassid and Ida Haendel.” I’ve got a CD of him, but I don’t think it’s with Ida Haendel. There must be more than one CD. He only, he didn’t make enough records to fill a whole CD. I think he only made about half a dozen records.

Thank you for all of your very nice comments and I’ll be back with you again on Wednesday.

Bye.