Arthur Rubinstein

Arthur Rubinstein: The Pianist Who Refused to Be Cautious

In 1964, at the height of the Cold War, Arthur Rubinstein walked onto a Moscow stage and gave an all-Chopin recital to an audience that had waited a generation to hear a Polish-Jewish emigre play their national composer inside the Soviet Union. He was seventy-seven, still recording for RCA at a rate few pianists half his age could sustain, and still operating on a credo he stated plainly near the end of his life: "On stage, I will take a chance. There has to be an element of daring in great music-making. These younger ones, they are too cautious." Rubinstein performed in public across eight decades, and the daring never left the playing.

A Prodigy Who Nearly Wasted It

Born in Łódź in 1887, the youngest of seven children of a textile-factory owner, Rubinstein showed absolute pitch by age two and was performing Mozart, Schubert, and Mendelssohn from memory at seven. The violinist Joseph Joachim heard him as a child and steered him toward serious study in Berlin under Karl Heinrich Barth, a pupil of Liszt. But early success bred complacency: by his own later account, Rubinstein coasted for years on raw talent while neglecting technique, and a poorly received 1906 Carnegie Hall debut, followed by a period of poverty and a reported suicide attempt in a Berlin hotel room in 1908, marked the low point of his twenties. He described what followed as something like a rebirth — an unconditional love of life that reshaped how he approached both living and playing.

The Spanish Turn

The real transformation in his artistry came through Spain and South America rather than the German conservatory tradition that trained him. Touring Spain from 1916 and South America the following year, Rubinstein fell for the music of Isaac Albéniz, Enrique Granados, and Manuel de Falla, and later Brazil's Heitor Villa-Lobos — repertoire that rewarded exactly the coloristic freedom and rhythmic looseness his German training had suppressed. De Falla dedicated his Fantasía Bética to him; Villa-Lobos dedicated Rudepoêma; Stravinsky dedicated the fiendishly difficult Trois mouvements de Petrouchka to him as well. It was not until 1934, already a famous pianist in his late forties, that Rubinstein forced himself into a period of intensive technical retraining, closing the gap between the instinctive musician and the disciplined one. The result was the pianist most people mean when they invoke his name: not a note-perfect technician in the mold of a Horowitz, but an interpreter whose Chopin the New York Times called without peer, built on rubato that breathed rather than distorted, and a tone that favored warmth and singing line over percussive brilliance.

Memory, Language, and a Life Lived Loudly

Rubinstein's memory was reportedly photographic: he learned César Franck's Symphonic Variations on a train with no piano, working out fingerings on his lap, and he could reportedly play entire symphonies through in his head. He spoke eight languages and moved through the salons of Paris, London, and later Los Angeles and New York with equal fluency, on close terms with Ravel, Stravinsky, Casals, Heifetz, and Piatigorsky, with whom he formed one of the notable piano trios of the era. His personal life was similarly unrestrained — he married the ballerina Nela Młynarska in 1932 at forty-five, had five children with her, and by his own wry admission spent less of his youth on "wine, women and song" than on women specifically; late in life, at ninety, he left Nela for a much younger companion, Annabelle Whitestone, without ever formally divorcing.

Politics on the Keyboard

Rubinstein's convictions showed up in his bookings as much as his phrasing. He refused to perform in Germany after 1914 over its conduct in Belgium during the First World War and never went back, even after most of his own Polish-Jewish family was murdered in the Holocaust; in 1949 he threatened to boycott the Chicago Symphony Orchestra over the possible hiring of Wilhelm Furtwängler, who had remained active in Nazi Germany. At the United Nations' inaugural conference in 1945, with Poland absent from the delegations because of the Soviet-installed government, Rubinstein sat down and played the Polish national anthem, slowly and forcefully, to a standing ovation — a piece of political theater performed entirely at the keyboard.

The Late Recordings

Rubinstein signed with RCA Victor in earnest from 1928 and re-recorded much of his core repertoire as technology moved from 78s to LP to stereo, leaving behind a body of recorded work — reissued on CD as roughly 107 hours of music — that constitutes one of the most complete documented careers in recorded piano history. He distrusted the microphone less than most of his peers but still preferred studio control, authorizing only a few hours of live recordings during his lifetime. He kept performing into his eighties despite failing eyesight, retiring from the stage only in 1976, at eighty-nine, with a final concert at London's Wigmore Hall — a coda to a public career that had opened in 1894.

Why Arthur Is Called a Genius

Rubinstein's genius is not the systematic, architect's genius of a Segovia building an instrument's repertoire from scratch, nor a physiological outlier's genius in the way Horowitz's technique is often described. It is closer to what musicians mean by a "natural" — an unusually direct wire between ear, memory, and hand that let him absorb a symphony after one hearing and reproduce a train-car sight-reading of Franck from memory days later. Critics and colleagues repeatedly singled out his Chopin as belonging to him uniquely, the New York Times crowning him a Chopinist without peer, and his late willingness to "take a chance" onstage is itself treated in the literature as the sign of a mind that trusted its own instant judgment over rehearsed safety. The honest counter to any claim of pure genius is that Rubinstein himself said he wasted his first decades on talent alone and only became the pianist of legend after forcing himself, at nearly fifty, into the unglamorous grind of retraining his technique — genius here was as much a hard-won correction as a gift.

Legacy

Rubinstein's name now attaches to an international piano competition held every three years in Israel, streets in Tel Aviv and his native Poland, and a catalogue of recordings still treated as reference performances of Chopin, Brahms, and the Spanish repertoire he did as much as anyone to bring into the standard concert canon.

Achievements

• Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire
• Presidential Medal of Freedom — 1976
• Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award — 1994
• Léonie Sonning Music Prize — 1971
• Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal — 1961
• Instruments: piano
• Genres: classical music