Music: Pupil of Liszt

In the days of Strauss waltzes and the musical “grand manner.” every aspiring pianist wanted to be apprenticed to the grey-maned old thunderer, Franz Liszt.

Not all of them made it ; one who did was a Polish boy prodigy named Moriz Rosenthal. At nine, he walked more than 400 miles from his native Lemberg to Vienna to study piano. At 14, he was made court pianist by Rumania’s Prince Carol I. He became Liszt’s star pupil, and practiced six hours a day to master the nuances of technique, played command performances all over Europe, exchanged ideas and mutual congratulations with Brahms and Johann Strauss in Vienna cafes.

At his U.S. debut in Manhattan in 1888, the audience applauded and shouted so wildly that it had to be forcibly calmed by police. (Almost unnoticed in the excitement was another musician making his U.S. debut on the same program: a 13-year-old Viennese violinist billed as Master Fritz Kreisler.) Rosenthal’s grand manner meant first-rate playing, but it also had plenty of the showman in it. Once, in Cincinnati, he played Liszt’s Don Juan Fantaisie so thunderously that a piano leg fell off. As Rosenthal described it: “I had to play without the pedals. I finalized the piece with one leg holding up the piano.” In 1938, a man of 75, with a huge red mustache and playful wit,* he boasted that he could still lift a 500-lb. weight or take care of a burglar by jujitsu. Some times he sparred a few rounds with Welsh Heavyweight Tommy Farr. But since then, U.S. audiences have had few opportunities to watch his flying fingers and applaud his romantic 19th-Century music.

Last week in Manhattan, his adopted home since Hitler occupied his beloved Vienna, death came at 83 to Moriz Rosenthal, last of the famous pupils of Liszt.

*Once in a hotel in Birmingham, he told a Negro maid that his dummy keyboard (for limbering up between concerts) was a holy piano whose music could be heard only by the pure and sinless. Then he ran off a long, soundless glissando. When he looked up, the maid had disappeared.