Music: The Big Four

Brought there by subway and limousine, and bundled in worsted and furs, the public crowded into Manhattan’s Carnegie Hall last week to hear a 72-year-old man play the piano. Artur Rubinstein was starting a marathon ten-concert series in which, as a gesture of gratitude to the public he “loves like a woman,” he plans to unpack the most cherished contents of his “musical valise.” The series will do more than demonstrate the impeccable artistry of the world’s most legendary virtuoso. Like the late great Josef Hofmann’s remarkable series of concerts in Petrograd, Russia, in 1913, it will, by comparison, illuminate the defects and virtues of the men who stand with Rubinstein as the greatest living players of the piano. The list is not long; it includes only three more: Rudolf Serkin, Vladimir Horowitz and Sviatoslav Richter.

The four men are as different in their relationship to the public as they are in their approach to the piano. While Rubinstein strides the stage with old-fashioned exuberance and verve, Serkin is more nearly the scholar, Horowitz the prophet, and Richter the mystic. At 16, Rubinstein’s vision of the good life was “to sit next to a lovely woman in a concert hall and hold her hand and listen to Tchaikovsky”; with a gusto born of love, he has been clutching the hand of the public ever since. And although he has long since banished Tchaikovsky from his valise, he regularly summons to the great romantic literature of the piano—Brahms, Schumann, Chopin, Debussy, Liszt—more poetry and grandeur than any other pianist alive. The moderns, Rubinstein thinks, are best left to “the brilliant youngsters to whom these sounds are more natural” (although one of the brilliant youngsters, Van Cliburn, has emerged as Rubinstein’s logical successor as a master of the musical romantics).

Rubinstein, whom his friend Thomas Mann called “that civilized man,” is a product of the same Europe that Mann knew, a Europe that also nurtured such pianists as Benno Moiseiwitsch and Wilhelm Backhaus. Indeed, Rubinstein could have stepped out of a Mann novel. His enthusiasm for food, wines, cigars, paintings and fine editions is legendary, and his cultural interests extend far beyond his music. He reads omnivorously in eight languages, hobnobs more with writers than he does with musicians, occasionally regrets that he did not follow a youthful urge to become a novelist. His piano playing seems the consequence of all the characteristics that make him a remarkable man. Its outstanding characteristic is its sheer lack of complication, its sense of inevitability.

Rubinstein prides himself on being “a very normal person” (“I don’t think anyone can beat me on that”), and when he sits down at the piano to ruminate on Chopin, say, or Schumann, he does so with the majestic air of a man who can look beneath the surface to the ultimate simplicities of great art. No other pianist achieves quite the same authority, nor does any other contemporary command Rubinstein’s remarkable elegance of tone. Big or small, the sound is always rich and full—in contrast to that of the younger pianists who tend to treat the piano more percussively.

The most romantic of modern pianists, Rubinstein always carefully nurtures a hint of improvisation, “a drop of fresh blood” in every performance. Occasionally, he maintains, “it is even better not to practice. A pianist should never take the performance out of his pocket instead of out of his heart.” Although he is the best classical record seller of all time (2¾ million records, with the Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto as his most popular disk), he dislikes hearing his own recordings because of the persistent fear that “I would want to make them again; I’ve learned something new and they haven’t.”

RUDOLF SERKIN, 58, is a totally different type of artist. A retiring man, he gives only a fraction of the 100-plus concerts that Rubinstein manages every year, devotes much of his time to his teaching responsibilities as head of the piano department at Curtis Institute and at the summer Music School and Festival he founded eleven seasons ago in Marlboro, Vt. (TIME, July 18, 1960). Born in Bohemia of Russian parents, Serkin took his early training in Vienna (along with Singing Hopeful Rudolf Bing and Fellow Pianist George Szell), became a first-rate chamber music player in a trio founded by Violinist Adolf Busch. As a soloist, he built an impressive—but not widespread—reputation playing the music of Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms, scored a triumph when he made his U.S. orchestral debut with Toscanini and the New York Philharmonic in 1936. Now a U.S. citizen, Serkin only recently returned to Germany for the first time since Hitler came to power; “overwhelmed and terribly moved,” he gave a Beethoven recital in Berlin that brought him a cheering ovation from a capacity crowd.

No major pianist since Artur Schnabel, an admirer of the young Serkin, has given so much time to teaching and advising young musicians; Pianists Eugene Istomin, Gary Graffman, Seymour Lipkin, Claude Frank, Lee Luvisi, all studied under him. Although he is not noted as a player of the moderns, Serkin teaches and occasionally even performs 20th century works of fiendish difficulty, e.g., Bela Bartok’s First Piano Concerto, which has been performed by virtually no other major pianist since its première in 1927.

The wonder of Serkin’s success is that he achieved it with minimum natural equipment. Neither graceful nor relaxed on the piano bench, he gives an impression of trying to club the instrument into submission—and often failing. The sound is big but not always pleasant, the style declamatory, the attack urgently propulsive. Nor is Serkin a notable technician, despite the fact that he spends hours in grinding practice, and even invents new fingerings so that the practice will not become routine. What has enabled Serkin to triumph is the formidable quality of his musical intellect—and the exciting tensions that he manages to convey as musical ideas, both subtle and adventurous, struggle to life on his keyboard.

VLADIMIR HOROWITZ, now 57, has turned his back on his public for the past eight years, but he still manages to generate far more interest than most continuing travelers on the concert circuit. Recently, no fewer than 1,300 New Yorkers sent him a petition protesting his absence from the concert stage. Horowitz has been away before—from 1936 to 1938, when illness forced his temporary retirement—but his latest absence dates back to the spring of 1953. Always terrified of concerts, he has used his leisure “to study a great deal of vocal and symphonic music I never previously had a chance to know.” He is not at all sure whether he will ever again play in public.

Horowitz, in fact, never wished to appear in public. Trained at the Kiev Conservatory, he was forced into a concert career when his family lost its money during the revolution. He got his first big break when he filled in as a last-minute substitute and played the Tchaikovsky First Piano Concerto with a Hamburg orchestra. The conductor was so astonished by the young pianist’s first crashing chord that he jumped from the podium and ran to stare stupefied at Horowitz’ hands. (Soon afterward, Serkin heard Horowitz’ Chopin and found it “like a fireball exploding.”) Horowitz was just as spectacular in the U.S., where he first played in 1928 and where he commanded fabulous fees. “To play the piano quite that loud and quite that fast with accuracy,” wrote Critic Virgil Thomson, “is given to few in any generation. To project at the same time so strongly a sentiment of controlled and relentless violence is given to none other in ours.”

A Horowitz performance of any of the composers in whose works he excels—Liszt, Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, Mussorgsky—can move an audience to almost dionysiac frenzy. Using the pedal subtly, he achieves a brilliant steely tone that, when combined with relentless rhythms and incredibly agile finger work, makes most other pianists seem tame by comparison. For all that, Horowitz has frequently been criticized in the past for an inability to play less glittering music properly. The best evidence that he has remedied that fault lies in the series of recordings that he has made in recent years for RCA Victor, notably of Clementi, Scriabin and Beethoven sonatas. Whether he can be persuaded to return to the concert stage or not, Horowitz plans to record still more Beethoven—in what could well prove to be some of the best playing of his career.

SVIATOSLAV RICHTER, 47, unlike most Soviet artists, is champion of the moderns, but he also excels in performing Beethoven, Liszt, Schubert, Chopin. Son of a pianist-composer, Richter set out to be a conductor, progressed so brilliantly that he was made assistant conductor of the Odessa Opera when he was 16. Then, suddenly, he became bored with his career, and at the unusually late age of 21 he entered the Moscow Conservatory determined to become a pianist. (Fellow Student Emil Gilels, two years younger than Richter, had already been famed in Russia for several years.) Richter first attracted attention when he played the première performance of Serge Prokofiev’s Sixth Sonata in 1939, for some time gave 120 concerts a season in Russia and the satellites. His triumphal tour of the U.S. last winter was his first extensive trip to the West.

A thoroughly Russian pianist, Richter has neither the big, majestic line of a Rubinstein, nor the sheer, flogging power of a Serkin, nor the machine-tooled glitter of a Horowitz. But his technical equipment is excellent—as he demonstrated in Carnegie Hall when he played five Beethoven sonatas in a single evening, his style always warm and flowing and never showy. What really enthralled U.S. audiences was Richter’s ability to sing his way into the emotional heart of the music: no pianist can so persuasively caress a melody, so delicately coax a piano into song. What Richter has in common with Rubinstein, Serkin and Horowitz is the sort of honesty that Rubinstein once defined as being not “afraid to feel, afraid to make a mistake.” That honesty is necessary, says Artur Rubinstein, because “piano playing is a dangerous life; it must be lived dangerously.”