Anton Rubinstein

• 1. Introduction

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  Anton Rubinstein once told a young Josef Hofmann, "When you are as old as I am, you may do as I do. If you can." That final dare captures the man entirely. Rubinstein was a Russian pianist who moved audiences to go home limp, who played Beethoven like a volcanic eruption, and who Liszt nicknamed "Van II" because listeners felt they were watching Beethoven himself return to the keyboard. He was also the founder of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, the composition teacher of Tchaikovsky, and a composer of twenty operas who spent his American tour longing for the whole ordeal to end. How did a child born in a village on the Dniester River become the most famous pianist in the world? And why, despite everything he built, do his compositions now live only at the edges of the concert repertoire? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. A Child on the Road

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  Rubinstein was born to Jewish parents in the village of Vikhvatinets in the Podolia Governorate, roughly 150 kilometres northwest of Odessa. Before he turned five, his paternal grandfather ordered every member of the Rubinstein family to convert from Judaism to Russian Orthodoxy. The religious imposition did not take hold permanently; Rubinstein would later become an atheist.

  His mother was a capable musician, and she began giving him piano lessons at five. His teacher soon heard him play and accepted him as a non-paying student. At nine, Rubinstein made his first public appearance at a charity benefit concert. Later that same year, his mother sent him to Paris accompanied by his teacher Villoing, who tried to enroll him at the Paris Conservatoire. The attempt failed.

  The pair stayed in Paris for a year anyway. In December 1840, the young Rubinstein played in the Salle Erard before an audience that included both Frederic Chopin and Franz Liszt. Chopin invited him to his studio and played for him personally. Liszt advised Villoing to take Rubinstein to Germany for composition study, but Villoing had other plans. He took the boy on an extended concert tour of Europe and Western Russia instead, and they did not return to Moscow until June 1843.

  Determined to finance both Anton's career and that of his younger brother Nikolai, their mother then sent the boys to Saint Petersburg to perform for Tsar Nicholas I and the Imperial family at the Winter Palace. Anton was 14. Nikolai was eight.

• 3. Poverty, Patrons, and Berlin

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  In spring 1844, Rubinstein traveled to Berlin with his mother, sister Luba, and Nikolai. Felix Mendelssohn, who had already heard Rubinstein on his European tour, declared that he needed no further piano study. Giacomo Meyerbeer directed both boys to Siegfried Dehn for composition and theory instruction.

  In the summer of 1846, word arrived that Rubinstein's father was gravely ill. His mother, sister, and Nikolai returned to Russia, leaving Rubinstein alone in Berlin. He continued studying, first with Dehn and then with Adolf Bernhard Marx, and began composing in earnest. Now 17, he knew he could no longer present himself as a child prodigy. He went to Vienna and sought out Liszt, hoping to be accepted as a pupil. After Rubinstein played his audition, Liszt reportedly told him, "A talented man must win the goal of his ambition by his own unassisted efforts." Liszt did nothing more to help him.

  Rubinstein was living in acute poverty during this period. Attempts to find patrons came to nothing. After an unsuccessful year in Vienna and a concert tour of Hungary, he went back to Berlin and returned to giving lessons. The Revolution of 1848 finally forced him home to Russia.

  Spending the next five years mainly in Saint Petersburg, he taught, gave concerts, and performed frequently at the Imperial court. The Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, sister-in-law to Tsar Nicholas I, became his most devoted patroness. His first opera, Dmitry Donskoy, was performed at the Bolshoy Theater in Saint Petersburg in 1852, though the work is now lost except for its overture. Three one-act operas for Elena Pavlovna followed.

• 4. The Virtuoso Abroad

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  In 1854, Rubinstein began a four-year concert tour of Europe, his first major tour in a decade. He was 24 and felt ready to offer himself as a fully developed pianist and a composer worthy of serious attention. He very quickly re-established himself as a virtuoso. The pianist Ignaz Moscheles, writing in 1855, put into words what became a widely shared opinion: "In power and execution he is inferior to no one."

  One high point came on the 16th of November 1854, when Rubinstein led the Leipzig Gewandhaus orchestra in his Ocean Symphony. Reviews of him as composer were mixed, though his solo recital a few weeks later received more favorable notices.

  A tour break in the winter of 1856-57 brought Rubinstein into the company of Elena Pavlovna and much of the Imperial family in Nice. There he took part in discussions about raising the level of musical education in Russia. Those conversations bore initial fruit with the founding of the Russian Musical Society in 1859.

  At the behest of the Steinway and Sons piano company, Rubinstein later toured the United States during the 1872-73 season. The contract called for 200 concerts at the rate of 200 dollars per concert, payable in gold; Rubinstein distrusted both American banks and American paper money. He stayed 239 days and gave 215 concerts, sometimes two or three a day in as many cities. He wrote afterward: "May Heaven preserve us from such slavery! Under these conditions there is no chance for art, one simply grows into an automaton, performing mechanical work; no dignity remains to the artist, he is lost."

  Despite his misery, the American tour left him financially secure for the rest of his life. He returned to Russia and purchased a dacha in Peterhof, not far from Saint Petersburg, investing his earnings in real estate.

• 5. Building the Conservatory

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  The Saint Petersburg Conservatory, the first music school in Russia, opened in 1862 as a development from the Russian Musical Society. Rubinstein founded it, served as its first director, and assembled an imposing faculty.

  The school's basic premise surprised some. One woman of fashion, told by Rubinstein that classes would be taught in Russian rather than a foreign language, exclaimed: "What, music in Russian! That is an original idea!" Rubinstein reflected afterward that it was indeed surprising, since any Russian who had previously wanted to study music theory had been obliged to take lessons from a foreigner or travel to Germany.

  Criticism came from another direction too. The Russian nationalist music group known as The Five attacked the Conservatory as a stronghold of academism. Mikhail Tsetlin, writing about The Five, acknowledged the tension while conceding that the Conservatory did raise the level of musical culture in Russia.

  Rubinstein's greatest success as a composer coincided with this period. His Fourth Piano Concerto arrived in 1864. His opera The Demon, based on Lermontov's Romantic poem, premiered in 1871. Between those two works came the orchestral piece Don Quixote, which Tchaikovsky described as "interesting and well done," though "episodic," and the opera Ivan IV Grozniy, which Balakirev premiered and which prompted Borodin to observe that "the music is good, you just cannot recognize that it is Rubinstein."

  By 1867, tensions with the Balakirev camp had created intense dissension within the faculty. Rubinstein resigned and returned to touring. He came back to the Conservatory in 1887 to tighten standards: he removed inferior students, demoted and dismissed professors, tightened entrance and examination requirements, and revised the curriculum. He resigned again in 1891 after the Imperial authorities demanded that admissions and annual student prizes be allocated along ethnic quotas rather than purely by merit. Those quotas were designed to disadvantage Jews. Rubinstein resettled in Dresden and gave concerts in Germany and Austria, nearly all of them charity benefit events.

• 6. The Playing Itself

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  Many of Rubinstein's contemporaries felt he bore a striking physical resemblance to Ludwig van Beethoven. Ignaz Moscheles, who had known Beethoven personally, wrote that "Rubinstein's features and short, irrepressible hair remind me of Beethoven." Liszt went further, referring to Rubinstein simply as "Van II." The resemblance was felt to extend to the playing itself. Audience members wrote of going home limp after his recitals, knowing they had witnessed a force of nature.

  Violinist Leopold Auer recalled hearing Rubinstein play Beethoven's Archduke Trio in 1868 alongside himself and cellist Alfredo Piatti: "It seemed to me I had never before heard the piano really played. The grandeur of style with which Rubinstein presented those five measures, the beauty of tone his softness of touch secured, the art with which he manipulated the pedal, are indescribable."

  Henri Vieuxtemps, violinist and composer, put it more forcefully: "His power over the piano is something undreamt of; he transports you into another world; all that is mechanical in the instrument is forgotten."

  Not everyone agreed. Clara Schumann heard Rubinstein play the Mendelssohn C minor Trio in 1857 and wrote that he "so rattled it off that I did not know how to control myself... and often he so annihilated fiddle and cello that I... could hear nothing of them." A few years later, after a concert in Breslau, she noted in her diary: "I was furious, for he no longer plays. Either there is a perfectly wild noise or else a whisper with the soft pedal down."

  American pianist Amy Fay, who wrote extensively on the European classical music scene, admitted that while Rubinstein "has a gigantic spirit in him, and is extremely poetic and original... for an entire evening he is too much."

  Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick, in an 1884 review, expressed what critic Harold C. Schonberg called the majority view. After complaining about the over-three-hour length of the recital, Hanslick conceded that the sensual quality of the playing gave genuine pleasure. He concluded: "Yes, he plays like a god, and we do not take it amiss if, from time to time, he changes, like Jupiter, into a bull."

  Rubinstein's hands were famously enormous. His student Josef Hofmann noted that his fifth finger "was as thick as my thumb." Pianist Josef Lhevinne described them as "fat, pudgy... with fingers so broad at the finger-tips that he often had difficulty in not striking two notes at once." The wrong notes were not always accidental. After a concert in Berlin in 1875, Rubinstein admitted: "If I could gather up all the notes that I let fall under the piano, I could give a second concert with them."

• 7. Rachmaninoff's Education

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  Sergei Rachmaninoff first attended Rubinstein's historical concerts as a twelve-year-old piano student. Forty-four years later, he told his biographer Oscar von Riesemann: "His playing gripped my whole imagination and had a marked influence on my ambition as a pianist."

  The series of historical recitals that made such an impression on the young Rachmaninoff were seven consecutive concerts covering the entire history of piano music. Rubinstein played the series throughout Russia and Eastern Europe. In Moscow he gave the recitals on consecutive Tuesday evenings in the Hall of the Nobility, then repeated each concert the following morning at the German Club for the benefit of students, free of charge. He concluded his American tour with the same series, performing all seven recitals over a nine-day period in New York City in May 1873.

  Each individual program was enormous. The second concert, devoted entirely to Beethoven sonatas, included the Moonlight, Tempest, Waldstein, Appassionata, E minor, A major (Op. 101), E major (Op. 109), and C minor (Op. 111). The fourth concert, devoted to Schumann, contained the Fantasy in C, Kreisleriana, Symphonic Studies, Sonata in F sharp minor, a set of short pieces, and Carnaval. Encores were not included.

  Rachmaninoff told von Riesemann that it was not Rubinstein's technique that spellbound listeners but rather "the profound, spiritually refined musicianship, which spoke from every note and every bar he played." He recalled hearing Rubinstein repeat the whole finale of Chopin's Sonata in B minor, apparently dissatisfied with a short crescendo near the end. He also remembered a memory lapse during Balakirev's Islamey, where Rubinstein improvised in the style of the piece for four minutes until the actual notes came back to him.

  Rachmaninoff's own formulation of Rubinstein's greatness was direct: "For every possible mistake he may have made, he gave, in return, ideas and musical tone pictures that would have made up for a million mistakes." Rubinstein himself had identified his most essential tool; he told Rachmaninoff, "The pedal is the soul of the piano."

• 8. Legacy and Later Years

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  Rubinstein gave his final concert in Saint Petersburg on the 14th of January 1894. His health had been failing rapidly, and that summer he moved back to his dacha in Peterhof. He died there on the 20th of November 1894, having suffered from heart disease for some time. The former Troitskaya Street in Saint Petersburg, where he had lived, now bears his name.

  He taught only one private piano student: Josef Hofmann, who became one of the finest keyboard artists of the twentieth century. Among the composition students he shaped, Tchaikovsky remains the most famous. Rubinstein's Fourth Piano Concerto greatly influenced Tchaikovsky's own piano concertos, especially the first, composed in 1874-75. The finale of that concerto traces back directly to Rubinstein's material.

  As a composer, Rubinstein was prolific but uneven. After his death, his works began to lose popularity. His piano concertos held their place in the European repertoire until the First World War, and his principal works have retained some presence in the Russian concert repertoire. Paderewski remarked that Rubinstein "had not the necessary concentration of patience for a composer" and "was prone to indulge in grandiloquent cliches at moments of climax."

  Rubinstein never forgot Vikhvatinets. He held a series of concerts specifically to donate the proceeds to a fund for his native village, and with that money a public school was subsequently opened there.

  His only private recording dates to January 1890, made in Moscow by Julius Block on behalf of Thomas Edison. On it, Rubinstein is heard remarking about the phonograph: "What a wonderful thing." Also captured on the same recording are the voices of Pyotr Tchaikovsky and soprano Yelizaveta Lavrovskaya, a small gathering of the Russian musical world preserved on one of the earliest audio documents in existence.