Word: arturs
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...almost 50 years ago to the month that Artur Rubinstein first played in Carnegie Hall (a mere coincidence, he insists-"I hate anniversaries"). In that half century he has grown from a prodigy to a musical playboy to a great artist with the broadest popular following of any front-rank musician in the world. The compact dignity of his entrances, his ramrod back and frizzled grey crown, his highhanded hammering of the keyboard are known and loved wherever there are pianos...
...time he was three, he was a "terrible little fiend" about music, screaming at his sisters when they struck a sour chord and banging the piano lid on their fingers to make them stop. Impressed with his son's possibilities, Papa Rubinstein bought him a child-sized violin. Artur promptly smashed it. Papa bought another, and Artur smashed that too. Papa gave up, let him concentrate on the then less fashionable piano...
Instead of regular school, Artur had three tutors-one for French, one for English, and one for everything else. At 15 he was a veteran performer in the capitals of middle Europe and went to visit Paderewski, who relaxed the prodigy's initial tenseness by feeding him champagne. The treatment worked so well that a visiting music critic from Boston arranged for his first tour in the U.S. On the boat going over, the charming teen-ager-of-the-world lost all his cash learning poker, but he made a big hit with the fashionable New Yorkers...
...stick because I never got to bed until morning." One evening Composer Paul (The Sorcerer's Apprentice) Dukas found him breakfasting in a cafe and insisted that he come at once to his studio. There he presented Rubinstein with a handful of pornographic pictures. "Why?" asked Artur. "Because that's the only thing you seem to be interested in these days," said Dukas. That slap in the face and the stern lecture that followed sent Rubinstein to the country and a milk diet. But after a short while there was another love affair ("Terrible, terrible...
...play in Germany again, and never has. Asked what countries he had not visited in the last 40 years, he once named Tibet, because it is too high, and Germany, because it is too low. In 1938 he returned a decoration awarded him by Mussolini with a telegram signed "Artur Rubinstein, Jewish pianist...