Word: playing
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Ignace Jan Paderewski's U. S. debut was no sensation. A stormy crossing from England on a small steamer had upset his stomach. The unexpected news that he was supposed to play six lengthy piano concertos during his first week in Manhattan had upset his nerves. After the concert he returned in a panic to his hotel room, where he immediately started to practice for his second appearance. The other guests banged angrily on their radiator pipes. So he went out again, woke up the watchman at the Steinway Piano Company's warehouse, and spent the rest...
...short of cash. For several years he remained a recluse, remembered by the public only for an occasional smouldering outburst on the state of affairs in his native Poland. He had not touched the piano for four years. Rumors spread that the great Paderewski had forgotten how to play. But in 1922, his red-gold hair now silver, Paderewski staged a comeback, proved that he was still the only living virtuoso who could gross half a million dollars on a U. S. concert tour...
When in 1933 aged Trouper Paderewski walked stiffly up to a piano in Manhattan's Madison Square Garden to play the last concert of his 19th U. S. tour, most of the throng of 20,000 believed they were hearing him for the last time...
...chance came in 1884 when, at a Polish summer resort, he met the great Polish Actress Helena Modjeska. To Modjeska, then the toast of half the theatres of the world, he confided his ambitions. Graciously she suggested a joint concert in Cracow, at which he would play and she would appear in dramatic recitations. The concert was given. Modjeska's name on the billboards acted like magic, and Paderewski was up the first notch in his laborious climb to fame...
...especially old Charlie Chaplin films), he looks back upon his film debut in Moonlight Sonata as an intensely uncomfortable experience. "There were too many repetitions and too many lights. I can only play at ease in subdued light." At the radio, over which he has made only two broadcasts, he practically spits: "It is killing music and musicians. I don't believe it [helps to make people more musical than they are]. It just robs them of any possible personal musical activity and of their musical keenness; it casts a spell of laziness on them." (Nevertheless, Critic Paderewski...