Paderewski generously agreed to the panic-stricken request of the Sejm that he try to form a new cabinet. Then he quietly left Warsaw, and after five years of voluntary exile returned to his beloved home on the shining Swiss lake.
CHAPTER 10
“AFTER THAT—ART!”
An announcement the world had been hoping to hear came from Paderewski on July 14—Bastille Day—1922. As he boarded the S.S. Savoie in New York for a trip back to Europe, he announced that in the fall of that year he would return to the United States to resume his concert career. He had not played in public for five years, not since the night he played in the Metropolitan Opera House at a special concert in honor of the French hero, Marshal Joffre. But now he was ready to move back to Carnegie Hall and the other concert platforms of the world. Or at least he would be ready, he felt, after four more months of the kind of hard work he had been doing behind closed doors for over two years.
Although certain of his friends advised against the step, the fact of the matter was that Paderewski had no choice. He had to return to the stage because it was the only way he knew how to make a living. He had to work for a living because he had no money. He, who had been the richest artist appearing before the public, was now all but penniless. Nearly all of his great fortune had been given away to the war-hungry people of Europe.
The announcement created a sensation. Paderewski was returning to the stage! Newspaper editorials around the world—and even his close friends and staunchest admirers—asked the same question: would his second concert career be a triumph or a failure? Yet the answer should have been clear to anyone who gave a moment’s thought to Paderewski’s life and work. Clearly he would never have made the decision to return to the scenes of his former greatness if he had not been sure of his own powers and of his ability to use them again as fully as before.
But never before had Paderewski spent more painstaking hours on his beloved music than he did in the months just before his second Carnegie Hall debut. The great French violinist, Jacques Thibaud, who crossed the Atlantic with him, said that Paderewski even sacrificed his favorite pastime of bridge in favor of extra hours of practicing.
It was thirty-one years, almost to the very day, since his well-remembered debut in Carnegie Hall in 1891. Now, on November 22, 1922, he walked out on the famous stage to begin again. This time an audience that months before had bought every seat in the house filled the hall with a great cheering at his entrance, and kept up the applause until he seated himself at the Steinway and struck the few chords with which he always liked to quiet his listeners. That he was nervous was certain. But that his fingers had every ounce of the control, of the magic singing sound, and the thundering excitement they had had in the past was clear to him and to his audience. It was clear, also, to the critics, who were unanimous as they sought, almost desperately, to describe the mature playing of this man who was now so much more than a pianist.
There was no dissent anywhere from the critical opinions. But there was one special friend who, under unique circumstances, summed it up better than any other. He was Georges Clemenceau, France’s wartime premier.
On the night before his own return concert in Carnegie Hall, Paderewski had gone to the Metropolitan Opera House to hear Clemenceau speak. But Clemenceau had to make another speech on November 22 and had not been able to hear the great triumph of Paderewski’s return. When Paderewski’s concert was over, he was driven to the home of Charles Dana Gibson, a fashionable artist of the day, with whom Clemenceau was staying. There, the two men greeted each other with the deepest affection.