There are many portraits of Paderewski at Riond-Bosson, but none except the pencil-sketch by Burne-Jones has represented both the strength and the spirituality of his head. This portrait hangs in the salon, surrounded by old prints, which are one of the master’s hobbies. Fragonard’s pictures are evidently among his favorites, as they also occupy a place of honor in the drawing-room. Autographed engravings by Alma-Tadema, caricatures of Paderewski by well-known artists, and photographs of famous friends—Modjeska, Saint-Saëns, and Sembrich, among others—adorn the house from top to bottom; and Paderewski is the possessor of a remarkable collection of old Swiss prints of towns and scenery. A few very interesting family photographs hang in the library, a whole group being of Mme. Paderewska in her childhood and girlhood, a maiden with beautiful dreamy eyes and a delicate face, framed in dusky hair.
There are seven pianos in the house, two being in the drawing-room; but it is in his own study that Paderewski does all his practising and composing. His practising would be both an encouragement and a discouragement to students. Hour after hour he works, with the patience that none but the greatest possess, polishing and repolishing phrases that sound perfect even to a practised ear, but which do not satisfy his critical judgment. Only occasionally does he allow himself the relaxation of playing even a page of music; after this he returns relentlessly to octave work, to staccato finger-passages, to separate phrases from Liszt’s sonatas, to the more difficult portions of his own magnificent “Variations et fugue,” to snatches of Chopin, or to bits of Debussy, whose piano-music he likes.
Paderewski has much admiration for the greatest masters of the French school: Gounod, Bizet, and especially Saint-Saëns, whom he considers the greatest living musician. With enthusiasm he tells of Saint-Saëns’s achievement in playing four Mozart concertos from memory at the age of seventy-six. He also admires Massenet, particularly his “Jongleur,” which he calls the French composer’s masterpiece. He feels that Gounod’s “Faust,” even more than his “Roméo et Juliette,” is immortal, and that “Carmen” is one of the works which can never grow old, and of which one cannot tire. He finds Gounod’s influence in Bizet’s compositions, and still more in those of Tschaikovsky, who in all his work was dominated by the great Frenchman, the “Faust” waltz even having colored Tschaikovsky’s symphonic ideas, coming into them either in conventional waltz time or in the unusual rhythm of five beats, as in the second movement of the “Symphonie Pathétique.” Still more pronounced is Tschaikovsky’s debt to Gounod in “Eugen Onegin,” where, in the love-scene, this same waltz phrase appears reversed, though almost identical with that in “Faust.” “But I prefer the father,” Paderewski adds. To him, as to many other lovers of “Faust,” the “Soldiers’ Chorus” is uninteresting; but he singles out for special admiration Mefisto’s striking song of the “Veau d’or,” his serenade, and the “immortally beautiful” love-music.
Acquaintance with Tschaikovsky’s music means knowing the whole Russian school, Paderewski says, although the younger Russian musicians repudiate him and Rubinstein, just as Russian writers turn against their greatest representative, and call Turgenieff a foreigner, expatriated, and untrue to Russian characteristics. The first and last movements of Tschaikovsky’s best-loved symphony, the “Pathétique,” Paderewski considers sublime; but he regards the other two as rather commonplace.
His opinion of the modern French school has not changed since his talk with Mr. Daniel Gregory Mason, which was published in THE CENTURY for November, 1908. Some of the Debussy piano-music appeals to him; but he still considers “Pelléas” little more than color, and rather monotonous color.
“I think I must be very old-fashioned,” he once said, “for I know many persons no younger than I who like it.” His own “Variations,” in which some listeners found a surface resemblance to the modern French school, have no more real relation to it than has the music of Chopin or of Liszt.
Paderewski is as great in gastronomy as in music, and he believes the subject of food is “the most important question” in our country. Of Americans he says: “They are rich—rich enough to spoil French cooking,” meaning their frequent indifference to quality, a fact which he deeply deplores; for in this art, to him as to other connoisseurs, the French are supreme. “You have good fruits, good meats, but nothing else is good except the scallops, which are the best thing you have. The fish is abominable.” In saying this he probably had in mind the cold-storage fish served in our hotels. “You have destroyed your lobsters, your salmon, your terrapin, your forests. You never think that another generation is coming.”
America is not the only country he censures thus sharply. The English are still more blameworthy, for their food-stuffs are perfection, and yet nothing tastes good; though he admitted that one could get excellent dinners in some London restaurants and private houses.
The sour cherry, which Europe owes to Lucullus, is Paderewski’s favorite fruit. Following the Roman’s example, he has imported the choicest varieties for his Swiss home. These trees came from Poland, and those who ate of the fruit agreed with Paderewski’s statement that they are “the aristocrats among cherries.”