“No,” he said, “that I shall never tell. But I shall send you the first orchestral score and parts as soon as Jurgenson, my publisher, has them ready.”
We parted with the expectation of meeting again in America during the following winter, but, alas, in October came the cable announcing his death from cholera, and a few days later arrived a package from Moscow containing the score and parts of his Symphony No. 6, the “Pathétique.” It was like a message from the dead. I immediately put the work into rehearsal and gave it its first performance in America on the following Sunday. Its success was immediate and profound. We gave it many repetitions that winter and I have played it since in concerts all over the United States. Other orchestras have cultivated it with equal assiduity, and in fact for me the time came several years ago when I cried a halt and let the work lie fallow, as it had evidently been overplayed and its high-strung rhythms had excited the nerves of executants and audiences so often that they were in danger of being overstrained.
Ignace Paderewski made his first appearance in America in 1891, and I conducted his first five orchestral concerts. He came under the auspices of Steinway and Sons, and they told me that the gross receipts for the first concert were only five hundred dollars! His playing as well as his personality, however, immediately took our public by storm, and I do not think that since the days of Franz Liszt there has been any other travelling virtuoso in whom the man was as fascinating as the artist. People who have wondered how it was possible for him when the Great War began to throw himself so fully equipped at every point into the struggle to achieve national unity for Poland, do not realize that he was, consciously or unconsciously, preparing himself for just this opportunity all his life. He had always dreamed of a united and independent Poland. He knew the history of his people, their strength, and their weakness. It is said that one day he played before the Czar who, congratulating him, expressed his pleasure that a “Russian” should have achieved such eminence in his art. Paderewski answered: “I am a Pole, your Majesty,” and, needless to say, was never again invited to play in Russia. His mind is one of the most extraordinary I have ever come in contact with. All the world knows what he has achieved in music—his inspired interpretations, his prodigious memory, and the subtle range of colors of his musical palette, but not so many know of his interest in literature, philosophy, and history, and it took the Great War to demonstrate that as orator and statesman he ranks as high as musician. I heard him make a speech on Poland during the Exposition in San Francisco in 1915 before an audience of ten thousand, in which he gave so eloquent a survey of Poland’s history and of her needs and rights, as to rouse the people to a frenzy of enthusiasm, and I am convinced that Poland owes her national existence to-day to his statesmanship and to the sympathy which his personality created among the Allies at the Versailles Conference. I believe that Colonel House pronounced him to be the greatest statesman of the Conference, and it was only the cynical Clemenceau who said to him: “M. Paderewski, you were the greatest pianist in the world and you have chosen to descend to our level. What a pity!”
When he first came to America, his English was very incomplete but even then he demonstrated his grasp of it in unmistakable fashion. One evening he, my wife, and I dined at the house of very dear mutual friends, Mr. and Mrs. John E. Cowdin, in Gramercy Park. Cowdin had all his life been an enthusiastic polo player, and after dinner Paderewski and I admired some handsome silver trophies that he had won and that were placed in the dining-room. I said: “You see the difference between you and Johnny is that he wins his prizes in playing polo while you win yours in playing solo.”
“Zat is not all ze difference!” Paderewski immediately exclaimed in his gentle Polish accents. “I am a poor Pole playing solo, but Johnny is a dear soul playing polo.”
He is highly gifted as a composer, and besides a very interesting and spiritual symphony I remember with keen pleasure his opera “Manru,” which Maurice Grau brought out at the Metropolitan Opera House in 1902 and which I conducted. I cannot remember ever having worked harder toward achieving a successful première. The orchestral parts, which had been copied in Germany in a great hurry, arrived so full of mistakes that the first rehearsals were an agony of constant stopping and correcting, and these corrections went on during the entire time of preparation, and I believe that I still found two inaccuracies at the rehearsal just preceding the general rehearsal. Again and again I took some of the worst parts home and worked late into the night going through them meticulously myself, and comparing them with the orchestral score in an endeavor to bring order out of chaos. The opera received a warm welcome, but the libretto was lacking somewhat in dramatic interest; and the music, with all its genuine charm and warmth, was not able to successfully combat this lack.
I think that if Paderewski had been willing to sacrifice his marvellous career as a piano virtuoso (and that would have been a great sacrifice) he would have become one of the greatest composers of our time. It does not seem easy to unite the two careers, as they are essentially at war with each other. Liszt, the only man with whom I can compare Paderewski, recognized this fact, and at forty years of age resolutely turned his back on virtuosodom, with its life in the public glare, its excitements, crowds, and emoluments, in order to devote himself to composition. He settled in the little town of Weimar, living a life of poverty, and never again touched the piano for personal gain. Only now and then he would play in public in order to gather funds for the Beethoven monument in Bonn or for some great charity. And yet it is universally conceded that even he stopped too late and that, great as is the sum total of his contributions to creative art, he would have been still greater and able to express himself more genuinely if he had never been “the greatest pianist of his generation.”
It is difficult to define the charm with which the artists of Poland seem to be imbued almost beyond any other race. It is more than a social gift. It is not the result of calculation but seems to be a combination of kindliness of heart and good breeding. Madame Marcella Sembrich has it to a supreme degree, also Jean and Edouard de Reszke, also Tim and Joe Adamowski, Paul Kochanski, and my old friend Alexander Lambert, and if the new state of Poland were composed only of such of the Polish elect as I have just mentioned it would soon become the ideal republic of the world. On the other hand, a country composed exclusively of musicians might not make a contented population, as it is well known that we need an audience to listen to us, and musicians, rightly or wrongly, have the reputation of never being willing to listen to each other.
I do not, however, mean to imply that the Poles are the exclusive possessors of personal charm. For instance, I do not know of any man who has it in greater degree than my old friend Charles Martin Loeffler, who was born in Alsace, received his musical education in France, was violinist in the private orchestra of a Russian grand duke in Nice, and, at the age of sixteen, came to America. My father immediately became very fond of him, and on Sunday afternoons, when we always had chamber-music at home in which my father played first violin and Sam Franko second, Martin Loeffler would play the viola. I liked him immensely and our friendship has lasted through the years. Our birthdays are on the same day, and we are almost of an age, as he is only a year older. When Higginson formed the Boston Orchestra under George Henschel, Loeffler migrated to Boston and became first violin and second concert master. At the same time he continued his studies in composition, and has since become one of our foremost American composers. For years he has lived as a gentleman farmer in Medfield, Massachusetts. His compositions are few and far between, but all of them have the same aristocratic conception, refinement, and original orchestration, such as a man can write who has spent a great part of his life in the orchestra and knows its literature and possibilities. His letters, exquisitely penned, rank with those of Eugene Ysaye, and that is high praise, as Ysaye is the very prince of letter-writers. I venture to insert one of Loeffler’s here because it treats of the first performance of my opera, “Cyrano,” and because it is so whole-hearted in its praise and so gentle but discerning in its criticisms of the weak spots in my work.
Medfield, Mass.