Bon Vivant
Arthur Rubinstein: My Young Years.
by Arthur Rubinstein.
Knopf. 512 pp. $10.00.
The mature Arthur Rubinstein presents so admirable a figure as a man and as a musician that one regrets his decision to confine this heavy tome of light reminiscence to his salad days. The narrative ends abruptly when, at thirty, he reached the age of discretion, so that what we get from it, all we get from it, is an overextended portrait of the artist as a pampered prodigy, a teen-age Casanova, an exceedingly spoiled young man.
At the age of ten Rubinstein was sent from his parental home in Lodz, Poland, to study piano under a famous teacher, Heinrich Barth, and he never returned. He was scarcely thirteen when the haut monde adopted him, petted him, lionized him, dazzled him, and his Orthodox Jewish parents lost him forever. Much too soon his course was charted for him, his career predestined. He was a born pianist, with the spatular fingers and a 12-key reach—his little finger was as long as its neighbor—that made technique come easy, and he had genuine musicianship. His brilliant playing soon commanded attention. His natural charm, ingenuousness, affability, ardor, made him an immediate social success. Older women were impelled to mother him, and to sleep with him. Fellow artists, noted musicians, helped and guided his career. Joseph Joachim, although a violinist, became his patron and his mentor. Paderewski heard him play, embraced him, and predicted a great future, which in itself was sufficient to insure it. Soon Rubinstein was performing before, as the saying went, “the crowned heads of Europe.”
Before he was twenty-one he had met almost all of the important personages worth meeting—the list he offers is awesome: King Edward VII of Great Britain, the Duke of Connaught, the Duke of Alba, Queen Mother Marie Christina of Spain, Josef Pilsudski and Count Potocki of Poland, to name a few, and not to mention the King of Cambodia, who is given no other name. In his own world he mingled with Saint Saëns, Ravel, Gorky, Scriabin, Norman Douglas, Sascha Guitry, Picasso, John Singer Sargent, Casals, Chaliapin, Richard Strauss. He can hardly be blamed if his head was turned. It is not every artist who is initiated into the mysteries of whorehouse sex (naturally none but the best) by the likes of the great Chaliapin, or privileged to have affairs with the mother and two daughters of an elegant household.
All of this Rubinstein describes with zest but without discrimination. Reliving the days of his youth he recaptures—or has never lost—its wide-eyed wonder or its slapdash spirit. When he was still a prodigy a critic remarked of his playing: “A great talent, the promise of a brilliant career, but still immature.” Curiously the same can be said of his octogenarian literary performance. He is as flashy with the pen as he was then on the keyboard, racing along con brio with never a pause over a cliché or a false note.
Some of it, most of it perhaps for those with a taste for vicarious pleasures, is entertaining. He is a born raconteur, and has a naughty but not malicious ear for gossip. It is titillating to learn that the foremost soprano of her day, Emmy Destinn, had a snake tattooed on her leg, encircling it from ankle to upper thigh—our young amorist followed its progress with more than his eyes. It is painful for an admirer of his works to learn that the eminent Scriabin was so vain as to compose an opus, Mystère, to be played only in a temple designed and built for that purpose. Nor does Rubinstein spare himself, telling how after a frolicsome night with two ladies of pleasure he found himself unable to foot the bill and was forced to part with a pair of treasured cuff links.
Eventually, however, the stress on la vie Parisienne grows wearisome, the single theme is too long maintained; one longs for less froth and more substance, and above all for mature judgment. Rubinstein, however, is blessed, or cursed, with total recall. We are spared not a single one of his conquests, his triumphs, or his indiscretions; we must follow his butterfly flitting from concert hall to concert hall (complete with program), from drawing room to drawing room, from boudoir to boudoir. It is the ormolu age he describes, a world in which polish meant more than substance, decoration more than design, a world in which elegance in dress and manners covered coarseness of conduct and crudeness of thought. It was also a world that gave birth to some of the greatest of composers and most gifted of virtuosos. But the petty princelings, the grand dukes and grand duchesses ruled over this world, as they did over their vast domains, and the artist was at their mercy—or so young Rubinstein believed. “I want you to play a short program alone,” said the Baroness Gustave de Rothschild, “and after an intermission you will accompany Miss Destinn in two arias from Carmen and the last scene of Salome! Your fee is a thousand francs.”
The book ends on his thirtieth year, with Rubinstein still the spoiled darling of fortune. World War I is raging and others are suffering unendurable miseries, but our hero is on his way, in charming company, from Cadiz to Buenos Aires where he is to give a concert. In his possession is a treasured portrait and endearing inscription from Alfonso R. of Spain, and a cablegram affirming an engagement he had long desired—his now because the Guitry Company which had been hired refused to sign in view of the submarine menace. The war has given him his greatest break and he is a happy man.
