Life and Liszt

The Recollections of a Concert Pianist

Arthur Friedheim, Theodore L. Bullock

• Publisher: Dover Publications
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780486266671
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Friend, favorite pupil, and secretary of Franz Liszt, Arthur Friedheim was the composer's closest associate during the 1880s. In this profound and scholarly study, Friedheim examines Liszt's life as a man, pianist, composer, conductor, teacher, and writer. His vibrant, richly textured prose recaptures a golden age of music that ended with the outbreak of World War I.
Friedheim's memoir evokes an era populated by giants of the keyboard and podium as well as scholars, writers, soldiers, and statesmen. A noted concert pianist and conductor in his own right, the author was the contemporary of Paderewski, Rachmaninoff, Kreisler, Rubinstein, and Caruso. His reminiscences revisit the opulent social and musical circles of Europe and North America during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. Modern readers will find this volume a rich source of sound musical scholarship on the forerunners of twentieth-century music.

CHAPTER
ONE

St. Petersburg, 1859-1878

It is of the past that I write, of a past which began long ago and far away.

Can it really be so long since the small boy who was I stepped out intrepidly before a brilliant Czarist audience to make that first bow destined to be repeated so many times down the years?

And if it was so long ago, why do I still feel the thrill of my first meeting with Liszt and the joy that was mine when I was enrolled among his disciples?

St. Petersburg, where I was born 26 October 1859, was one of the brilliant capitals of a Europe which was then at the peak of its power, splendor and civilization. Built by Peter the Great on the Baltic a century and a half before, to serve as a “window overlooking Europe” and to supplant inland Moscow as the capital of his sprawling, restive Empire, St. Petersburg had attracted many families of foreign origin and its society was international in scope, Byzantine in its tone and lavishness.

The earliest European influences in Russia were British, but for several generations Czarevitches and Grand Dukes had married German princesses. The husband of Empress Anna had been a German royal duke and Catherine the Great had been a German princess before she married the incompetent heir to the Russian throne and seized his power shortly after his accession.

Families of German origin were prominent in the professions, the arts and business, and among these families was mine. We belonged in the category known as “intelligentsia”. My mother’s family, the Hempels, came from Königsberg in East Prussia. The husbands of the three Hempel sisters, Annette, Rosalie and Johanne, were all men of standing in the capital. My father, Carl Alexander Friedheim, was an Imperial Army officer, of Prussian descent like Annette, my mother. When he was killed in Tashkent, two thousand miles away, during a revolt in Central Asia, my mother gave up her apartment and moved with her infant son into the spacious home of Aunt Rosalie and Uncle Carl Tobes, a manufacturer of wool textiles and fabrics. My Aunt Johanne de Kollman was the wife of a popular and exceedingly wealthy architect who was to take a great interest in my studies and in my career.

I had displayed great aptitude for the piano at a very early age and had received an excellent musical foundation. By the time I was six, though I was attending school, I was practicing two hours a day with my teacher, Carl Siecke, a pupil of Anton Rubinstein.

I was nine years old when I made my debut as a pianist in St. Petersburg. There had been amusement in the orchestra during the rehearsal because the pedals of the piano had to be raised several inches to meet my diminutive legs.

I played John Field’s E flat Concerto, an immensely popular work in Russia where the Irish composer had been one of the first Western European musicians of stature to settle, teach and compose. His music is heard rarely today, but in the first half of the nineteenth century it swept Europe and his melodious Nocturnes made a lasting impression on a child in the Russian province of Poland who would be known to the world as Frédéric Chopin. Field had come to St. Petersburg in 1804 with Clementi and settled there as a salesman for Clementi pianos. He soon became also the most sought-after teacher, pianist and composer in a Russia where “Western” music and musicians had been until then mainly fashionable imports for the enjoyment of the Imperial Court and the “intelligentsia”. Field’s greatest pupil was Alexandre Villoing, Villoing was Anton Rubinstein’s teacher, and my teacher, Carl Siecke, was a pupil of Rubinstein.

Imperial Russia was an extremely orthodox country where the calendar of the church was strictly observed. Opera and the theatre always closed down for Lent. So people went to concerts instead, and the Lenten concert season in St. Petersburg was one of the most brilliant in Europe.

It was a sharp, clear evening in Lent, in the year 1869, when I climbed with my mother and teacher into an open sleigh, snuggled down among the furs and was driven from our big house, behind three swift horses, through the broad, snowy streets of St. Petersburg to the Michael Theatre. Of the four Imperial Theatres in the capital, this was the newest, having been built in 1833 to house French and German plays. It was popularly known as the Imperial French Theatre because French was the language spoken at the box office, and it ranked in popularity next only to the Great Imperial Theatre, the home of the Ballet, the great Masked Balls and Italian opera.

When I stepped onto the stage to make my very first bow as a performer in public, the brilliantly-lighted hall was filled with a colourful, fashionable audience. My performance of the familiar concerto was greeted with considerable enthusiasm, but I can remember no particular emotion, either of timidity or elation, on that great evening. Nor can I recall having been stirred at any of my subsequent appearances as a child. I enjoyed playing to large audiences and the applause with which I was always received was merely a part of the setting, to be taken for granted. But I do remember my heart beating faster when the eminent pianist and conductor, Nicholas Rubinstein, brother of the more famous Anton, came to me after one of my concerts with words of praise and encouragement, and I have never forgotten the evening when Leopold Auer and Charles Davidoff both came together to greet and congratulate me.

In the two years which followed my debut I made several public appearances and achieved quite a reputation. My mother was besieged with offers from impressarios who foresaw great profits for themselves if they could exploit the new child prodigy. But Annette Friedheim, widowed during my first year when my father was killed in far-off Asia, was a woman of unfailing wisdom and judgment. She refused every offer. I was to continue my general education until my seventeenth year, then I should decide for myself what career I chose to follow.

My entire youth was spent in affluent circumstances and I enjoyed all the educational advantages of the intellectual centre of the Russian Empire. I worked hard, first at school and then in college, but every day, after I came home, I practiced assiduously for three hours, sometimes more. Siecke was not only a very able pianist, but a competent conductor and composer as well. He trained me soundly in all branches of composition and held me strictly to my lessons in harmony; I remember that I used to pore over works of great masters which were supposed to be far beyond me, yet in my inmost heart I felt that I understood them.

Every summer, for ten years, my family spent the season at the fashionable resort of Pavlovsk and Siecke came with us. The orchestra was an enterprise of the local railroad and free concerts, led by such famous conductors as Johann and Joseph Strauss and Bilse, drew crowds from the Capital. I never missed a performance, and in this way I became acquainted very early with the quality, character, purpose and range of every instrument.

Pavlovsk was a wonderful place for a boy in those far-off summer days. Railroads were still a novelty in Russia and the Czar had built the first line in the Empire to connect St. Petersburg with his vast country estate of Tsarkoé Sélo, fifteen miles to the south. Just beyond the Czar’s grounds was Pavlovsk, also in part an Imperial domain, since Grand Duke Constantine had his palace there. Peter the Great had erected his capital on the swampy shores of the Neva and on islands in its delta, and most of the countryside around the city was marshy and damp. But Pavlovsk, which straddled the River Slavianska, was hilly and wooded and dotted with lakes. On one side of the river rose the Grand Duke’s castle, and I remember a citadel in his vast gardens which had towers, bastions and cannon, fascinating to a small boy whose officer-father had died in the service of the Czar. On the other side of the river were the great wooden houses of the summer colony, half-hidden in their trees and gardens. There was swimming in the lakes, and fine riding in the bridle-paths among the Grand Duke’s guest houses, Greek temples, monuments, rose gardens, waterfalls, fountains and ponds.

His Imperial Highness, who was a good cellist, a great lover of music and a friend of Anton Rubinstein, was probably the moving spirit behind the daily concerts which the railway company gave, at first beside the station or in the nearby Vauxhall Restaurant, later in a theatre whose construction I watched with great interest. It was in this theatre that my first orchestra composition would be performed.

In the winter months there were plays and concerts in St. Petersburg to attend. Thanks to the traditions of the Imperial Court, standards were very high in both drama and music. Tragedy and comedy were presented in Russian, French and German. The foremost actors of Western Europe were engaged by the season, and operatic stars were drawn from all over the world. In one season alone I remember Coquelin, Possart, Parri, Christine Nilssen, Pauline Lucca, Albani, Schalci and many more. There was a Russian opera and an Italian one, each in its own theatre. There was a Conservatory of Drama. Following his only visit to Russia, in 1863, Wagner spoke enthusiastically of the St. Petersburg Symphony Orchestra as a body of artists. And, of course, we had the unrivalled Russian Ballet and School which Diaghilev transplanted after the 1917 Revolution to Paris and then to Monte Carlo. The staging of these great performances was on such a lavish scale that Ambassador Otto Von Bismarck wrote to his wife saying he had never seen anything more fairylike or marvellous. What I have seen of the Russian Ballet of today, commendable as it is, is not to be compared with the fabulous Imperial Ballet in the days of Fokine and Bolm, Nijinski, Pavlova and Karsavina.

Let it not be supposed that I was a young drudge. I rode and skated well and have been a strong swimmer all my life. If I was blessed with a capacity for study and hard work, I aimed at rewards in music beyond mere proficiency. I longed for a grand piano, so I gave a concert and earned it. I wanted a pony and it became mine in the same way. In those days fashionable young Russian gentlemen wore sable coats with large beaver collars; even that seemingly unattainable luxury, which all Russian boys, large or small, yearned for urgently and clamorously, I presented to myself for a birthday gift. These occasional concerts which I gave, mainly in the salons of great houses, entailed additional hours of diligent preparation, but they lent point to my musical studies and served as measuring-sticks for my development as a performer.

Anton Rubinstein, Russia’s greatest pianist, returned to his homeland in 1873 from a tour of the United States which had not only revolutionized the attitude of the American public toward serious music but netted him the vast sum of sixty thousand dollars. He was a hero when he left, he came home an idol. And he brought with him strange tales, of a piano made by Steinway in New York finer than any other, and of an orchestra organized by Theodore Thomas which only the Royal Academy in Paris could rival.

As far back in my childhood as I could remember this great teacher of my teacher had been a gigantic figure in my life. Nothing could have kept me now from his concerts, which were crowded to capacity.

If imitation is really a sincere form of flattery, Rubinstein received great flattery from me. I struggled blindly but wholeheartedly to copy his inimitable style. My efforts must have amused him, but apparently they caused him no displeasure for he accepted me as a pupil; and after a reception given in his honor my aunt, Madame Johanne de Kollman, he admitted me to his intimacy to the extent of allowing me to accompany him to various musicales where he played and even to his biggest recitals.

Though I became Rubinstein’s pupil when I was fourteen, I kept up my lessons with Carl Siecke in harmony and composition. Rubinstein’s teaching methods were peculiar, but they suited me. He would address me, as the mood moved him, in Russian, French or German, all of which he spoke imperfectly. When my playing failed to please him, which was quite often, he would thrust me from the piano and perform the composition himself, sometimes only in part but more frequently in its entirety. This, of course, was invaluable instruction.

He was a fiery man, given to excessive moods, and there were times when his playing fell far short of his own standards. But his interpretations were always noble in conception and outline; however faulty the performance might be, the majesty of a great art always shone through. Hans von Bülow wrote to his mother: “I would rather listen to his wrong notes than to my own correct playing.”

“Remember,” Rubinstein would insist over and over, “the soul of the piano is the pedal.” All my life, even today, those vital words have been a mandate.

At one concert which was the event of the season because the Czar and Czarina were present, Rubinstein was asked by Grand Duke Constantine to conclude his program with Liszt’s “Don Juan Fantasie”.

The spirit had moved Rubinstein but little at the beginning of the concert, even less toward the end. During the last encore I hurried to the artist’s room as usual to wait for him. As he entered, frowning, Constantine was on his heels.

“Look here, Anton Gregorowitsch,” he rumbled, “I have often heard you play badly, but tonight was the limit. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself?” He bantered and chaffed in this vein for several minutes, while the pianist’s frown deepened; then he burst out laughing.

Rubinstein took the hint, his face cleared, and he joined in the laugh. “That is all very well, Your Highness,” he protested with a smile, “but why give me away in the presence of this youngster?”

The Grand Duke glanced at me with mock gravity and said: “I will tell you what, Anton, the mere fact the boy is in this room proves that he knows how badly you played without being told.”

By the time I reached my sixteenth year, Rubinstein’s advice and criticism had begun to vary from day to day. He would say that I was going to be a successful pianist, then he would advise me to give all my time to composition. I decided to take all the advice he offered, and more: to become pianist, composer and conductor as well.

Anton Rubinstein holds a secure place in musical history as one of the foremost pianists of all time, and his fame is surely a great measure of success as the world views success. Yet even in my youth I realized that it was as a great composer he wished to be known, not as a performer. But because the lack of a critical faculty, which would have prevented him from showering his greatest concerts with slipshod playing, also prevented him from developing the unquestioned inspirations which were his into broadly harmonious patterns of balanced merit, his compositions are little more than a memory today.

I was still attending innumerable concerts and operas as well as Rubinstein’s performances, and as I became increasingly familiar with Wagner’s “Tannhäuser” and “Lohengrin,” several of Liszt’s symphonic poems and overtures by Berlioz, a whole new world of music opened before me. But Rubinstein was an ultra-conservative and the new tendencies and experiments, which so fascinated me, dismayed and outraged him. When I showed him “Pitschorin,” an overture of mine which had just been performed by an orchestra of eighty in Pavlovsk, he acknowledged that the workmanship was good but added: “Of course, a future star of the radicals! Why don’t you follow legitimate models? Write string quartets after the style of Haydn and Mozart.”

That was in 1876. Could the “radicals” be ignored? Must I close my ears to those siren calls from Germany? Or had the shrine of my musical devotion become too broad for a single idol? I tried to stifle my growing doubts, but I became obsessed with longing for Germany, the centre of music. And my longings were to be gratified sooner than I expected.

In spite of the fruitful hours I spent with Rubinstein and my intensive musical studies at home with Siecke, I did creditably in the German Gymnasium, one of the best high schools in the city, and entered St. Petersburg University in the Faculty of Philosophy.

Here I was in my element. I liked philosophy, intense application was easy for me, yet I was gregarious and articulate and, because I was a good athlete, as well as a pupil of Rubinstein and a pianist in my own right, I was popular.

It is true that most of my discussions with my fellow-students were about music, literature and art, which were subjects of fierce debate in Russia in that era, and we were eager in our analysis of the rival classical and romantic tendencies. To maintain my standing among my peers I delved more deeply than I might otherwise have done and in this way I was stimulated, not only socially but scholastically.

In the century and a half since Peter the Great had decided to “westernize” his people, Russia had been a world in ferment. Side by side with the almost incredible conservatism of the Imperial Court, perhaps because of it, recurring waves of reform surged half-concealed in the circles known as “intelligentsia”. The rulers of Russia had soug...