Read Ebook: The Lion of Poland: The Story of Paderewski by Hume Paul Hume Ruth Fox R Thi Lili Illustrator

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Ebook has 387 lines and 34930 words, and 8 pages

Thus the trio became a duo. As the boys turned north and crossed into Russia, they suddenly found themselves in mid-winter. They lined their thin clothing with newspaper and pressed on. They were forced to admit that their brief summer success was over. Soon they were penniless and hungry. Ignace-the-violinist gave in first and wrote home for money. Finally Ignace-the-pianist had to break his resolution and do the same. The fathers of both boys sent money immediately and told the lads to be on the next train home. The violinist was delighted to follow orders. The pianist was more stubborn. "If only I could get to Petersburg. If only I could play one successful concert there!" he thought. "It's just as easy to get home from there as it is from here. Easier in fact. Just one more chance! It's all I ask. Father wouldn't really mind!"

He went on alone to Petersburg. And then real disaster struck. Both his baggage and the money he had counted on for his return home were stolen. He found himself absolutely penniless and half starved in a strange, unfriendly city. Fortunately for Ignace, not everyone in it was unfriendly. A poor plumber took the boy in off the street to save him from freezing to death. With nothing to do all day but try to stay warm, Ignace had plenty of time to think over his foolishness. He had no idea what to do next. On one point, however, he was adamant. He would not write his father again. "How can I?" he said to the friendly plumber. "He already sent me more than he could afford. And I lost it! I can't ask him for more!"

A few days later the janitor of the building came to the plumber's little basement room and said, "Isn't your name Paderewski? There's a letter for you at the General Delivery window of the Post Office."

"For me? But that's impossible. From whom?"

"From a Jan Paderewski. The Post Office has been asking for you all over town. Just by chance I heard about it."

The letter from home enclosed a hundred rubles. Ignace left Petersburg the next day and was soon safe at home in Sudylkow, thinner but considerably wiser than he had been a year before. One question had haunted him all the way home. "How did you know where to find me?" he asked his father. "And how did you know how desperately I needed that money?"

"Oh, that was easy," Mr. Paderewski said. "You see, I had a dream. I saw you hungry and cold in St. Petersburg, so I sent the letter to the Post Office there and begged them to look for you. The surprising thing is that they found you."

The fact that his father's intense love for him had worked a small miracle on his behalf touched the boy's heart so deeply that he made an immediate resolution. He would repay his father's goodness by doing exactly as his father wanted. He would go back to the Conservatory and finish his studies with no more nonsense. Nor would he put his father to any more years of expense than the good man had originally expected. He was now two years behind his own classmates, but he vowed that somehow he would graduate with them. This gave him six months in which to complete the regular work of two years!

During these months of intensive study, young Ignace began to develop the gift that would carry him through so many crises in his life: an enormous power of concentration.

On graduation day Mr. Paderewski was in the hall, sick at heart because he did not really believe that his son could possibly have passed the rigorous final examinations for the music diploma. As the list of the names was read, as one boy after another went up to the platform, the nervous father braced himself. "But of course his name will not be called. How could it be? The others in the class have been working an extra year and a half ... There ... that's the last boy going up now, I think."

But it was not quite the last boy. The last boy was now being called. "And finally," the Director announced, beaming, "with the highest honors of the class, Ignace Jan Paderewski."

Mr. Paderewski remembered few details after that. All twelve Kerntopfs were trying to shake his hand at once, and then Ignace was playing the Grieg Piano Concerto with the orchestra, and everyone in the hall was cheering for him. Then the father realized something that must have made him even happier than this moment of triumph: in six short months young Ignace must have done quite a bit of growing up.

Now that Paderewski had his diploma, he determined that he would no longer be an expense to his father. Much as the young man disliked teaching , he knew he had no choice in the matter. If he intended to eat, he would have to teach. But at least he did not have to look very hard for pupils. Immediately after graduation he was offered a position on the faculty of the Conservatory.

Among the students that year was a beautiful young girl named Antonina Korsak. Although Paderewski's future was uncertain, Antonina had complete faith in it. It did not matter in the least to her that at the moment he was only a struggling, poorly-paid piano teacher. In 1880, when Paderewski had just turned twenty, they were married.

He found a small apartment where the two talented young musicians lived in complete happiness and made glowing plans for the future. Paderewski would look back on it as though he were recalling a brief but unforgettable dream. One year after her marriage the beautiful Antonina was dead, leaving her young husband with an infant son.

During her last conscious hours, Antonina, knowing that she was dying, had made her husband promise to take some of her small inheritance and use it to continue his musical studies. Her faith in his future was as bright and untroubled at the moment of her death as it had been during her life.

Now that he had a son to support, Paderewski knew that he must be practical. Nearly everyone who knew anything about it assured him that although he could never make a career as a pianist, he would be a success as a composer. Since no one in Warsaw could teach him any more than he already knew about composition, he decided to go to Berlin to study with a famous teacher named Friederich Kiel. Antonina's mother happily agreed to take care of little Alfred for him.

Professor Kiel was greatly impressed both by Paderewski's talent as a composer and by the young Pole's enormous capacity for work. Too saddened by his wife's death to enjoy the boisterous student life of Berlin, Paderewski devoted himself entirely to his studies. Ten or twelve hours a day of uninterrupted work was not the least unusual.

Although most Berliners were automatically anti-Polish, Paderewski made some good friends among German musicians. His warmest affection was for the great composer, Richard Strauss, whose family accepted the young foreigner as a member from his first appearance in the house. Of all his kindnesses to Paderewski, the greatest favor Strauss ever did for him was a completely unconscious one.

Paderewski knew that he had the habit of making faces while he played the piano. The more complex the music, the more tortured the grimaces that distorted his handsome face. He had never given the failing much thought, however, until he realized that Strauss had the same bad habit. As he watched the great man play--his face almost as busy as his hands--Paderewski thought, "Good Heavens! That is how I look!" He determined to reform at all costs and did so, but only after months of practicing with a mirror propped up on the music rack of the piano.

Although he did not forget his promise to Antonina to continue his studies, he worried more and more about earning money for his little son. The music he published brought him a great deal of praise but little money. But he soon found a way to increase his earnings. He was in great demand as an accompanist for violinists and singers, since he could sight read music so brilliantly that the performers who hired him did not have to spend much time or money on rehearsals.

One of his closest friends was a violinist named Gorski. He had arranged a short tour of resort hotels, and he asked Paderewski to come with him. The pianist smiled to himself, remembering an earlier tour he had once made. But since this one was on a much sounder financial footing, he gladly agreed to go. There was a marked resemblance, however, in the matter of pianos!

At the very first hotel where they were booked, the piano proved to be of such ancient stock that half the hammers had resigned from active duty. When he struck the keys attached to the afflicted hammer they would fly up, but once up they would not return to place. This meant that each note with a bad hammer could only be used once during the evening.

"I can probably play your accompaniments by faking!" he said to Gorski, "but I can't possibly get through my solos!"

"What can we do? It's the only piano in town."

One of Gorski's young pupils was making the tour with them.

"Excuse me, sir," he said, stepping up timidly. "I think I can help you."

"Impossible!" Paderewski said gruffly.

"Suppose I stand by the piano and push the hammers down just as fast as you hit them. I don't think the audience would notice, do you?"

The two artists looked at each other and shrugged. It was worth a try, since there was nothing else to do. In later years, Paderewski loved to tell this story. "Ah! You should have seen him!" he wrote. "His hands went like lightning. They flew like birds from side to side. He had to lean way across the piano--back and forth he weaved and darted in constant motion.... What an experience!"

The concert was a huge success. The clever hammer-pusher had been wrong in only one respect: his modest belief that the audience would not notice him. After the concert as Paderewski was walking through the lobby, he heard a man say to his wife, "How did you like that young pianist?"

"Oh, he was all right," came the answer, "but the other one, you know! The second pianist who was playing at the back of the piano! He was the best, I thought. He worked much harder than the other one. He was the real artist!"

Paderewski worked nearly two years in Berlin, interrupted only by a short period of teaching in Warsaw. There, in addition to a heavy teaching program, he began taking private lessons in Latin, mathematics, literature, and history. He did not want his education to be completely one-sided. He had, at the time, no way of realizing how wise a decision this was.

Paderewski's studies in composition had been brilliant, and the piano pieces he published were unusually successful. One of the first pianists to play his work in public was the popular Madame Essipoff. She included his Variations in A minor on many of her programs. To Paderewski, however, Essipoff's greatest attraction was not her success as a pianist but the fact that she was married to the great Theodore Leschetizky.

Leschetizky lived in Vienna, but he was a fellow Pole. He was, in addition, the most famous piano teacher in the world.

The thought of a piano career had remained at the back of Paderewski's mind during every minute of his years in Warsaw and Berlin, although reason told him to abandon the idea. The turning point in his thinking came about quite casually.

One night his publisher invited him to dinner to meet Anton Rubinstein, a brilliant and famous concert pianist.

The famous pianist was charming to the relatively unknown composer and asked to hear some of his piano compositions. When Paderewski had played several pieces, Rubinstein said, "How very fine they are! You must compose more for the piano!"

Paderewski smiled diffidently. "Oh, I can't do too well writing for piano," he said modestly, "because I play so little myself."

Rubinstein's eyebrows lifted. "Nonsense!" he said. "You have an inborn technique. You could have a splendid piano career, if you wanted one. I'm sure of it!"

For a moment the young man was too stunned to mumble a polite reply. It was true that this opinion was only one against many others in the opposite direction. But it was Anton Rubinstein's opinion, and that gave it a few extra votes. In any case it was all that was needed to decide the young man's future. Somehow he would manage the impossible task of raising the money to study the piano seriously. It was his last chance, if indeed it was not already too late, so he could not afford to settle for anything but the best. He would go to Vienna and study with Leschetizky.

Before he could even think about the future, though, he knew that he needed a rest. The years of intensive work, compounded by a constant uneasiness about his little boy's delicate health, had exhausted him. He decided to spend a few weeks in the beautiful Tatra Mountains. There he could think things out--and start adding up figures. What would a few months in Vienna cost? How much did Leschetizky usually charge per lesson? What was the quickest way to raise the money? The last question was a tricky one, since there was no quick way to raise money. It would have to be done piecemeal.

In the village of Zakopane where he stayed, there lived an old doctor who was an expert on the folk music of the region. Paderewski tramped happily through the hills with his new friend, jotting down notes as fast as the good old man could whistle them. One day the doctor said, "Guess who arrived in the village to open up her summer home? Helen Modjeska! Would you like to meet her?"

Modjeska and her husband were delighted with the handsome young musician, and when he played the piano for her the actress was enchanted. "You will have a great career!" she predicted. "You will do great honor to your country. But you must start at once!"

Paderewski smiled. Non-musicians simply did not understand these things! "You are kind, Madame! But I am not ready to start. Not until I have studied much more. And that is not easy to do."

"Studying costs money." She frowned. "I understand that."

He nodded. "I'll raise it somehow. Maybe if I give a few hundred concerts! Next month I'm giving a little recital in Cracow. It might even fill about one quarter of a hall--if the hall is small enough."

The actress's beautiful dark eyes flashed. "Nonsense! The hall will be filled! Sold out! There will not be an empty seat!"

For a moment he was too stunned to say anything at all.

The hall was indeed sold out and the box-office "take" was at least five times greater than the poor pianist had expected. Modjeska's name on the program was the greatest endorsement he could have had in Cracow. People flocked to hear her recite from the beloved Polish poets. They stayed to hear the unknown pianist play his persuasive brand of Chopin. In one evening he had earned enough to live in Vienna for at least three months. The "right person at the right moment" pattern was once more in evidence.

From the phenomenally early age of fifteen, Leschetizky had been recognized as a remarkable teacher, and while he himself played publicly until he was past fifty, his greatest gift was the ability to make superb pianists out of the advanced students who came to him from all over the world.

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