Biography (read more)
Josef Casimir Hofmann — Józef Kazimierz Hofmann — was born on 20 January 1876 in Podgórze, now part of Kraków, in Austro-Hungarian Galicia. His father Kazimierz was a composer, conductor and pianist, his mother Matylda Pindelska a singer; in 1886 the family moved to Berlin so the boy could be taught properly. He had already given a debut recital in Warsaw at five. Heinrich Urban taught him composition, Moritz Moszkowski the piano.
Anton Rubinstein heard him at seven, playing Beethoven’s C minor concerto in Warsaw, and declared him an unprecedented talent. An American tour followed in 1887 — fifty recitals in three months, seventeen at the Metropolitan Opera House — until the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children intervened over the boy’s health, and Alfred Corning Clark donated ,000 to void the contract on condition that Hofmann not perform in public until he turned eighteen. In 1892 Rubinstein took him as his only private pupil, forty-two sessions in Dresden’s Hotel d’Europe with no piece brought twice. Rubinstein arranged the adult debut in Hamburg on 14 March 1894, his own Fourth Concerto with the composer conducting, then ended the lessons; they never saw each other again.
He made the United States his base during the First World War and became a citizen in 1926. In 1924 he became the first head of the piano department at the new Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, its director from 1927, bringing Fritz Reiner, Wanda Landowska, Moriz Rosenthal and Leopold Auer onto the faculty.
The recordings came in fragments, because he distrusted the machinery. He recorded for Columbia in America from 1912 to 1923 and then for Brunswick from 1924, all of it acoustic; he cut twenty-three pieces for the Welte-Mignon reproducing piano in 1913, a medium he did not trust; after 1923 he released only test pressings, keeping just the RCA and HMV tests of 1935. What survives of him at full strength is largely other people’s doing. RCA Victor privately recorded the Golden Jubilee concert at the Metropolitan Opera on 28 November 1937, where he played Rubinstein’s Fourth Concerto and his own Chromaticon with the Curtis Orchestra under Fritz Reiner; and on 7 April 1938 the Curtis librarian Gordon Mapes wired a new disc recorder into the hall system for the Casimir Hall recital, given days after Hofmann learned he would be forced out and knowing it would be his last there.
He tendered his resignation on 26 September 1938. Alcoholism, marital trouble and a loss of interest in performing took the rest: he moved to Los Angeles in 1939, gave his last Carnegie Hall recital in 1946, retired in 1948, and died there of pneumonia on 16 February 1957.
Unlike Rubinstein, Hofmann sat quietly at the piano and struck the keys in a kneading manner. Harold C. Schonberg thought his finger staccato and his orchestral sonority unequalled in their day, and held that he had all of Leopold Godowsky’s technique – a claim Godowsky himself accepted. His pupil Nadia Reisenberg said he combined finger pedalling and foot pedalling continuously. His hands were small and exceptionally strong, so Steinway built him keyboards with slightly narrower keys and instruments with two pedals rather than three. He adhered closely to the printed score, occasionally doubling left-hand octaves, shunned sentimentality, and was more demonstrative live than in the studio. His own summary of the manner was that an aristocrat never hurries.
The lineage runs in both directions and is unusually short. He was Anton Rubinstein’s only private pupil, which makes him the direct link between the nineteenth-century Russian grand manner and American conservatory teaching; through Curtis he taught Shura Cherkassky, Abbey Simon, Ruth Slenczynska, Nadia Reisenberg, Abram Chasins and Jeanne Behrend, and Jorge Bolet, never formally a pupil, learned from him too. Rachmaninoff dedicated the Third Concerto to him and cut Chopin’s B minor Sonata from his own repertoire after hearing Hofmann play it. The dissent is as informative: Arthur Rubinstein thought him interested only in the mechanics of music, and Claudio Arrau dismissed him outright.
What the recordings preserve is mostly not the studio, which he refused. The Columbia and Brunswick sides are acoustic and he never accepted them as a likeness; the Welte rolls he did not trust. The two private documents of 1937 and 1938 – the Golden Jubilee and the Casimir Hall recital – are the substantial record of Hofmann in public at sixty and sixty-two, just before his command fell away, and they exist only because other people chose to record them. After 1938 there is very little worth having; his own student Jeanne Behrend, hearing the 1940-1946 broadcasts, said it was his playing but nothing like what they had heard in the 1920s.
Sources:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josef_Hofmann
- https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q505921
- https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/hofmann5
- https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/hofmann5
- https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/hofmann5
- https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/hofmann6
- https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/hofmann6
- https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/hofmann6
- https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/hofmann6
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/Josef_Hofman.jpg
- https://www.youtube.com/oembed?format=json&url=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CsFzaw3vpA
- https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet&id=QuOJkHtC10Q
- https://exploremusic.eu/wp-json/wp/v2/posts?slug=josef-hofmann
