Leopold Godowsky was born on 13 February 1870 in Žasliai, then in the Vilna Governorate of the Russian Empire and now in Lithuania, to Jewish parents. His father, a feldsher, died in a cholera epidemic eighteen months after his son’s birth, and the boy was raised by his mother and by foster-parents in Vilnius. He was composing and playing both piano and violin by five, gave his first concert at nine, and toured Lithuania and East Prussia soon afterwards. Formal teaching barely touched him: a short period under Ernst Rudorff at the Königliche Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, and, in his own account, “I have not had three months lessons in my life.”

He first played in America in Boston in 1884, toured the north-eastern United States and Canada in 1886 with the violinist Ovide Musin, and went back to Europe in 1887, where he became a protégé and friend of Camille Saint-Saëns. From 1890 he taught at the New York College of Music, then in Philadelphia, then at the Chicago Conservatory; he married Frieda Saxe on 30 April 1891 and became an American citizen the day after. A concert at the Beethoven-Saal in Berlin on 6 December 1900 made his European reputation and he moved there. In 1909 he took over Ferruccio Busoni’s master classes at the Vienna Academy of Music and taught them until 1914, when the war sent him back to America — New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, then New York again — and into a decade of touring that reached South America and East Asia.

The recordings fall into three groups, and the division is the label’s own: Marston’s chronological survey of the 78s separates American Columbias of 1913-1916, American Brunswicks of 1920-1926 and British Columbias of 1928-1930, noting that a large number of alternative Brunswick takes survive as test pressings. Through the 1920s he also cut piano rolls for the Duo-Art reproducing piano and for the American Piano Company. He disliked the studio and said so plainly, calling the London sessions of 1930 nerve-killing tortures.

The last group was cut short. During a recording session on 17 June 1930, just after completing Chopin’s E major Scherzo, he suffered a severe stroke that left him partially paralysed. He never gave a public concert again. His son Gordon died in December 1932 and his wife a year later; he moved to another New York apartment with his daughter Dagmar, went on playing for friends, and died of stomach cancer on 21 November 1938, at the age of 68.

Godowsky’s standing among pianists was always higher than his standing with audiences. Arthur Rubinstein said it would take him “five hundred years to get a mechanism like” Godowsky’s; James Huneker called him “a pianist for pianists”; Busoni held that he and Godowsky were the only composers to have added anything of significance to keyboard writing since Liszt. The dissent describes the playing as usefully as the praise: Claudio Arrau called him one of the greatest technicians and still found the playing boring, complaining that he never played above mezzo-forte. Together the two verdicts point at the same thing — an evenness and an economy that impressed players and left listeners unmoved.

The line of descent runs through the teaching. His pupils included Heinrich Neuhaus, who taught Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels and Radu Lupu, along with Jan Smeterlin, Abbey Simon, Issay Dobrowen and Apolinary Szeluto. With Teresa Carreño he was the first pianist to teach weight release as distinct from purely muscular momentum, which is the idea those pupils carried forward.

What the discs preserve is disputed, and the dispute is the point. He was plagued by stage fright and disliked the studio, and those who knew him thought the real playing happened at home; Josef Hofmann, leaving one such evening, told Abram Chasins that it was tragic the world had never heard him as only he could play. The records are what there is. Marston’s survey notes that the 1928-1930 English Columbia sessions hold his only recordings of several large-scale works, and the tracks gathered here bear that out: complete performances of Chopin’s B flat minor Sonata, Schumann’s Carnaval, Beethoven’s Op. 81a and Grieg’s Ballade in G minor, alongside Schubert songs in his own transcription. Takes of three further Chopin scherzi and four more Schubert transcriptions were made in April 1930 and have never been found. He is met here as a player of other men’s music, which is not how he is usually met at all.

Sources:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leopold_Godowsky
• https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q434328
• https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:FilePath/LeopoldGodowsky55.jpg
• https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/godowsky1
• https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/godowsky1
• https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/godowsky3
• https://www.marstonrecords.com/products/godowsky3
• https://www.youtube.com/oembed?format=json&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DSWf3ymmJFJo
• https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet&id=gnNDfINZrg0
• https://www.googleapis.com/youtube/v3/videos?part=snippet&id=SWf3ymmJFJo