Biography (read more)
Arthur Rubinstein was born on 28 January 1887 in Łódź, then in Congress Poland under the Russian Empire, the youngest of seven children of a Jewish family; his father owned a small textile factory. He had absolute pitch at two and was recognised as a prodigy at four, and made his public debut on 14 December 1894, aged seven, in Mozart, Schubert and Mendelssohn. Joseph Joachim, who had heard him and told the family he might become a very great musician, entrusted him at ten to Karl Heinrich Barth in Berlin, placing him in a teaching line running back through Liszt and Czerny to Beethoven. He first played with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1900, at thirteen.
He moved to Paris in 1904, made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1906 and his London debut in 1912. Tours of Spain and South America in 1916 and 1917 began a lifelong attachment to Granados, Albéniz, Falla and Villa-Lobos. In 1934, acknowledging that he had relied on natural facility rather than discipline, he withdrew from concert life to rebuild his technique. He settled in Los Angeles during the Second World War, in which most of his Polish family died, and became an American citizen in 1946; he never played in Germany again after 1914. He retired in May 1976, aged eighty-nine, with a final concert at the Wigmore Hall in London, where he had first played nearly seventy years before, and died in his sleep at his Geneva home on 20 December 1982, aged 95. His ashes were buried in Jerusalem a year later.
Rubinstein’s name is bound to Chopin above all others; at his death The New York Times observed that Chopin was his specialty and that as a Chopinist he was considered by many without peer. He recorded most of Chopin’s output apart from the Études, and gave an all-Chopin recital in Moscow in 1964, at the height of the Cold War. He was also an advocate for Spanish and Latin American repertoire when few international pianists were, and was the dedicatee of works by Falla, Villa-Lobos and Stravinsky.
He recorded for His Master’s Voice and RCA Victor from 1928, having at first disdained the acoustic process for making the piano sound like a banjo, and left roughly 107 hours of music across the successive formats of a fifty-year recording career; he preferred the studio and approved only about three hours of live recordings for release. He was a notable chamber player, working with Henryk Szeryng, Jascha Heifetz, Pablo Casals, Gregor Piatigorsky and the Guarneri Quartet, and his two volumes of memoirs, My Young Years (1973) and My Many Years (1980), shaped the public image of the twentieth-century concert pianist. The Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition, established in 1974, has been held triennially in Israel since.
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