Chapter 4: A New World to Conquer

Carnegie Hall in New York City has been the goal of musicians from all over the world for nearly three quarters of a century. But on November 17, 1891, when the new European artist first played there for an audience that had paid a total of only $500 to hear him, the famous hall was barely six months old.

Paderewski was still slightly numb from his first impressions of the world he had come to conquer! After a long, rough crossing, his ship had docked late on a rainy night. In those days the first view of New York from the harbor was by no means the thrilling sight it is today. The famous skyline did not yet exist and the unlit waterfront consisted of a few dirty, low-lying buildings.

Almost as depressing as the scenery was Mr. Charles F. Tretbar, the Steinway representative who met him at the dock with this cheering welcome: "Well, Mr. Paderewski, we hear you have had a brilliant success in London and Paris. But let me tell you, you need not expect anything like that here in America. We have heard them all, all the pianists, all the great ones, and our demands are very exacting. We are not easily pleased here! Besides, everyone knows that piano playing is not as well rewarded as singing or violin playing, so don't expect any extraordinary audiences. I've done my best for you, but it won't amount to much!"

Paderewski, his secretary, and his luggage, were then deposited at a dismal hotel in Union Square where the two men spent the night routing battalions of mice and bedbugs. Although they were moved to a good hotel the next day, with the profound apologies of Mr. Steinway himself, the lost night had not helped to put Paderewski in a festive mood for his first concert. Nor had his first look at the schedule of his tour arranged by Mr. Tretbar. To his dismay, he found that he was advertised for six solo recitals and three concerts with orchestra during the first two weeks. Each orchestral concert included two concertos. He would be playing six different concertos within six days.

Paderewski was learning the hard way about the energetic all-out American way of doing things! In Europe, a pianist who played six different concertos in one season, much less one week, would be considered a wonder. Four of the concertos he could easily manage, but the other two, although he had played them once or twice, were not really ready for public performance.

All of these troublesome facts, however, he put out of his mind when he walked out onto the stage of Carnegie Hall for the first time and began to play the Saint-Saens C minor Concerto. It was the same work he had played with the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris. This time he was accompanied by the Symphony Society of New York City, under its handsome young conductor, Walter Damrosch. The evening closed with his own concerto, which gave the New York critics a chance to judge him as a composer as well as a pianist.

But poor Paderewski had little time after the concert that night to worry about the next day's reviews. Damrosch had scheduled the rehearsal for the next concert at ten o'clock in the morning. And at this second concert he was to play not only the Beethoven "Emperor" Concerto and the Schumann Concerto, but, as a bonus for the audience, the fiendishly difficult Hungarian Fantasia for piano and orchestra by Liszt.

Paderewski went back to his new hotel physically exhausted, as always after a concert, and began practicing for the next day's work. He had not struck more than six chords before there was an agitated knocking at the door. The manager of the hotel stood outside, wringing his hands.

"Mr. Paderewski! Playing the piano at this hour?"

"But I have to practice for my next concert. And nighttime is the only time I have free!"

"Yes, but Mr. Paderewski, we have so many elderly people living in the hotel. We can't possibly have you practicing the piano at midnight. You can understand that!"

He could understand it, yes, but what could he do about it? Suddenly from the depth of his memory came a clear picture of the Kerntopf factory in Warsaw, with its room after room of inviting pianos. He grabbed his coat and called to his secretary, "Goerlitz! Come on! We're going out!"

"Going out? At this hour? Where to?"

"To the Steinway warehouse!"

The nightwatchman at the Fourteenth Street office was surprised to be roused from his slumbers by a wild-eyed man pounding at the door. "I must have presented a strange appearance," Paderewski recalled. "The watchman, however, opened the room where the pianos were stored, and there, in that cold and gloomy loft, I began practicing. There were no lights except the two candles on the piano. It must have been a strange sight as I think back on it--the empty room, with two fluttering candles and the two men, the night watchman and my secretary, each snoring loudly in his corner as I worked on until morning. That was all I had for inspiration!"

Yet in spite of his fatigue, this concert was a greater success than the first one. The reviews of the debut had been of the sort usually described as "mixed." But after the second concert the _New York Times_ headlined its account with the flat statement, "The Success of Ignace Jan Paderewski is Assured."

His success might be assured, but poor Ignace Jan Paderewski himself was in sad shape as he doggedly returned to the Steinway warehouse to practice the arm-wrenching Rubinstein Concerto. How long, he wondered, could he go on at his present pace? No wonder Rubinstein himself had made only one American tour in his life and had said, when begged to return, "May Heaven preserve us from such slavery!"

The third concert, a matinee for which he had practiced a total of seventeen hours, was an unqualified triumph, "the real beginning of my career in America." It was not only the critics who were ecstatic. So was Mr. Tretbar. Three thousand dollars, an unheard-of amount of money for a single concert, was taken in at the box office. By the end of the season, Paderewski's appearance in the same hall would bring in nearly twice that amount.

Mr. Steinway himself, although pleased by the box office receipts, did not really care whether he made money out of these concerts. The Steinway firm had thought of the Paderewski tour as a means of advertising its pianos. And what an inspiration the idea turned out to be! In the mind of the public the name "Steinway" became inextricably linked with the name "Paderewski," and the latter was about to move into the household-word category.

Successful as it undoubtedly was, the first American season was full of trials--some small, one a near tragedy. Mr. Tretbar (who, it should be recorded, later became Paderewski's staunch friend and ally) had indeed had little faith in the success of just one more piano player from Europe. To Paderewski's great annoyance he found that his six solo recitals to be given the week after the three orchestral concerts would not be played in Carnegie Hall, but in a small recital room in Madison Square Garden.

"But why?" he asked. "Why? I've just filled Carnegie Hall for you! Why should I play my recitals in a small place?"

Mr. Tretbar shrugged. A solo piano recital would never fill Carnegie Hall, he said. Besides, it was in the contract that Mr. Paderewski would play where and when he was told to play, and he was being told to play in the small hall of Madison Square Garden!

He played three out of six recitals there. When hundreds of would-be ticket-buyers were turned away, disappointed, from the third one, Mr. Tretbar had nothing whatever to say. Mr. Steinway himself ordered the last three recitals moved to Carnegie Hall.

Paderewski's brilliant concerts shed a special lustre over the new hall which until then had simply been one of several possible places to appear in New York City. But soon a new artist's appearance in Carnegie Hall came to be regarded as the real sign that he had "arrived." It was Paderewski's successes there that established the trend more than any other single factor.

Paderewski left New York with the audiences and critics alike solidly behind him. His New York success was repeated all over the country. Although he was naturally delighted to play before packed houses, the economic aspects of the tour were more and more irritating. He was being paid an average of $375 for each appearance, yet the box office income was running upwards of $3,000! Far more serious was the frightening problem that soon began to plague him. As the strenuous weeks wore on, as solo recitals and orchestral concerts piled up, the strain of playing so often in public began to produce a violent physical reaction in his right arm. Before long he found himself playing in almost constant pain. The actual physical basis of his trouble lay in the action of the Steinway pianos of that day. As Paderewski said, they were "universally recognized as the most marvelous instruments in the world." But they had an action that he found extremely heavy and tiring. It simply took too much pressure to move the keys. After much arguing back and forth he finally persuaded the factory to regulate the action of the seven pianos he was using for the tour.

The relief was immense and the discomfort in his arm, although still present, became bearable. Then one dreadful night in Rochester, as he was playing the opening chords of his recital, he felt an excruciating pain tear through his right arm. (Afterwards, when it was too late, he found out what had happened. The piano used in the Rochester concert had just come back from the factory, where a new and unbriefed workman had carefully changed the action back to its original stiffness.) Yet Paderewski stayed on the platform to play the Beethoven "Appassionata" Sonata, one of the most taxing works in the repertoire. He finished the program in a state of near collapse, then rushed off to find a doctor, and to hear the terrifying truth. He had torn some tendons in his right arm and could no longer move his fourth finger. The doctor said, "The situation is very grave, and there is nothing that I can do for you. Nothing but time will help. You must rest." This was easy advice to give, but how does a pianist rest when he has concerts ahead of him for which tickets have been sold? Paderewski did it by rearranging the fingering in every piece of music on his programs so that he could play with only four of the fingers on his right hand. This is like asking a baseball pitcher to fire a curve ball without using his thumb!

It was not the first time that Paderewski had demonstrated the peculiar iron of his constitution. It was certainly not the last.

At the end of the tour he returned to New York exhausted and discouraged, but relieved that the gruelling months were over. He was met by news that both pleased and horrified him. Mr. Steinway, all smiles, announced that various cities not included in the tour were besieging the office with requests for Paderewski! "Now Paderewski," he said expansively, "you are going to give those extra concerts and we will pay all expenses--everything. Every cent that is taken in will be clear gain for you. That will be our small contribution to reward you for what was, I am sorry to say, badly managed at the beginning of your tour."

Generosity of spirit was a factor that meant a great deal to Paderewski, but although Mr. Steinway's thoughtfulness touched him, he was aghast at the thought of playing more concerts. He was also struck by the sobering thought that since his career had probably been wrecked forever by this tour, he might as well make the most of it. He gave the concerts and made more from the extra ones than he had made out of all the others put together.

Paderewski's bleak conviction that the American tour might be his last happily proved to be mistaken. Actually it was only the first of twenty triumphant tours during which he would play more than fifteen hundred concerts for more than five million people. Only one other person has ever equaled his success at the box office--the beloved soprano, Amelita Galli-Curci. The two artists still stand supreme as the greatest money-makers in the musical history of America.

During those American tours, Paderewski did much more than make music and money. He also made friends in high places--firm, devoted friends who respected him for his great spirit as well as for his fleet fingers. And he captured the imagination and affection of the American public as no other artist has ever done.

How to describe Paderewski's electrifying effect on the public! Many people have tried. Arthur Loesser, in his fascinating book, MEN, WOMEN AND PIANOS, does it as well as anyone. He says: "The most flaming pianistic glory in America's history broke out when the Steinways first put forth Ignace Paderewski in the autumn of 1891. He was indeed a performer of very high ability, an artist of unusual expressive power; yet that was only one element of his peculiar appeal. His total personality was just what, in the American idea, a concert pianist's ought to be, if one were to marvel at him and respect him at the same time. His chrysanthemum of pale red hair, the feminine dreaminess and brooding of his looks coupled with his aggressive, solid muscularity--all this was strange and might have seemed ridiculous to Philistines. But the reserve of his bearing, the hypnotic deliberateness and lordly courtesy of his movements, were the signs of a profound inner dignity before which a measure of awe could not fail to be felt. He seemed, verily, the prince of a foreign realm. No pianist has ever captured the American imagination as he did, keeping his hold over it for thirty years. He became a legend: his mispronounced name drew farmers from their barns, schoolboys from their baseball, real estate speculators from their offices--all manner of unlikely persons from their dens--into a concert hall to have a look and a listen at him."

The day would come when Paderewski's hold over the affection of the American public would mean more to him--and to his country--than he could even begin to imagine as he sailed back to Europe at the end of his first visit to America.