Music: A Song to Remember

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His career as an international playboy was curbed in 1932 when he married Aniela Mlynarski, by whom he had four children. But it was not entirely ended: forsaking Nela, Rubinstein lived the last two years of his life in Geneva with his fortyish English secretary, Annabelle Whitestone.

Marriage settled Rubinstein in more ways than one. Up to then, he had got by on sheer talent. But after the birth of his first child in 1933, he took up the piano in earnest; for three months, he practiced diligently at a remote mountain cottage in southeastern France. "I didn't want people telling my child after I died, 'What a pianist your father might have been,' " he explained. He emerged from his battle a master of the keyboard; at age 47, his real career was about to begin.

The former prodigy became even more prodigious. At 69, he played a marathon cycle in New York City that consisted of 17 compositions for piano and orchestra, on five programs, within two weeks; in 1961 he gave ten Carnegie Hall concerts in one season. Conductor Edouard van Remoortel was probably not exaggerating when he said that Rubinstein was "the only pianist you could wake up at midnight and ask to play any of 38 major piano concertos." Before blindness put an end to his public career in 1976, he was playing up to 100 concerts a year.

To see Rubinstein onstage was to witness a master in his element. Striding purposefully to the keyboard while acknowledging the welcoming cheers, he would sit down, adjust the tails of his formal coat, tilt his face upward at about a 45° angle and stare intently into the middle distance as he composed himself. Then the great hands would rise from his sides and come down on the keyboard. The piano, with its intricate mechanism of strings and hammers, would cease to be a percussion instrument when Rubinstein caressed it; in his hands, it sang.

"At every concert," Rubinstein once said, "I leave a lot to the moment. I want to risk, I want to dare. It's like making love. The act is always the same, but each time it's different." But some things were consistent. His Chopin—and he was peerless in Chopin—was strong-willed and large-boned, robust and masculine, yet sensitive and poetic. His Brahms was as hearty, bluff and ruminative as the composer himself. Rubinstein played Spanish music with the brio of a native (Spain was one of his favorite countries), and Impressionist music like a born Frenchman. Perhaps that was to be expected from a man who seemed at home everywhere and who spoke eight languages. Rubinstein was a champion of modern music in his younger days; two of the most difficult works in the repertoire, Stravinsky's piano arrangement of his own Petrushka and Villa-Lobos' Rude-poema are dedicated to him.

One wintry day in 1908, Rubinstein was alone, broke and hungry in a Berlin hotel room, his career stalled, unable to pay the rent, a love affair in tatters. He took the belt from an old robe, fastened it to a hook on the wall and put a loop around his neck. As Rubinstein pushed a chair from beneath his feet, the worn belt ripped apart and he landed in a heap on the floor. It was then, he later said, that he learned the secret of happiness: "Love life for better or for worse, without conditions."