This beautifully produced soft-back book follows
Micieo; Rememberances of Mieczslaw Horszowski, which
was published almost a decade ago. It’s in landscape format
about eight inches high and eleven and a half across, the better
to fit the two columns of text and to display the full colour
postcard reproductions that form the kernel of the story. It
makes for glorious aesthetic pleasure simply flipping through
the evocative cards – of which more in a moment.
The book consists of the postcards and (transcribed
and translated) letters of Janina Roza Horszowska, Horszowski’s
own piano playing and very acutely musical and practical mother.
They were written between 1900 and 1904 and somehow ended up
in, of all places, a garage in Nice. Miecio, or Mieczslaw Horszowski
was eight at the start of the epistolary correspondence between
his parents (his father was called Stanislaw). Roza stayed with
the prodigy in Vienna whilst Stanislaw remained in Lwów.
What is so fascinating, beyond all the complexities
of long distance domestic arrangements, food requests, money
and transport – and the like – is the close attention we can
pay to Horszowski’s musical development. The book offers an
intense scrutiny, on repertoire, teachers, fees, rivals, the
psychology of concert giving – the whole impedimenta of a young,
brilliant musician’s thorough training under a great teacher.
That teacher of course was Leschetizky and his reported aperçus
are as delicious as ever – try the one that Roza says was a
habitual comment of his; ‘Poles have absolutely no sense of
rhythm, Paderewski leading them all.’ Henryk Melcer makes some
important appearances; in one of them claiming that Leschetizky
destroys a pupil’s individuality even whilst he contributes
materially to forming his sound. Roza interpreted this as Melcer
wanting to poach her son from Leschetizky.
What emerges, as well, is the extent to which
the young Horszowski played the violin. For some time these
studies operated in tandem, occupying almost equal amounts of
time – his teachers included Stock and Grün. It was only by
May 1901 that it became clear that Grün had lost confidence
in his pupil’s violinistic abilities and offered pragmatic,
definitive advice. As well as this by eight he was learning
four languages. From time to time frustrations emerge; in March
1900 she writes that she is ‘fed up with Vienna and all this
music! If I had not encouraged him, it would never have occurred
to Miecio to play music.’
Names now forgotten appear frequently; Frank
Merrick and Berta Jahn prominently as well as names that have
resounded down the years – Sarasate, Flesch, Schnabel, Huberman,
Vecsey, Mark Hambourg, Stefi Geyer, Siloti, Safonov, Mahler
– the list is almost endless. So too questions of prestige,
patronage, the etiquette of concert giving, the maelstrom of
Viennese musical politics, the financial losses suffered by
recital and tour giving (or indeed the occasional astronomical
fees).
There is a bonus CD with the book. The first
twelve bars of the Mozart are missing but it’s a work referred
to in the letters and postcards as one he studied with Leschetitzky
and performed in 1904. So too the Bolero which he played in
class on 1 May 1904. I’ve reviewed
the Beethoven in its guise on Arbiter.
I must return to the superbly produced book and
reinforce just how opulently the postcards have been reproduced
and how evocatively they reflect their time and place, the last
fluttering years of the Double Eagle.
Jonathan Woolf
