13
MUSICAL COURIER
January 25, 1923
Tributes
Three Extraordinary
to the Art of
New York Herald, January 14, 1923
JOSEF HOFMANN MASTERFUL
AT PIANO IN GREAT RECITAL
Artist Awes and Inspires Cultivated Audience With Superlative Playing at Carnegie Hall
After these 'came the big thunder of the afternoon, the Hammerklavier sonata, opus 106, of Beethoven. Elterlein says it is the “grandest sonata ever written,” and Marx declares that it “develops toward all sides a mass of power without equal spiritually or materially.” After these many years, the sonata remains, not quite so enthralling or awesome, but still a prodigious essay at imposing orchestral utterance upon the piano, a composition in which majestic mass effects contrast with tender song, and in which are pages of music hard to make pleasing to the most cultivated listener, and still more to a general audience.
Mr. Hofmann played the sonata stupendously. He rose superior to every beclouded page and vivified the whole work with an interpretation which not only translated the prose parts into poetry, but made of the whole a mighty epic of instrumental song. The performance of the fugue was bewildering in its triumphant conquest of almost insuperable difficulties in the way of making it sound rich and musical as well as appallingly intricate.
Audience Demanded More.
After the novelette he had played Liszt’s transcription of Widmung and after the Beethoven he delighted the audience with a set of four encores—for the people would not let him stop—the E fiat nocturne and two etudes (one the Butterfly) of Chopin and a piece which sounded suspiciously like the work of the celebrated Michael Dvorsky.
After two short numbers the pianist finished his program with that utterly impossible piece of virtuosity, Godowsky’s arrangement of the waltz, Du und Du, from Die Fledermaus. The manner in which Mr. Hofmann sang its piquant melodies while hanging Mr,._ Godowsky’s decorative garlands around their necks without strangling them was something to remember. Then came the usual clamor for more encores, and, for all the reporter knows, the pianist may be playing them yet. As for himself, his soul was> fed full of beauty and he walked home upon air.
signs of weariness, for which the performer was not to blame. Applause followed, of course, but Mr. Hofmann knew that relief from the tension was necessary and promptly applied the remedy. Not that it is particularly apropos of the sonata, but simply because it is always interesting to hitch up past and present, it may be mentioned that the first of the Ham-merclavier sonatas (op. 101) was dedicated by Beethoven to the great-great-grand aunt of the husband of Mme. Jeritza, the Baroness Dorothea von Ertmann, who, though an amateur, was esteemed by the composer as the most accomplished pianist of his later years.
BOOKING
By W. J. HENDERSON.
Of making piano compositions there is no end, and much piano playing is a weariness to the flesh. But when such a recital as that of Josef Hofmann in Carnegie Hall yesterday afternoon flames into the midst of a chilled season the icy barriers of decorous reviewing are swept away, the tumultuous floods of responsive emotion are let loose and the impotent chronicler, emerging limp and dazed into the canyon of West Fifty-seventh Street, goes joyously homeward, probing his mind for adjectival clarions with which to trumpet the glad tidings to a callous world.
It is jibt criticism to speak in comparatives¿ but at the choice moment of a lifetime a superlative may be permitted. Therefore the writer makes no hesitation in declaring that yesterday afternoon he heard the greatest piano recital within his recollection. Everything in the pianist’s art was revealed from the profoundest musicianship, the most searching appreciation of significant details and the most poetic and even passionate feeling, to technical feats which made at least one man inclined to spring to his feet and cry, “Stop! It is impossible! The piano cannot be played like that!”
His Artistry Unexcelled.
Mr. Hofmann does not often make a program such as that of yesterday. He began with the Brahms B minor rhapsody (he rarely plays Brahms) and put no Chopin on the list, but introduced him in the encore department. It would be gratifying to the reporter to tell how he performed every number, but it is unnecessary. Certainly no one else ¡gives more incisive rhythm and melodic vivacity to the Brahms rhapsody, nor can any other player excel the delicacy of touch and the ravishing loveliness of tone heard in the capriccio and pastoral of Scarlatti and the novelette (No. 8) of Schumann.
maus—a pretty thing in the original package, in its arrangement a huge display of musical fireworks.
For the central number and climacteric of his scheme, Mr. Hofmann chose the second of Beethoven’s three sonatas, which he designated as composed for the Hammerclavier. He gave it a noble interpretation, one which must have been uplifting and inspiring, no doubt, to all his hearers until the final fugue was reached. In fact, even the uninitiated felt the lofty charm of the Scherzo, and it was rewarded with hearty applause.
At the end of the fugue, however, there were
New York Tribune, January 14, 1923
Art of Hofmann Pervades Recital At Carnegie Hall
Beethoven Sonata, a Strauss Waltz, Brahms B Minor Rhapsody and Scarlatti Pastorale on His Program
By H. E. KREH31EL.
When a pianist creates as numerous a clientele as Mr. Josef Hofmann has done and holds it as many years without resort to any aid which might be called adventitious, it is reasonable to make, two deductions from the fact. One is that there is a tremendous basis of excellence in his playing; the other that he has trained a large number of persons to appreciate that excellence. All that was sensational, in the ordinary sense, about his performances departed from them with his sudden withdrawal from the concert rooms when he was a prodigious lad of twelve years—a providential act in which a wise music-lover, who lived to see the fruits of his good deed—was the agent. That was so many years ago that only a small minority of those who listen to him now with sane and whole-souled delight can recall it. When he was returned to us from the shaping hands of Anton Rubinstein, he was the ripe and seasoned artist that he has been ever since. Once only, a few years ago, did he attempt a departure from what must be called the well proven repertoire. That was when he undertook to make propaganda for the American composer. His purpose was sincere, but it was soon disclosed that it was sacrificial in its nature. He had to resort to something like force to get the managers of his concerts to let him have his way in a few large cities, and long before he wished to, had to capitulate to the demands of his public. “I am not doing it to get audiences,” he remarked on the eve of his experiment; “I could more easily fill the houses with an old Chopin group.”
Though he abandoned the plan, as it was but right that he should do, and has never become a propagandist for either the ultra old or the ultra modern, he has managed to put something into each of his programs to keep them out of the rut of conventionality. There was no Chopin in the recital which he gave in Carnegie Hall yesterday afternoon, though the composer had a place in the extra pieces. Items which have become stereotyped (though such performances as they received yesterday have not, and cannot) were the Capriccio and Pastorale by Scarlatti, the Rhapsody in B minor by Brahms, and, if one is wishing to draw the line somewhat loosely, the Soirée en Granade by Debussy. The recital began with the Rhapsody and ended, so far as the printed list was concerned, with Godowsky’s transcription of the waltz from Johann Strauss’s Fleder-
New York Times, January 14, 1923
MUSIC
By RICHARD ALDRICH.
Josef Hofmann’s Recital.
Josef Hofmann appeared for the second time this season in a piano recital yesterday afternoon at Carnegie Hall, before such an audience as he always plays for in New York, one that filled every seat in the hall, and that was raised to the highest pitch of admiration by what they heard.
There was good reason for it. Mr. Hofmann, in his program, had departed widely from the more usual scheme of things into realms where few can follow him. He was himself more than ever in the vein and his spirit was attuned to the loftiest things. In fact, it might be said, conservatively and cautiously, that such piano playing has only most rarely been heard in New York; or say, never.
Here was the art of the pianist raised to its highest power; technically, to a point where technical problems seemed to have vanished as such, and to leave the performer free to concern himself only with the higher artistic and intellectual problems.
All this was most conspicuously displayed in Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata, op. 106, so called from the fact that in the later years of his life he had a passing fancy to use German words for musical strings instead of Italian, then, as now, more usual; and “Hammerklavier” was the word he preferred to “pianoforte.” It has long been a problem to pianists, one of the most difficult of the compositions of Beethoven’s last period, comparable in that respect to the last five string quartets. Its difficulties to the player are of the most abstruse sort, technical and intellectual. To the listener there are equal difficulties.	,	״״ . .	...
For Mr. Hofmann the difficulties, which pianists for a century have groaned over and editors have tinkered, were as if they did not exist. He played the work with a stupendous power, with a fiery eloquence that illumined its meaning and for once sounded the depths and made them seem like a message of beauty-sombre, rugged, thorny, but still beauty. He made a lucid exposition of its structure and of the monumental outline, a plastic development of its themes, especially in the wayward fugue of the last movement, which he took at a great speed that in no way clouded its intricacies. And it was all done with a variety and beauty of tone, a propulsive movement, a pulsing rhythm that never ceased in their appeal to the ear. It was a profoundly impressive performance and was felt as such.
Mr. Hofmann played Schumann’s eighth Novelette in F sharp minor; one of the composer’s more appealing and imaginative piano pieces that pianists strangely neglect. Its deficiency is chiefly one of form, but it has treasures of exalted and romantic feeling that Mr. Hofmann set lavishly before his listeners.
He played Brahms’s Rhapsody in B minor with a tempestuous energy; spun infinite delicacies in the two pieces of Scarlatti that pianists so much effect, disregarding several hundred others of the same fibre; worked some tonal delights in Debussy’s Soirée en Granade, found rhythmical charm in a Gigue by Mozart, and ended with a coruscating performance of Godowsky’s brilliant fantasia on themes from Johann Strauss’s operetta of Die Fledermaus.
Of course there were many encores—a transcription of Schumann’s song, Widmung, after the Novelette; a group of three pieces by Chopin after the sonata by Beethoven, and then more at the end.
TOUR SEASON 1923-24 NOW
Management:
WOLFSOHN MUSICAL BUREAU, Fisk Building, 57th Street and Broadway	New York
STEINWAY PIANO