Review: My Young Years

My Young Years by Arthur Rubinstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Rubinstein so often reports the piece was a success in concert from the very earliest part of this career, that I was prompted to find this recording of him performing the Saint-Saëns Piano Concerto No 2 in G minor to see about it, and indeed full of exploitable dynamics I can see why this piece would win over even reluctant audiences. Rubinstein is as much an evangelist for Brahms and this long, elaborate, adventurous Grand Tour of a performance career.

This is a dense and breathless telling of the young man's accidental discovery of this ability and lurching early career, on up to World War I. Along the way, he recounts all the elite and low-lifes he met, including casual dalliances with young ladies inside and outside of bordellos. (The ease of relating these sexual adventures is rather intriguing considering a life in high art, but then it was a popular art and Arthur was, really, a pop start on the road.)

Among the luminaries and characters met and described here are German pianist Heinrich Barth, Ludwig Bösendorfer himself (piano manufacturers figure in often as agents behind recital arrangements as they seek talent to showcase their often shoddy wares), Pablo Casals (a miserly anarchist here), Lina Cavalieri of My Secrets of Beauty and Arthur's pin-up girl, Russian basso and roué Feodor Chaliapin, the tragic and talented toper and gambler Paul Draper and his powerhouse wife Muriel, the original Englebert Humperdinck, various royalty, Jenny Lind, Lydia Lopoukhava future wife to John Maynard Keynes, cameo by a sullen John Reed, his best Karol Szymanowski, the Tchaikovsky brothers, and much more.

The final chapters covering World War II are fascinating for depictions of life during wartime in a vacant Paris, crowded London, and neutral Spain. At the beginning, we read of a Poland largely subsumed by its neighbors and a tense Europe were even well-attended concerts do not make it easy for a performer to obtain passports without subterfuge.

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