‘It was the first time I had heard this great artist play. He was most amiable at the
rehearsal. To this day I can recall how Rubinstein sat down at the piano his leonine head
thrown back slightly, and began the five opening measures of the principal theme. It
seemed to me I had never before heard the piano really played. The grandeur of style
with which Rubinstein presented those five measures, the beauty of tone his softness
secured, the art with which he manipulated the pedal, are indescribable.’
Violinist and composer Henri Vieuxtemps adds:
His power over the piano is something undreamt of; he transports you into another world;
all that is mechanical in the instrument is forgotten. I am still under the influence of the
all-embracing harmony, the scintillating passages and thunder of Beethoven’s Op. 57
[Appassionata], which Rubinstein executed for us with unimagined mastery.’
Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick expressed the majority point of view in an 1884
review. After complaining of the over-three hour length of Rubinstein’s recital, Hanslick
admits that the sensual element of the pianist’s playing gives pleasure to listeners. Both
Rubinstein’s virtues and flaws, Hanslick commented, spring from an untapped natural
strength and elemental freshness. ‘Yes, he plays like a god’, Hanslick writes in closing,
‘and we do not take it amiss if, from time to time, he changes, like Jupiter, into a bull.’
Rachmaninoff’s fellow piano student Matvey Pressman adds;
‘He enthralled you by his power, and he captivated you by the elegance and grace of his
playing, by his tempestuous, fiery temperament and by his warmth and charm. His
crescendo had no limits to the growth of the power of its sonority; his diminuendo
reached an unbelievable pianissimo, sounding in the most distant corners of a huge hall.
In playing, Rubinstein created, and he created inimitably and with genius. He often
treated the same program absolutely differently when he played it the second time, but,
more astoundingly still, everything came out wonderfully on both occasions.’
Rubinstein was also adept at improvisation – a practice at which Beethoven had excelled
but which by Rubinstein’s time was on the wane. Composer Karl Goldmark wrote of one
recital where Rubinstein improvised on a motif from the last movement of Beethoven’s
Eighth Symphony:
‘He counterpointed it in the bass; then developed it first as a canon, next as a four-voiced
fugue, and again transformed it into a tender song. He then returned to Beethoven’s
original form, later changing it to a gay Viennese waltz, with its own peculiar harmonies,
and finally dashed into cascades of brilliant passages, a perfect storm of sound in which
the original theme was still unmistakeable. It was superb.’
Villiong had worked with Rubinstein on hand position and finger dexterity. From
watching Liszt, Rubinstein had learned about freedom of arm movement. Theodor
Leschetizky, who taught piano at the St Petersburg conservatory when it opened, likened