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 "The Pianist of Pianists" - Leopold Godowsky
A famed Polish-American pianist, composer, and teacher Leopold Godowsky (1870–1938), was born to Jewish parents in Sozły, near Vilna, nowadays Lithuania. At age fourteen, Godowsky entered the Königliche Hochschule für Musik in Berlin, but left after three months. Otherwise, he was self-taught. Soon after, he started his career as a concert pianist, which eventually took him to every inhabited continent except Australia.
Godowsky's technique was such that Arthur Rubinstein wrote, "It would take me 500 years to get a mechanism like Godowsky's." However, like Adolf von Henselt, Godowsky was a virtuoso technician plagued by stage fright - though he didn't avoid the concert platform altogether, it was acknowledged that his best work was not in public or in the recording studio, but at home.
In 1890, Godowsky married Frieda Saxe and the next day became an American citizen. He began his pedagogical activity at the New York College of Music, the Broad Street Conservatory in Philadelphia, at the Vienna Academy of Music and the Chicago Conservatory, where he headed the piano department. Among Godowsky's prominent students are Jan Smeterlin, Issay Dobrowen and Heinrich Neuhaus.
The outbreak of World War I drove Godowsky back to New York, where his home was frequented by many distinguished performers and celebrities of that day. He was a close friend to Sergei Rachmaninoff and Albert Einstein. After the war, Godowsky resumed touring, but a stroke he suffered June 17, 1930, during a recording session in London, put an end to his public performances. The death of his wife in 1933, combined with his despair over the deteriorating political situation in Europe, cast an even deeper shadow over his last years, and he stopped composing. Godowsky died of stomach cancer in New York on November 21, 1938.
As a composer, Godowsky has been best known for his paraphrases of piano pieces by other composers, which he enhanced with ingenious contrapuntal devices and rich chromatic harmonies by: introducing countermelodies; transferring the technically difficult passages from the right hand to the left; transcribing the entire piece for left hand solo; or interweaving two pieces, with the left hand playing one and the right hand the other (as impossible as this seems).
Java Suite, a fabled work among piano fanciers one can easily appreciate its glamour as a virtuoso showcase. It is however considerably more than the equivalent of yet another collection of velocity displays or a tourist route through an exotic locale. Godowsky went much beyond the low-brow picture postcard pieces peddled by so many composers and created a virtuoso Indonesian sequence rife with the dulcet tintinnabulation of the gamelan. The music is light but not intellectually bankrupt: approachable without kitsch; affecting without being wince-making. The transmission of the Far Eastern touch at the stage of the Western world became Godowsky's real triumph.
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