Bubbling over with fun

‘What a concert that was! [Paderewski] gave eight encores. [. . . He] showed no sign of strain or fatigue. On the contrary, he was bubbling over with fun.’ Ignacy Jan Paderewski, who was as famous for his piano recitals as he was for his staunch advocacy of Polish independence, died 80 years ago today. This commentary, and many others, on the famous Polishman can be found in the diaries of Aniela Strakacz, wife to Paderewski’s personal assistant.

Paderewski was born in 1860 to Polish parents in the village of Kuryłówka in the Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire (now in Ukraine). His mother died soon after his birth, and he was largely brought up by an aunt (his father was arrested in connection with the so called January Uprising of 1863). He showed a strong interest in music from an early age, and, in 1872, was admitted to the Warsaw Conservatory. Upon graduating in 1878, he worked as a piano tutor. In 1880, he married a fellow student, Antonina Korsakówna. The following year she gave birth to a severely handicapped son. She herself died only weeks later. Paderewski left his son in the care of friends, and in 1881, went to Berlin to study music composition with Friedrich Kiel and Heinrich Urban.

Encouraged and financed by the actress Helena Modrzejewska, Paderewski moved to study in Vienna from 1884 to 1887 under Theodor Leschetizky. During this period he also taught at the Strasbourg Conservatory. From 1887, he made his first public appearances as a pianist, in Vienna, Paris, London, becoming extremely popular with audiences. In 1898 he settled at Riond Bosson near Morges in Switzerland, and the following year he married Helena Górska, Baroness von Rosen. In 1891, he made his first successful tour of the United States, a country he would continue to tour every year or two for the next half century. Despite his busy tour schedule, he also composed much music which he included in his recitals. In 1901, he premiered his opera Manru in Dresden. In 1909, his Symphony in B Minor was premiered in Boston; and that same year he was appointed director of the Warsaw Conservatory.

During the First World War, Paderewski became a member of the Polish National Committee and was appointed its representative to the United States. There, he urged President Woodrow Wilson to support the cause of Polish independence. After the war, the provisional head of state, Józef Piłsudski, asked Paderewski to form in Warsaw a government of experts free from party tendencies. He took the portfolio of foreign affairs for himself but soon realised he wasn’t suited to frontline politics. He returned to Riond Bosson in 1919 - never to return to Poland. In 1921 he resumed concerts in Europe and the US, mainly for war victims. In 1932, he performed at the Madison Square Garden for an audience of about 15,000, raising money for unemployed American musicians.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Paderewski led an anti-Nazi campaign from his home in Switzerland. In 1940, he became the head of the National Council of Poland in exile in London, and again turned to the US for help, speaking to its people directly over the radio. He also restarted his Polish Relief Fund and gave several concerts to raise funds. He died in New York on 29 June 1941. He was much honoured during his lifetime. The Academy of Music in Poznań is named after him, and many major cities in Poland have streets and schools named after him. Further information is available from Wikipedia, Encyclopaedia Britannica, and Culture Poland. 

There’s no evidence that Paderewski himself left behind any significant diaries, but Aniela Strakacz did. She was the wife of Sylwin Strakacz, Paderewski’s personal assistant from 1918 for many years, and the executor of his will. Aniela’s diary was published in English by Rutgers University Press in the late 1940s as Paderewski as I knew him - from the diary of Aniela Strakacz (translated from the Polish by Halina Chybowska). This can be read freely online at Internet Archive. Here are several extracts.

4 December 1920
‘This has been a red-letter day at the League because today Paderewski addressed the delegates. All week the League‘s secretariat had been besieged with requests for passes for this occasion.

Long before he was scheduled to speak, every seat on the floor was taken and the spectators gallery was jammed with standees.

At last, Paderewski came up on the platform - a leonine figure radiating moral strength. Accustomed though I am to seeing him, my heart skipped a beat. The audience rose in a spontaneous gesture of welcome and burst into loud and long applause. Paderewski acknowledged the tribute with a dignified low bow and waited for the ovation to subside. From the first minute of his speech, the audience was so quiet you could have heard a pin drop. For more than an hour Paderewski addressed this assemblage of the world’s greatest diplomats in French without notes and held them as spellbound as if he were playing Chopin for them. When he finished, he received another ovation lasting several minutes. Then, to everyone’s undisguised astonishment, Paderewski launched into an English version of his own speech. He’s the only delegate who has perfect command of both languages.

The meeting was adjourned following Paderewski’s bilingual performance. To have any other speakers after him would only have been an anticlimax. Delegates and spectators gathered in knots in the corridors to exchange comments about the oration they’d just heard.

What the President’s appreciative audience did not know was how hard he had worked to make this - and, as a matter of fact, every speech of his - the masterpiece of clear thinking and brilliant verbal form that it was. Time ceases to exist for Paderewski when he is in the throes of composing a speech. If he works on it during the day, lunch or dinner are hours late. Nobody dares interrupt the President. So we all wait mournfully, stealing a snack as best we can, for none of us would dream of sitting down to a meal without him. Sometimes we wait so long that lunch practically runs into dinner. Woe to the guest who has been invited for such a day - he must wait with the rest of us.

When the President writes at night, he often works until the small hours of the morning. At such times we, too, go without sleep because nobody retires without bidding Paderewski good night. We all stay up, even Mme. Paderewska and her secretaries. Before the President finally goes to bed, he and Sylwin still have to play a game of cribbage.

Sylwin yawns scandalously but plays; I’m generally so sleepy I’m groggy; only Paderewski shows no sign of fatigue and never yawns.

After he writes out his speech, the President commits it to memory word for word. For the meeting of the League of Nations today he accomplished the prodigious feat of memorizing two speeches, one in French and one in English.’

3 November 1931
‘I can’t seem to stay in Warsaw long. No one knows how happy I am. For the first time in my life I’m going to England and on a concert tour at that. The President will give a number of recitals in England and this will be my first tour with him.

I’ve heard him play so little. Often at Riond Bosson we’d station ourselves outside his study when we heard the sound of piano-playing, but it never worked out very satisfactorily. Even though Paderewski practises eight hours a day, he never plays anything to completion. He starts playing something, pauses over a chord and fusses around with it until he thinks it’s perfect, then plays a few measures more, stops again, and strikes another chord over and over again. Only when he’s absolutely satisfied with the way it sounds does he go on to the next measure. I don’t think I‘ve ever heard him play a single piece all the way through without interruption in all the summers I’ve spent at Riond Bosson.

I’m delighted to be going to England and I’m thrilled about the concerts, but it’s getting more and more difficult to leave home. I‘ve had to board Anetka out in her school because there’s nobody to leave her with at home. Too bad I can’t entrust her to Father. That would be something, if Father gave her the run of the house the way he did me. His theory of rearing children is to put on his eyeglasses, survey Anetka carefully and then remark: ”Come a little closer, my dear. Let me have a look at you. Hm, you don’t seem pretty enough to me. Oh well, don’t worry, you’ll grow up into a pretty young woman.” ’

15 November 1931
’In a few minutes we shall leave for PaderewskI’s concert in Albert Hall which holds six thousand people. I thought this evening would never come. How different everything is on the day Paderewski is scheduled to play. Of course I haven’t even seen him today, nobody has. There is no lunch, everyone eats on his own. We all know that the President suffers dreadfully from stagefright before every concert and never touches food until after the recital.

Today is a particularly important occasion. A London concert and in the largest hall in Europe to boot. I’ve caught the President’s nervousness myself. It’s silly to be scared about the way Paderewski will play, but I can’t help it. I’m worried sick. I even went to church to offer a little prayer for the success of the concert.

Later

Well, it’s all over. I couldn’t even say what Albert Hall looks like. All my amazed eyes could make out was a sea of human heads thousands upon thousands of them. The boxes were bulging with standees. When I looked for the stage, I couldn’t find it; a second look located a small black dot - the piano. But how was the President to get to it? What was supposed to be the stage was so tightly packed with chairs seating part of the overflow audience that those closest to the piano could have reached out and touched it.

The lights dimmed and Paderewski walked in slowly as if trying to fit into the narrow passage that had been left for him. Everybody rose spontaneously and there was prolonged applause. Finally Paderewski sat down at the piano. He began to play only when the silence grew so deep you could have heard the buzzing of a fly.

It was so quiet I didn’t dare look at my program to see what the President was playing for fear the paper would rustle. Gradually I fell under the spell of the music and no longer felt any need to consult the program. The unearthly beauty of that music transported me to another world where neither time nor space existed, and where everything was fine, noble, and sublime.

A lady fainted during the second part of the concert and was carried out without the slightest noise. It couldn’t have taken more than a minute altogether. Still, after the concert the President asked me: “What happened during the concert, did someone faint?” It’s beyond me how the President saw, heard, or sensed the incident because it occurred in an obscure comer of one of the balconies behind him. Sylwin says the President always notices everything that goes on while he is playing.

What a concert that was! The President gave eight encores.

Following the recital there was a tremendous supper for some twenty-odd guests in a private reception room of the Hotel Carlton. The President attacked the food with a healthy appetite. He was in excellent humor and very gallant toward the ladies.

The supper was fit for a king, deliberately so for the benefit of Jancio H., who has the reputation of being the greatest gourmet in Paris. Rumor has it that a chef at the Ritz fainted when he heard that Count H. was in the restaurant.

Paderewski showed no sign of strain or fatigue. On the contrary, he was bubbling over with fun.’