Title: The Lion of Poland - The Story of Paderewski
Author: Hume, Ruth Fox, Hume, Paul C.
Language: English
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                       [Illustration: Monument.]



                           THE LION OF POLAND
                       _The Story of Paderewski_


                         by RUTH AND PAUL HUME

                     [Illustration: Street scene.]

                       ILLUSTRATED BY LILI RÉTHI

                      [Illustration: CREDO BOOKS]

          _Hawthorn Books, Inc._    _Publishers_    _New York_

Copyright © 1962 by Hawthorn Books, Inc. Copyright under International
and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. All rights reserved, including
the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form,
except for the inclusion of brief quotations in a review. All inquiries
should be addressed to Hawthorn Books, Inc., 70 Fifth Avenue, New York
City 11. This book was manufactured in the United States of America and
published simultaneously in Canada by McClelland & Stewart, Ltd., 25
Hollinger Road, Toronto 16. Library of Congress Catalogue Number
62-16226. Decimal Classification 92.

                     FIRST PRINTING, NOVEMBER, 1962
                    SECOND PRINTING, NOVEMBER, 1963

                                 H-5420


                          This is for Michael


                            _AUTHORS’ NOTE_

Our warmest thanks must go to all those through whose kindness the
material for this book was assembled. We are particularly indebted to
Mrs. Robert Woods Bliss and to the Honorable Harry S Truman for their
generosity of time and spirit in giving us invaluable personal
recollections of Paderewski.

The following publishers kindly allowed us the use of copyrighted
material: Charles Scribner’s Sons, facts and quotations from THE
PADEREWSKI MEMOIRS, by Ignace Jan Paderewski and Mary Lawton; Rutgers
University Press, a quotation from PADEREWSKI AS I KNEW HIM, by Aniela
Strakacz; The Macmillan Company, for facts from PADEREWSKI, THE STORY OF
A MODERN IMMORTAL, by Charles Phillips; _Harper’s Magazine_, for a
quotation from “Paderewski, the Paradox of Europe,” by Colonel Edward M.
House; the _New York Times Magazine_, for a quotation from “The
Paderewski Saga,” by Charlotte Kellogg (Mrs. Kellogg is also the author
of PADEREWSKI, an excellent biography for young people that would be of
special interest to any readers who wish to investigate the subject
further); Simon and Schuster, Inc., for the quotation from MEN, WOMEN,
AND PIANOS, copyright 1954 by Arthur Loesser; Julian Messner, Inc., for
the story of Paderewski’s meeting with Clemenceau in 1922 told in THE
WORLD OF CARNEGIE HALL, by Richard Schickel.

In an effort to give a complete and accurate picture of Paderewski we
investigated every available book and magazine article about him that we
could get hold of. The fact that so many _were_ available is entirely
due to the good offices of the Music Division of the Library of Congress
to which we are continually grateful on this and other scores.

                                                      RUTH AND PAUL HUME


                       A Note About Pronunciation

Although Paderewski quickly grew accustomed to hearing himself called
“Paderooski” all across America, this is not his name! A Polish “w” is
pronounced like an English “v”, so he is really “Pa-de-_rev_-skee.”
Since Polish surnames change their final “i” to “a” when applied to
women, his wife is called Madame “Pa-de-_rev_-ska.”



                               _CONTENTS_


  1. A Pounding at the Door                                           11
  2. Debut in Vienna                                                  38
  3. The Lion Begins to Roar                                          57
  4. A New World to Conquer                                           72
  5. A Promise Fulfilled                                              86
  6. “They Will Listen”                                              104
  7. The Providential Man                                            122
  8. The Thirteenth Point                                            134
  9. Rebirth of a Nation                                             147
  10. “After That—Art!”                                              163
    Further Reading                                                  183
    Index                                                            187

                         [Illustration: Map of Poland.]



                               CHAPTER 1
                         A POUNDING AT THE DOOR


                [Illustration: Coat of arms with Eagle.]

The boy lay awake in the darkness, listening.

All evening long the adults in the house had been conversing in agitated
whispers, behind closed doors. Now they were asleep—or pretending to be
asleep, as he was pretending. The house was unnaturally silent.

Suddenly the boy sat up in bed, clutching the blanket around his
shoulders and listening with every ounce of concentration he could
muster. His ears were unusually sensitive. Surely he had heard a muted
laugh in the blackness outside. Yes—and there was another, and then the
sound of low-pitched voices, no longer concealed, and finally footsteps
running to the house.

He leaped out of bed and flung open the window. The house was surrounded
by Cossacks. Their leader was pounding on the door. “Jan Paderewski!” he
was shouting. “Open it up before we break it down!”

The boy could hear the heavy bolt being drawn. By the time he had crept
fearfully downstairs it was all over. His father was gone. His sister
and his aunt were sobbing in each other’s arms. He ran into the
courtyard. “Where is my father? What have you done with him?” he asked
one of the soldiers. When the man ignored him, he tugged at his coat and
cried, “Where are you taking my father?”

A stinging pain shot along his cheek as the Russian whirled and struck
at him with a knout. “Let go of my coat, you Polish brat!” the man half
snarled and half laughed. He called out some orders to his men, and the
troop clattered down the road and out of the boy’s sight.

The boy raised his hand to his smarting cheek. The Cossack rope had
ripped across it like a firebrand, and the fire had burned itself into
his soul.

Young Ignace Paderewski was only four years old on the night the Russian
soldiers took his father to prison for a year. Jan Paderewski had been
accused of plotting the overthrow of his Imperial Majesty, Alexander II,
Emperor of all the Russias.

What Jan Paderewski had actually done was to allow firearms to be stored
in his basement until such time as they might be useful. But besides
getting him arrested and imprisoned, they had actually accomplished very
little. The revolution of 1863 and 1864 was just one more in a
succession of uprisings by which the Polish people struck back at their
oppressors. None of these unhappy revolts had ever won back the
country’s lost freedom, but they kept alive the fierce pride of the
Polish people, a pride that the rulers of three nations had tried for
nearly a hundred years to extinguish.

[Illustration: “_Where are you taking my father?_”]

Poland, as a nation, no longer existed. The ancient Catholic kingdom had
been swallowed up by three hungry neighbors: Germany, Austria, and
Russia. It had not, therefore, been swallowed whole, but in pieces.
Three times—in 1772, in 1793, in 1795—the three royal butchers had met
over a map of Poland and thought up new ways of dividing the country to
their mutual satisfaction. To their distaste they found the Polish
people did not agree with their selfish plans.

Ignace Jan Paderewski was born in the Russian third of Poland, on
November 6, 1860. His mother died when he was a baby, so his father’s
imprisonment was a doubly cruel blow. The boy and his older sister,
Antonina, were very close. Like all Polish children, they had been
brought up on heroic tales of their country’s former glory, and their
childhood games always centered around the melancholy struggle for
freedom. The boy, dressed in a Polish uniform of red and white paper,
would charge madly about the house on a hobby horse, smiting his
country’s enemies with a wooden sword. By the time he was six or seven
these games had taken on a reality for him that no one suspected. Young
as he was, he determined that when he grew up he would fight for his
country, not with a wooden sword but with whatever weapons God would
give him. Gradually he took it into his head that only by becoming
someone special could he ever hope to help his people and his country to
freedom.

Soon after Jan Paderewski’s release from prison, he moved his family to
the little town of Sudylkow, where the boy grew up. By the time he was
three, Ignace’s family realized that he had an unusual talent for music.
His father, determined to give every possible advantage to his children,
brought a music teacher to the house to give them piano lessons. The
teacher was a violinist at heart and he could not do much for the
children except teach them the names of the notes and set them to
playing dreadful duets, arranged from popular operatic arias.

As a student Ignace was rather lazy, but he had a natural gift for
languages and a great love for reading the history of his country. When
he was ten years old, his sympathetic tutor gave him a book that
described the great battle of Grünwald in which the Poles had defeated
the greedy German Knights of the Cross and driven them from Poland. As
the boy read the stirring account over and over, he was struck by an
inspiration. The battle had been fought in 1410. This meant that its
five hundredth anniversary was only forty years away—in 1910. “When I
grow up,” young Ignace promised himself, “I’m going to be rich and
famous enough to build a great monument in honor of the anniversary of
the battle of Grünwald!”

It was one of those odd fancies that overtake sensitive children. He
kept it to himself to avoid unnecessary laughter at his expense.

It seemed obvious to Ignace’s father that his son was clearly headed for
a career in music. The boy played the piano constantly, although he much
preferred to improvise his own melodies rather than practice anyone
else’s. The music notebook that his proud father had given him was
already half filled with random compositions. But how, Jan Paderewski
wondered, could the poor boy possibly get the musical training he needed
in Sudylkow? When word came to town that a railroad was soon to be
built, connecting Sudylkow with Warsaw, the father took it as a sign
from heaven. In Warsaw there was a famous conservatory of music. Jan
Paderewski swore that his boy would have a chance to study there, no
matter how much penny-pinching would have to be done at home in order to
finance the venture. In 1872, when Ignace was twelve years old, he and
his father set out on the very first train that ran to Warsaw.

[Illustration: _Ignace and Antonina were very close._]

It was an exciting and a somewhat frightening adventure. The Warsaw
Conservatory did not have dormitories and supervised living for its
students, as a modern school would have. The twelve-year-old country boy
would be more or less on his own in the big city. Added to this worry
was Mr. Paderewski’s concern over the fact that his son had had so
little formal training in music. Would the entrance exams at the
Conservatory be too much for him? As they were ushered into the office
of Director Kontski, the father was more unnerved than the boy.

The director looked at Ignace’s musical composition book and then he
looked squarely at Ignace. The boy returned his gaze without a blink.
Kontski turned to the anxious father and said cordially, “We’ll take
this boy immediately—and without any examinations.”

The first hurdle had been taken easily.

Their unexpected luck at the Conservatory had improved Mr. Paderewski’s
spirits. “Now,” he said to Ignace, “all our worries are over! First we
buy you a piano! Then we find you a place to live!”

A few hours later his optimism was again on the decline. Although father
and son had inspected nearly every piano in Warsaw, they had seen
nothing that was not far too expensive. The last address on their list
was that of the Kerntopf factory, the most famous piano manufacturers in
Poland.

A wasted effort, this one, the elder Paderewski thought gloomily, as he
trudged up the stairs to the showroom. If he had not been able to meet
the price of lesser piano makers, how could he afford a Kerntopf piano?

Mr. Kerntopf himself greeted the two weary customers. Yes, he told the
father, several used pianos were available but they were rather
expensive. At the price Mr. Paderewski had mentioned? Well, there was
only the old upright over in the corner. The boy was welcome to try it
out if he cared to.

Ignace rushed over to the piano and began to play. It wasn’t much of a
piano, perhaps, but as long as he had something—anything—to practice on,
he would be happy.

While he was playing, a younger man came into the showroom and stood
listening attentively. After a while he turned to Mr. Paderewski and
said, “What plans have you in mind for your son?”

The father said proudly, “My boy has just been accepted for the
Conservatory without an examination. That’s why I want to buy him a
piano!”

“Not this old thing!” the young man said. “It would be worthless in a
year. You don’t have to buy him a piano! I will give him one to practice
on. For nothing!”

Mr. Paderewski could hardly believe his ears. He looked inquiringly at
Mr. Kerntopf. “This is my partner and my eldest son,” the old gentleman
said, shrugging as if to say that there was nothing he could do about
this sort of impulse. But he looked pleased in spite of himself.

Mr. Paderewski said, “Now I must find a place for Ignace to live. I
would like to get him a room with a family. He is so young to be alone
in the city. Perhaps you could advise me?”

Edward Kerntopf laughed. “_Here_ is a family. It’s a little big already.
There are ten children in it, so one more will hardly be noticed! Leave
your boy here and he can practice on all the pianos in the factory.”

Mr. Paderewski beamed. All his problems had been solved at once.

God works in different ways to help the people who are close to Him
accomplish His work and theirs. In Paderewski’s life it happened time
and again that when exactly the right person was needed to fill a
specific need, that person was always sent to him. Edward Kerntopf was
the first of many.

Although young Ignace wept bitterly when it was time to say goodbye to
his father, his tears dried quickly. A houseful of youngsters to play
with, and a factory full of pianos to play on! It was a splendid
combination.

On the day Ignace reported to the Conservatory for his first piano
lesson, his excitement was so great that he could hardly walk without
reeling. Never in his short life had he looked forward to anything so
eagerly. To study piano with a really fine teacher! Young as he was, the
boy knew very well that although he could improvise cleverly and could
impress his neighbors in Sudylkow, he did not really know how to play
the piano correctly. He had a vast natural instinct for music, but such
matters as correct hand position, fingering, and proper pedalling were
mysteries to him. This was not surprising, since neither of his teachers
at home had known much more than he himself knew about piano technique.
But now, he thought naively, now at last he would learn everything! Here
at the Conservatory some great teacher would give him the key to unlock
all the secrets of the piano.

By the end of the first lesson, poor Ignace’s enthusiasm had been
cruelly dampened. The teacher to whom he had been assigned was a surly
type. He listened to the boy play for a few minutes and then said
flatly, “You’ll never be a pianist. You haven’t got the hands for it!”
He added helpfully, “I understand you write music. You’d better stick to
that!”

It was a blow, but Ignace realized that one man was not the whole
faculty. Immediately after the lesson, he went to Director Kontski and
asked for another teacher. Unfortunately, the second teacher was exactly
the opposite of the first. The first man cared only for ready-made
technique and had failed to recognize the boy’s natural talent. The
second man, with whom Ignace studied for two years, was so poetic and
romantic in his approach to music that he paid no attention to the
hardcore technical problems of piano playing. Although he had vast
admiration for his young pupil, he could not give him what he most
needed.

After several discouraging weeks at the Conservatory, Ignace was ready
to agree that he was not really cut out to be a pianist. Perhaps he
should start thinking seriously about some other instrument. Since he
had always liked the sound of the flute, he decided to try it out. The
flute teacher decided otherwise. “You’ll never be a flute player, boy!
You haven’t got the lips for it!”

The teacher of oboe and clarinet was a much more agreeable man, but he
finally had to admit that Ignace’s future did not lie with either
instrument. So did the teacher of bassoon and French horn. In time,
however, the young musician found his instrumental niche. “Now, my dear
boy,” the professor of brass instruments told him one day, “you are
always trying to play piano. But why? You have no future at all with the
piano! Your future is here, playing the trombone!” He flung an arm
enthusiastically around Ignace’s shoulder. “Don’t you know that you are
a great natural trombone player?”

[Illustration: _He spent hours at the piano._]

The teachers who were most enthusiastic about the new student, however,
were the men who taught him theory and harmony and composition. “Never
mind which instrument you play best,” they told him. “Learn to play all
of them because it will be useful to you as a composer. And it is as a
composer that you will become famous. As a pianist, never!”

But as he sat night after night in the dimly-lit warehouse, as he worked
hour after hour trying to make his fingers produce the kind of sound he
wanted to lure out of the piano, he knew that nothing had changed. He
would be a pianist no matter who said what. He would be a pianist if it
took him a dozen more years to find the right teacher!

Hard work and discouragement did not by any means prevent Ignace from
thoroughly enjoying life in Warsaw. For the first time in his life he
had a chance to hear real music, properly performed. Edward Kerntopf saw
to that. He took the boy to a succession of concerts and operas, and
even took him visiting in the homes of Warsaw’s leading musicians.
Nothing could shake his faith in Ignace’s future as a pianist, even
though the boy had so far shown progress in nothing but trombone
playing.

During his first few days in Warsaw, Edward had taken him to see all the
city’s beloved monuments to the past. Ignace returned to them again and
again, dreaming as he had dreamed from his childhood of the day when his
country would be reborn. He liked to walk by the great yellow Zamek,
once the royal palace of the kings of Poland. In the palace square stood
the noble bronze figure of King Sigismond III, who held a cross in one
hand and a sword in the other. Like every other Polish boy, Ignace knew
the prophecy that had grown up around the statue: “When Sigismond shakes
his sword,” the old folks said, “then Poland will be free again!” How
many times Ignace went to the square to stare, fascinated, at the
statue. Yet the king held his bronze sword rigid and immobile, and it
seemed unlikely that he would ever be able to shake it in the name of
freedom.

Near the Zamek, in a triangle of fresh green trees, was the shrine of
the Mother of Sorrows. The heroic King John Sobieski had built it two
hundred years before and dedicated it to “the Queen of Poland.” It was
here that the boy knelt most often to pray for the liberation of his
country and for his own future. Another favorite spot was the
seventeenth century Church of the Holy Cross, a spot particularly dear
to the people of Warsaw. In its crypt was buried the heart of Chopin,
and as young Paderewski saw it for the first time, he must have felt as
many Poles had felt before him that the heart of Poland itself was
buried in this holy spot. “Where your treasure is,” read the inscription
over the shrine, “there shall your heart be also.”

Although Ignace was a serious boy and a tireless student, he had an
incurable streak of mischief in him. In Warsaw, for the first time, he
had a real opportunity to exercise it. At home, he had never had any
playmates but his older sister, and a boy’s older sister is hardly the
ideal playmate. But now the rather shy country lad blossomed out and
became a favorite among his young fellow students. They called him
“Squirrel,” in honor of his quick ways and his bright red hair. (Polish
squirrels are not gray, but red.) He soon became the ringleader in most
of the pranks that went on in the stately corridors of the Conservatory.
He also became an expert in the art of playing practical jokes on the
older, more dignified students, who frequently called him several names
other than “Squirrel.”

It was not Ignace’s mischief-making, however, that finally got him into
serious trouble with the officials of the school. It was his skill as a
trombone player. During the boy’s second year as a student, Director
Kontski decided to rouse up some publicity for the Conservatory by
founding a student orchestra to play at local functions. As the school’s
finest trombone player, Ignace was naturally drafted into the brass
section as first trombone. Final exams were looming ahead. The nearer
they came, the more the boy resented the considerable time he had to
spend blowing his trombone at rehearsals when he preferred to be
studying the complexities of harmony and counterpoint. One day he flatly
refused to attend the day’s rehearsal.

The outraged director called him into the office and delivered a lecture
on student discipline. Ignace countered with some ideas of his own on
the useless, time-wasting aspects of the student orchestra. One word led
to another, as one word unfortunately does at tense moments. Before he
knew exactly what had happened, Master Ignace Paderewski had been
expelled from the Warsaw Conservatory.

Fortunately for Ignace, he had friends among the faculty members. They
raised such a fuss in his behalf that the Director was forced to change
his mind. The boy was taken back in time to pass his examinations.

A less hot-headed fellow than the red-headed “Squirrel” might have
learned a lesson from this extremely close call. But Ignace did not have
the sense to stay out of trouble. The next year the orchestra question
flared again. Seven students drew up a letter of protest which appeared
over their signatures in the newspaper. The seven students were promptly
expelled for one year, Ignace among them. This time no amount of
influence helped.

Only the loyal support of Edward Kerntopf enabled Ignace to stay on in
Warsaw and work at the piano as best he could by himself. And by giving
piano lessons to the young children of Kerntopf customers he earned the
princely sum of twelve cents an hour.

By the end of the school year he was getting a little bored with this
routine and yearned to launch his concert career. So did his best
friend, a seventeen-year-old violin student who was also named Ignace.
“Why wait around until we’re too old to enjoy success?” the
seventeen-year-old asked the fifteen-year-old. “Now look, Squirrel.
We’re wasting our time! The summer vacation is coming. What do people do
in summer? They go to summer resorts. And they need entertainment there,
don’t they? Let’s go on tour and present a violin and piano recital. You
have enough Liszt and Chopin pieces ready for your half of the program.
What do you say?”

“Well—uh—”

“Good! Then it’s all settled. We’ll tour as far as Russia. That’s it!
We’ll go all the way to St. Petersburg, leaving a trail of triumph
behind us!”

Ignace’s eyes lit up. “That’s it! We’ll conquer Russia. We’ll show them
what a couple of _Polish_ musicians can do!”

In the end a cellist joined the troupe, and the foolish trio of young
hopefuls started out in the direction of the nearest resort hotel.

“How different from today,” Paderewski said later, as he reminisced
about his boyhood adventures. “Such a thing could probably not happen in
these years of rapid communication, with parents in constant touch with
pampered children. Although still youths, we were to a great extent ‘on
our own,’ as you put it, and parental advice was not close at hand. We
were completely out of touch with our families. So it was easy for us to
keep this great adventure a secret. I knew well enough that my father,
had he known, would have no faith in it, nor could he give me any money
for such an undertaking.”

Whenever the artists reached a new town their first problem was to
locate a piano and to persuade the owner to contribute the use of it to
the evening’s concert. The second problem was to get the piano moved to
the hall where the concert was to be played. This was easier, the boys
soon found, in a town which housed a military garrison. The good-natured
soldiers were always willing to carry the piano in exchange for a glass
of vodka. Since every soldier had a different theory about the proper
way to move a piano, the entire garrison ended up as an escort. The
sight of thirty or forty soldiers surging through the street after a
piano, and all arguing at once, was good free advertising. No one in
town could long remain unaware of the fact that a concert was to be
played that night.

The first few concerts were quite successful and the three artists moved
on, by train, by bus, or on foot, further and further to the north. But
as summer faded and the temperature began to drop, the cellist gave
notice. “I’m going back to Warsaw,” he said, “and if you have any sense,
you’ll come too.”

“Nothing doing!” violinist Ignace replied. “It’s on to St. Petersburg
for us!”

“Well, I’m not as adventurous as you are. Goodbye!”

Thus the trio became a duo. As the boys turned north and crossed into
Russia, they suddenly found themselves in mid-winter. They lined their
thin clothing with newspaper and pressed on. They were forced to admit
that their brief summer success was over. Soon they were penniless and
hungry. Ignace-the-violinist gave in first and wrote home for money.
Finally Ignace-the-pianist had to break his resolution and do the same.
The fathers of both boys sent money immediately and told the lads to be
on the next train home. The violinist was delighted to follow orders.
The pianist was more stubborn. “If only I could get to Petersburg. If
only I could play one successful concert there!” he thought. “It’s just
as easy to get home from there as it is from here. Easier in fact. Just
one more chance! It’s all I ask. Father wouldn’t really mind!”

He went on alone to Petersburg. And then real disaster struck. Both his
baggage and the money he had counted on for his return home were stolen.
He found himself absolutely penniless and half starved in a strange,
unfriendly city. Fortunately for Ignace, not everyone in it was
unfriendly. A poor plumber took the boy in off the street to save him
from freezing to death. With nothing to do all day but try to stay warm,
Ignace had plenty of time to think over his foolishness. He had no idea
what to do next. On one point, however, he was adamant. He would not
write his father again. “How can I?” he said to the friendly plumber.
“He already sent me more than he could afford. And I lost it! I can’t
ask him for more!”

A few days later the janitor of the building came to the plumber’s
little basement room and said, “Isn’t your name Paderewski? There’s a
letter for you at the General Delivery window of the Post Office.”

“For me? But that’s impossible. From whom?”

“From a Jan Paderewski. The Post Office has been asking for you all over
town. Just by chance I heard about it.”

The letter from home enclosed a hundred rubles. Ignace left Petersburg
the next day and was soon safe at home in Sudylkow, thinner but
considerably wiser than he had been a year before. One question had
haunted him all the way home. “How did you know where to find me?” he
asked his father. “And how did you know how desperately I needed that
money?”

“Oh, that was easy,” Mr. Paderewski said. “You see, I had a dream. I saw
you hungry and cold in St. Petersburg, so I sent the letter to the Post
Office there and begged them to look for you. The surprising thing is
that they found you.”

The fact that his father’s intense love for him had worked a small
miracle on his behalf touched the boy’s heart so deeply that he made an
immediate resolution. He would repay his father’s goodness by doing
exactly as his father wanted. He would go back to the Conservatory and
finish his studies with no more nonsense. Nor would he put his father to
any more years of expense than the good man had originally expected. He
was now two years behind his own classmates, but he vowed that somehow
he would graduate with them. This gave him six months in which to
complete the regular work of two years!

During these months of intensive study, young Ignace began to develop
the gift that would carry him through so many crises in his life: an
enormous power of concentration.

On graduation day Mr. Paderewski was in the hall, sick at heart because
he did not really believe that his son could possibly have passed the
rigorous final examinations for the music diploma. As the list of the
names was read, as one boy after another went up to the platform, the
nervous father braced himself. “But of course his name will not be
called. How could it be? The others in the class have been working an
extra year and a half ... There ... that’s the last boy going up now, I
think.”

But it was not quite the last boy. The last boy was now being called.
“And finally,” the Director announced, beaming, “with the highest honors
of the class, Ignace Jan Paderewski.”

Mr. Paderewski remembered few details after that. All twelve Kerntopfs
were trying to shake his hand at once, and then Ignace was playing the
Grieg Piano Concerto with the orchestra, and everyone in the hall was
cheering for him. Then the father realized something that must have made
him even happier than this moment of triumph: in six short months young
Ignace must have done quite a bit of growing up.



                               CHAPTER 2
                            DEBUT IN VIENNA


                       [Illustration: Quill pen.]

Now that Paderewski had his diploma, he determined that he would no
longer be an expense to his father. Much as the young man disliked
teaching (a dislike from which he never recovered), he knew he had no
choice in the matter. If he intended to eat, he would have to teach. But
at least he did not have to look very hard for pupils. Immediately after
graduation he was offered a position on the faculty of the Conservatory.

Among the students that year was a beautiful young girl named Antonina
Korsak. Although Paderewski’s future was uncertain, Antonina had
complete faith in it. It did not matter in the least to her that at the
moment he was only a struggling, poorly-paid piano teacher. In 1880,
when Paderewski had just turned twenty, they were married.

He found a small apartment where the two talented young musicians lived
in complete happiness and made glowing plans for the future. Paderewski
would look back on it as though he were recalling a brief but
unforgettable dream. One year after her marriage the beautiful Antonina
was dead, leaving her young husband with an infant son.

During her last conscious hours, Antonina, knowing that she was dying,
had made her husband promise to take some of her small inheritance and
use it to continue his musical studies. Her faith in his future was as
bright and untroubled at the moment of her death as it had been during
her life.

Now that he had a son to support, Paderewski knew that he must be
practical. Nearly everyone who knew anything about it assured him that
although he could never make a career as a pianist, he would be a
success as a composer. Since no one in Warsaw could teach him any more
than he already knew about composition, he decided to go to Berlin to
study with a famous teacher named Friederich Kiel. Antonina’s mother
happily agreed to take care of little Alfred for him.

Professor Kiel was greatly impressed both by Paderewski’s talent as a
composer and by the young Pole’s enormous capacity for work. Too
saddened by his wife’s death to enjoy the boisterous student life of
Berlin, Paderewski devoted himself entirely to his studies. Ten or
twelve hours a day of uninterrupted work was not the least unusual.

Although most Berliners were automatically anti-Polish, Paderewski made
some good friends among German musicians. His warmest affection was for
the great composer, Richard Strauss, whose family accepted the young
foreigner as a member from his first appearance in the house. Of all his
kindnesses to Paderewski, the greatest favor Strauss ever did for him
was a completely unconscious one.

Paderewski knew that he had the habit of making faces while he played
the piano. The more complex the music, the more tortured the grimaces
that distorted his handsome face. He had never given the failing much
thought, however, until he realized that Strauss had the same bad habit.
As he watched the great man play—his face almost as busy as his
hands—Paderewski thought, “Good Heavens! That is how I look!” He
determined to reform at all costs and did so, but only after months of
practicing with a mirror propped up on the music rack of the piano.

Although he did not forget his promise to Antonina to continue his
studies, he worried more and more about earning money for his little
son. The music he published brought him a great deal of praise but
little money. But he soon found a way to increase his earnings. He was
in great demand as an accompanist for violinists and singers, since he
could sight read music so brilliantly that the performers who hired him
did not have to spend much time or money on rehearsals.

One of his closest friends was a violinist named Gorski. He had arranged
a short tour of resort hotels, and he asked Paderewski to come with him.
The pianist smiled to himself, remembering an earlier tour he had once
made. But since this one was on a much sounder financial footing, he
gladly agreed to go. There was a marked resemblance, however, in the
matter of pianos!

At the very first hotel where they were booked, the piano proved to be
of such ancient stock that half the hammers had resigned from active
duty. When he struck the keys attached to the afflicted hammer they
would fly up, but once up they would not return to place. This meant
that each note with a bad hammer could only be used once during the
evening.

“I can probably play your accompaniments by faking!” he said to Gorski,
“but I can’t possibly get through my solos!”

“What can we do? It’s the only piano in town.”

One of Gorski’s young pupils was making the tour with them.

“Excuse me, sir,” he said, stepping up timidly. “I think I can help
you.”

“Impossible!” Paderewski said gruffly.

“Suppose I stand by the piano and push the hammers down just as fast as
you hit them. I don’t think the audience would notice, do you?”

The two artists looked at each other and shrugged. It was worth a try,
since there was nothing else to do. In later years, Paderewski loved to
tell this story. “Ah! You should have seen him!” he wrote. “His hands
went like lightning. They flew like birds from side to side. He had to
lean way across the piano—back and forth he weaved and darted in
constant motion.... What an experience!”

The concert was a huge success. The clever hammer-pusher had been wrong
in only one respect: his modest belief that the audience would not
notice him. After the concert as Paderewski was walking through the
lobby, he heard a man say to his wife, “How did you like that young
pianist?”

“Oh, he was all right,” came the answer, “but the other one, you know!
The second pianist who was playing at the back of the piano! He was the
best, I thought. He worked much harder than the other one. He was the
real artist!”

Paderewski worked nearly two years in Berlin, interrupted only by a
short period of teaching in Warsaw. There, in addition to a heavy
teaching program, he began taking private lessons in Latin, mathematics,
literature, and history. He did not want his education to be completely
one-sided. He had, at the time, no way of realizing how wise a decision
this was.

Paderewski’s studies in composition had been brilliant, and the piano
pieces he published were unusually successful. One of the first pianists
to play his work in public was the popular Madame Essipoff. She included
his Variations in A minor on many of her programs. To Paderewski,
however, Essipoff’s greatest attraction was not her success as a pianist
but the fact that she was married to the great Theodore Leschetizky.

Leschetizky lived in Vienna, but he was a fellow Pole. He was, in
addition, the most famous piano teacher in the world.

The thought of a piano career had remained at the back of Paderewski’s
mind during every minute of his years in Warsaw and Berlin, although
reason told him to abandon the idea. (So had every teacher with whom he
had ever studied.) The turning point in his thinking came about quite
casually.

One night his publisher invited him to dinner to meet Anton Rubinstein,
a brilliant and famous concert pianist. (He occupied much the same
position in his day as his namesake, Artur Rubinstein, occupies in
ours.)

The famous pianist was charming to the relatively unknown composer and
asked to hear some of his piano compositions. When Paderewski had played
several pieces, Rubinstein said, “How very fine they are! You must
compose more for the piano!”

Paderewski smiled diffidently. “Oh, I can’t do too well writing for
piano,” he said modestly, “because I play so little myself.”

Rubinstein’s eyebrows lifted. “Nonsense!” he said. “You have an inborn
technique. You could have a splendid piano career, if you wanted one.
I’m sure of it!”

For a moment the young man was too stunned to mumble a polite reply. It
was true that this opinion was only one against many others in the
opposite direction. But it was Anton Rubinstein’s opinion, and that gave
it a few extra votes. In any case it was all that was needed to decide
the young man’s future. Somehow he would manage the impossible task of
raising the money to study the piano seriously. It was his last chance,
if indeed it was not already too late, so he could not afford to settle
for anything but the best. He would go to Vienna and study with
Leschetizky.

Before he could even think about the future, though, he knew that he
needed a rest. The years of intensive work, compounded by a constant
uneasiness about his little boy’s delicate health, had exhausted him. He
decided to spend a few weeks in the beautiful Tatra Mountains. There he
could think things out—and start adding up figures. What would a few
months in Vienna cost? How much did Leschetizky usually charge per
lesson? What was the quickest way to raise the money? The last question
was a tricky one, since there was no quick way to raise money. It would
have to be done piecemeal.

In the village of Zakopane where he stayed, there lived an old doctor
who was an expert on the folk music of the region. Paderewski tramped
happily through the hills with his new friend, jotting down notes as
fast as the good old man could whistle them. One day the doctor said,
“Guess who arrived in the village to open up her summer home? Helen
Modjeska! Would you like to meet her?”

Paderewski gasped. “Modjeska? Here? Certainly I’d like to meet her!” Who
wouldn’t? How many times he had cheered himself hoarse over a Modjeska
performance in _Hamlet_ or _Othello_! Poles all over the world loved
Modjeska, not only because she was a great actress, but also because she
was dedicated heart and soul to the cause of a free Poland. Since she
was one of the most famous actresses in the world, she had done as much
as anyone alive to remind the world that there was such a place as
Poland.

Modjeska and her husband were delighted with the handsome young
musician, and when he played the piano for her the actress was
enchanted. “You will have a great career!” she predicted. “You will do
great honor to your country. But you must start at once!”

Paderewski smiled. Non-musicians simply did not understand these things!
“You are kind, Madame! But I am not ready to start. Not until I have
studied much more. And that is not easy to do.”

“Studying costs money.” She frowned. “I understand that.”

He nodded. “I’ll raise it somehow. Maybe if I give a few hundred
concerts! Next month I’m giving a little recital in Cracow. It might
even fill about one quarter of a hall—if the hall is small enough.”

The actress’s beautiful dark eyes flashed. “Nonsense! The hall will be
filled! Sold out! There will not be an empty seat!”

“Thank you, Madame.” Paderewski laughed delightedly. “You are very
flattering, but I’m afraid the people of Cracow won’t quite turn out _en
masse_ to hear me.”

“Perhaps not. Not yet—but they might just turn out to hear _me_. We
shall make it a double bill. Paderewski plays, Modjeska recites! What do
you say?”

For a moment he was too stunned to say anything at all.

The hall was indeed sold out and the box-office “take” was at least five
times greater than the poor pianist had expected. Modjeska’s name on the
program was the greatest endorsement he could have had in Cracow. People
flocked to hear her recite from the beloved Polish poets. They stayed to
hear the unknown pianist play his persuasive brand of Chopin. In one
evening he had earned enough to live in Vienna for at least three
months. The “right person at the right moment” pattern was once more in
evidence.


In 1886 Vienna was the heart of the musical world. The great composer,
Johannes Brahms, lived and worked there. The Vienna Philharmonic was the
oldest and finest symphony orchestra in the world. The Vienna State
Opera was producing its almost flawless productions under some of the
world’s finest conductors. Johann Strauss was writing operettas such as
_Die Fledermaus_ and “The Gypsy Baron,” while the whole country waltzed
to the “Beautiful Blue Danube” and “Tales From the Vienna Woods.” To the
hopeful young Polish pianist, however, the center of Vienna’s musical
life was the studio of Theodore Leschetizky.

From the phenomenally early age of fifteen, Leschetizky had been
recognized as a remarkable teacher, and while he himself played publicly
until he was past fifty, his greatest gift was the ability to make
superb pianists out of the advanced students who came to him from all
over the world.

[Illustration: “_Play something for me._”]

When Paderewski called on Leschetizky, the great man received him
cordially. “Of course! You are the young man whose music my wife so
admires! Many young composers are kind enough to bring me their new
compositions. You have some pieces to play for me?”

Paderewski gulped. Now that he had to put it into words, his mission
suddenly looked a bit ridiculous. As clearly as he could, he explained
to Leschetizky that he had not come to him as a composer but as a piano
student, since he wanted to have a career as a concert pianist.

The older man’s bushy eyebrows flew up. “Are you serious? But—how old
are you, young man?”

“Twenty-four.”

“And at twenty-four you intend to start studying to be a virtuoso? Do
you realize what you are saying?”

Although a man is still very young at twenty-four, he is far too old to
begin a new career as a pianist. Either he should be well on his way to
an established reputation by that age, or he should forget the whole
thing. Paderewski knew this as well as anyone.

Leschetizky was now pacing up and down the room nervously. “It is
impossible, I tell you! Impossible!”

Paderewski felt as though the world were crumbling into bits and pieces.
Seeing the look on his face, the good-natured professor said more
kindly, “Well, well—since you are here, play something for me. It does
not matter what.”

With what desperation Paderewski must have poured into his playing the
emotions that were surging through his head at that moment! He played
his own compositions, since he knew little else. When he had finished,
Leschetizky, who had stopped pacing, said quietly, “You have a great
many qualities as a pianist. You have a natural technique, but it lacks
so much. Still, you have the principal quality—that is tone.” He frowned
and shook his head sadly, “But I am afraid there will be too much to do
with your fingers. They absolutely lack discipline. Besides,” he added,
cutting directly to the heart of the problem, “I am afraid you do not
know how to work!” This was the thing that Paderewski had known all
along. It was, in fact, the reason he had decided he must study with
Leschetizky. “If I decide to give you lessons,” Leschetizky was saying,
“you must start with finger exercises and with Czerny studies.” This was
where all well-trained beginners started. But it was also the way that
every Leschetizky pupil, no matter how advanced, had to begin working
towards his lofty goals: absolute mastery of each finger, and a
beautiful, singing tone.

Now Paderewski knew how someone feels who must begin learning to walk
all over again after a leg injury. As he thumped out his scales and
exercises, he realized more clearly than ever how slipshod his playing
really was. “I could not improve in a few weeks or months even, because
bad habits were already deeply rooted in me, an amateurish way of
treating the piano, just play the piano, fingering—anyhow!” No wonder
poor Leschetizky almost gave up hope during the early days. “No, no,
it’s impossible!” he would say, tugging nervously at his beard. “It’s
too late! It’s too late! You have wasted your time on pleasant things
like orchestration!” And here he would add the most heart-breaking
judgment of all: “Ah, but if you had begun to study earlier. Then you
could have become a great pianist!”

But Leschetizky had not reckoned with Paderewski’s stubborn
determination to work. He practiced seven or eight exhausting hours a
day. By the end of each session he felt as though his arms would drop
off at the shoulder. There was no time in his life now for anything but
work. He who had such a gift for friendship now found that his closest
friend was a little spider who ran down a thread and sat on the music
rack while he practiced.

In spite of his Spartan existence, Paderewski was completely happy. He
knew that he had, at last, found exactly the man he needed. “He opened
up another world to me,” he wrote later. “After those groping,
struggling years, even in a few lessons things became clear. I began to
see, to understand, to know how to work. And my thankfulness to
Leschetizky is as great today as it was then!”

But life in Vienna was expensive, and although the generous Leschetizky
refused to take any money at all for these priceless lessons,
Paderewski’s small supply of cash finally ran out. Through Leschetizky’s
influence he was offered a decently paid post at the Strasbourg
Conservatory. During that year, he played five important public
concerts. The more he played, the more he could see not only how far he
had come but how far he still had to go. When the school term was over,
he left Strasbourg, determined to get back to Vienna and Leschetizky at
all costs. But how?

Once more it was Edward Kerntopf who came to his rescue. He insisted on
giving his friend the necessary money. Much as Paderewski hated to
impose his problems on anyone else, he felt a strong conviction that
some day, in some small way, he would be able to repay Edward’s
kindness.

And so back to Vienna and Leschetizky, and those driving hours of work.
But this time it was different. This time both student and teacher knew
that the impossible was actually going to happen.

Before Paderewski had been in Vienna many months, Leschetizky came to
his room one day and said, “I have a suggestion to make to you. Would
you not like to make your first appearance here in Vienna? Pauline
Lucca—she is such a beautiful singer!—is doing a charity concert. She
wants to have a pianist on the program too. It’s a good opportunity. I
think you should take it.”

“Yes, I shall be glad to,” Paderewski said, his eyes shining. What
delighted him to the point of dancing was not the idea of the concert
itself. That was just a matter of playing a few pieces during the
program so that the singer could rest her voice. What filled his soul
with joy was the fact that Leschetizky himself believed he was ready for
his debut in Vienna!



                               CHAPTER 3
                        THE LION BEGINS TO ROAR


                        [Illustration: Statue.]

Nearly all the musicians in Paris came to the piano recital given at the
Salle Erard on the evening of March 3, 1889. The French composers
Gounod, Massenet, and Saint-Saens were there. So was their famous
Russian colleague, Tchaikovsky. It was the sort of audience that is
usually described as “small but distinguished.” It included many members
of the Polish aristocracy in exile who lived in Paris, their “second
capital.” And they had brought with them whatever friends among the
French nobility they could round up for the occasion. It made no
difference to them that they had never even heard the name of the young
man who was playing. The fact that this Ignace Jan Paderewski was a
Polish artist was all they needed to know about him.

From Paderewski’s point of view, however, the two most important people
in the audience were two Frenchmen named Edouard Colonne and Charles
Lamoureux. Both men were conductors of highly successful orchestras
bearing their names. And each man was not only constantly on the alert
for new talent, but was eager to be first in bringing it before the
public.

Paderewski sat in his dressing room before the concert, completely
alone, as was his habit. He was not thinking about the audience or
anything else in the world except the music he would soon be playing:
Beethoven’s Thirty-Two Variations in C minor; some Chopin (whose music
he loved above any other and which he felt that he, a Pole, could play
as Paris had not heard it before), and one of the most brilliant and
fiery of the Hungarian Rhapsodies by Liszt.

The manager of the hall had been surprised when the young visitor had
asked to have the lights lowered to about half their usual brightness.
So was the audience, accustomed as it was to recitals played with the
gaslight blazing at full power. But early in his concert career
Paderewski had found that a bright light on the keys of the piano made
it almost impossible for him to play.

What happened that night in the Salle Erard?

We have a report about it from a man who was himself one of the world’s
greatest pianists, and no tribute can be held in higher regard than that
spoken by one artist about another. Alfred Cortot said of Paderewski’s
Paris debut, “He appeared with the suddenness of a lightning stroke,
making a blurring, an eruption in our hearts. Instead of a pianist, an
inspired poet took possession of the keyboard.”

The listeners, charmed from the first moment by the romantic appearance
of the newcomer, grew more and more enthusiastic with each succeeding
piece. But after the last encore—the encores lasted for nearly an
hour—the audience was on its feet thundering its approval.

Two men in the audience had better things to do than shout and applaud.
The minute the last note had died away, conductors Colonne and Lamoureux
leaped to their feet and began a race to the platform. Each man was
determined to get there first. Lamoureux, by a masterpiece of broken
field running around cheering Polish counts, French dukes, and assorted
musicians, won the race. “Monsieur,” he puffed, hearing Colonne slide to
a stop behind him, “I have the honor to invite you to appear as soloist
in three weeks with the Lamoureux Orchestra!”

Lamoureux and other new friends pressed the young pianist to arrange
several additional solo recitals at once. “You must strike again while
this enthusiasm lasts,” they told him. “You must reinforce this first
success, or people will quickly forget you.” All professional artists
are aware of the fickleness of the public. Paderewski knew what good
advice his friends were giving him. The night’s triumph, therefore,
instead of making him happy, plunged him into absolute misery.

Why? Because the modest young man, encouraged to try his luck by his
success in Vienna, had come to Paris with exactly one program prepared.
And he had just finished playing it! He could have postponed his Paris
debut until he had a larger repertoire, but it had never once occurred
to him that he would be called upon to play anything in Paris but his
one recital. And now!

“It’s impossible,” he told himself on that triumphant evening of March
3. The first program—the _only_ program—had taken him eight months to
prepare to his satisfaction. Now he was asked to prepare a second
program in three weeks! “It’s absolutely impossible! I can’t even think
about it!”

On the morning of March 4, he said, “Well—maybe I could try—”

On the evening of March 23 he appeared with the Lamoureux Orchestra in
the Saint-Saens Piano Concerto in C minor. He played it, said the city’s
toughest music critic, “in a superb and masterful manner.” Critics
should be embarrassed, the writer added, to praise Paderewski, because
they had been so free and easy in using superlatives to describe other
pianists. As a result, there was now a shortage of new words by which to
describe the particular genius of the Polish artist. Another newspaper
promptly labelled him “the Lion of Paris.”

The faster Paderewski’s career gathered speed, the harder he worked,
“always struggling for perfection, pushing on and on to that
ever-receding faraway peak of attainment,” he would write of those days.
“All work is like that.... The summit of the mountain is always farther
and farther away.” He went back to Vienna and prepared more and more
programs, and added concerto after concerto to his growing list. He
accepted more and better engagements with bigger and bigger box office
receipts to show for them. He toured the French provinces—Lyons ...
Nantes ... Bordeaux ... Tours.... Then on to Antwerp ... Brussels ...
Liège ... and Vienna again. And always Paris. After three successful
seasons in Paris he felt like a real veteran of the concert stage.

The financial rewards of success were important to him because of
Alfred, who was now nine years old. It had been evident from the time he
was a year old that the little boy, mentally so alert, was not
developing well physically. In those days doctors could do very little
to improve or even to diagnose his condition. It would seem that he
suffered from a congenital weakness of the spine, and possibly of the
heart. “Always in the foreground,” his father wrote, “was the menace of
his illness, a constantly increasing problem to be met. He had his
tutors at this time and he was intelligent and gifted. He had a
brilliant, clear mind; he loved music too. It was difficult to take him
to concerts, but he often went to recitals at the Salle Erard which we
could manage easily and he was very happy to go, and touchingly proud of
me at these concerts. It was a great excitement to him, a stimulant to
his mind. Poor child, he was completely cut off from everything in life
except intellectual things, by his great infirmity.”

Father and son were together at last. And Paderewski had accepted the
fact that the boy would never walk. In Paris Alfred was cared for in the
home of the beautiful Mme. Helena Gorska, a friend who gave great love
and kindness to the motherless boy and therefore much peace of mind to
his father.

Paderewski’s reputation made possible another long-awaited opportunity.
In 1889, a great exhibition—a sort of World’s Fair—was held in Paris. It
included a display of pianos from all over the world. Paderewski
arranged to have some Kerntopf pianos, up to then known only in Poland,
shipped to Paris and exhibited. They won a gold medal (after Paderewski
had happily and cleverly used every ounce of influence he had with every
one of the judges). The fact that his pianos—Polish pianos—had come out
so well in international competition was one of the greatest events in
Edward Kerntopf’s life. It would never be possible to repay Edward’s
kindness, Paderewski thought, but at least he had been able to do
something. Many people who reach sudden, dazzling success find it all
too easy to forget the people who helped to bring it about. It was one
of Paderewski’s principal characteristics, from his boyhood to his old
age, that he never forgot his friends at home.

The road had led him from Warsaw to Vienna to Paris. To continue his
conquest of the musical world, Paderewski now turned to London. As his
ship pitched its way across the Channel, the seasick artist was in no
mood for optimism. The conquest of one city, he knew, did not guarantee
success in another city. London in particular had always maintained a
chilly “show me” attitude toward artists who came supplied with flowery
reviews from foreign critics. Naturally anyone who arrived in the
British capital preceded by rave notices like Paderewski’s would be
under high suspicion.

It came as a nasty shock to Paderewski to find that his London manager,
Daniel Mayer, a beginner in the field, had plastered the city with
posters advertising the appearance of the “Lion of Paris.” Paderewski, a
Pole, knew better than the English Mr. Mayer that Londoners simply did
not care for this sort of thing. “You make me sound like an incoming
circus,” he roared at his overeager manager.

Paderewski’s gloomy predictions about his first London appearance turned
out to be one hundred percent correct. The night was wet and foggy; the
hall was half empty; the audience was chilly. The artist, so sensitive
to the emotions of the audience, was appalled. And the reviews were
ghastly. “Vulgar,” “violent,” “much noise and little music,” “the clay
and the jangle of metal,” he read about himself in the London papers.
The critics seemed determined to cut the lion down to the size of a
small tabby cat.

Today we have our own opinion about the cautious critics who complained
so bitterly because Paderewski’s playing was “utterly at variance with
the traditional methods.” In England the “traditional methods” of
playing certain unfortunate composers often meant rather spineless,
languishing, ladylike performances. Paderewski’s intense vitality and
virility startled the conservative critics of that Victorian era. It
would take some getting used to!

After two slightly more successful London concerts, Paderewski went on a
tour of the smaller cities. Poor Mr. Daniel Mayer set out on the road
with a heavy heart, for he looked forward to financial disaster. To his
horror, Paderewski had firmly insisted that his publicity circulars for
the provinces should reprint all his London reviews complete! Mr. Mayer,
like every other manager in the business, believed in picking out the
best and kindest remarks from reviews and cleverly stringing them
together with “...” and “...,” thus giving the impression that all the
critics had thought everything was wonderful. Yet Paderewski had vetoed
this simple business procedure for a reason that appalled his poor
manager. He said it was dishonest. Dishonest! Who cared about honesty in
publicity releases, Mr. Mayer moaned to himself. Results at the box
office were what counted! And who had ever heard of a rising concert
artist with a conscience. It was a luxury he could not afford.

[Illustration: _The admiring lady was Queen Victoria._]

To Mr. Mayer’s vast surprise, Paderewski’s honesty turned out to be the
best policy, financially as well as morally. The people of the smaller
English towns felt—quite correctly—that Londoners looked down on them.
For this reason they leaned over backwards to avoid following the lead
of the big city in making decisions about anything, even the abilities
of an unknown artist. The very fact that the London critics had given
him rough treatment was a point in his favor. And the fact that he had
circulated all of his reviews, good and bad, piqued their curiosity as
nothing else could have done. Curiosity and sympathy are a powerful
combination at the box office.

Paderewski finished his tour with the sweet sounds of success ringing in
his ears. By the time he returned to London, his complete triumph all
over the rest of England had been duly noticed. The lines formed at dawn
outside the box office of St. James Hall on the days of his concerts.

His appealing personality and flawless manners quickly made Paderewski a
popular figure in London society. He made friends among British
statesmen as easily as he did among British musicians. The former
gentlemen were surprised at his grasp of so many subjects besides music.
And the authority with which this romantic-looking, golden-haired
pianist discussed international affairs astounded them. The composer
Saint-Saens had, with typical French acumen, already summed up
Paderewski’s gifts. “Paderewski?” he had said one evening, shortly after
the Paris debut. “He is a genius who happens to play the piano!”

It was at this time that the most famous of all Paderewski portraits was
made. It was a pencil drawing by the distinguished British artist,
Edward Burne-Jones. The picture came into being in a delightful way. As
Burne-Jones was walking down the street one day, he passed a young man
with a radiant face and a halo of red-gold hair. The artist was so
struck by this apparition that he rushed around the block quickly in
order to pass it again. Then he rushed back home and announced to the
astonished household, “I have just seen an archangel walking on the
London pavement!” He grabbed a pencil and rapidly sketched what he could
remember of the archangel’s appearance.

A few days later Paderewski was brought by a mutual friend to pay a call
on Burne-Jones. Much to his surprise he was met by his host not with a
polite British greeting, but with an ecstatic cry, “It’s my archangel!”
Before the astonished visitor could say a word, the artist had seized
the unfinished picture and gone to work on it.

A lady who heard him play that year wrote about it this way in her
diary: “Went to the green drawing room and heard Monsieur Paderewski
play on the piano. He does so quite marvelously, such power and such
tender feeling. I really think he is quite equal to Rubinstein. He is
young, about 28, with a sort of aureole of red hair standing out.”

The admiring lady was Queen Victoria. Another victory had been won in
his complete conquest of England.

It was time to move on now and the logical world to be conquered next
was the new one. In 1891, the firm of Steinway and Sons in New York
offered Paderewski a contract for eighty concerts with a guarantee of
$30,000. What young artist could refuse such an offer? On November 3,
1891, Paderewski sailed for New York.



                               CHAPTER 4
                         A NEW WORLD TO CONQUER


                [Illustration: Coat of arms with Eagle.]

Carnegie Hall in New York City has been the goal of musicians from all
over the world for nearly three quarters of a century. But on November
17, 1891, when the new European artist first played there for an
audience that had paid a total of only $500 to hear him, the famous hall
was barely six months old.

Paderewski was still slightly numb from his first impressions of the
world he had come to conquer! After a long, rough crossing, his ship had
docked late on a rainy night. In those days the first view of New York
from the harbor was by no means the thrilling sight it is today. The
famous skyline did not yet exist and the unlit waterfront consisted of a
few dirty, low-lying buildings.

Almost as depressing as the scenery was Mr. Charles F. Tretbar, the
Steinway representative who met him at the dock with this cheering
welcome: “Well, Mr. Paderewski, we hear you have had a brilliant success
in London and Paris. But let me tell you, you need not expect anything
like that here in America. We have heard them all, all the pianists, all
the great ones, and our demands are very exacting. We are not easily
pleased here! Besides, everyone knows that piano playing is not as well
rewarded as singing or violin playing, so don’t expect any extraordinary
audiences. I’ve done my best for you, but it won’t amount to much!”

Paderewski, his secretary, and his luggage, were then deposited at a
dismal hotel in Union Square where the two men spent the night routing
battalions of mice and bedbugs. Although they were moved to a good hotel
the next day, with the profound apologies of Mr. Steinway himself, the
lost night had not helped to put Paderewski in a festive mood for his
first concert. Nor had his first look at the schedule of his tour
arranged by Mr. Tretbar. To his dismay, he found that he was advertised
for six solo recitals and three concerts with orchestra during the first
two weeks. Each orchestral concert included two concertos. He would be
playing six different concertos within six days.

Paderewski was learning the hard way about the energetic all-out
American way of doing things! In Europe, a pianist who played six
different concertos in one season, much less one week, would be
considered a wonder. Four of the concertos he could easily manage, but
the other two, although he had played them once or twice, were not
really ready for public performance.

All of these troublesome facts, however, he put out of his mind when he
walked out onto the stage of Carnegie Hall for the first time and began
to play the Saint-Saens C minor Concerto. It was the same work he had
played with the Lamoureux Orchestra in Paris. This time he was
accompanied by the Symphony Society of New York City, under its handsome
young conductor, Walter Damrosch. The evening closed with his own
concerto, which gave the New York critics a chance to judge him as a
composer as well as a pianist.

But poor Paderewski had little time after the concert that night to
worry about the next day’s reviews. Damrosch had scheduled the rehearsal
for the next concert at ten o’clock in the morning. And at this second
concert he was to play not only the Beethoven “Emperor” Concerto and the
Schumann Concerto, but, as a bonus for the audience, the fiendishly
difficult Hungarian Fantasia for piano and orchestra by Liszt.

Paderewski went back to his new hotel physically exhausted, as always
after a concert, and began practicing for the next day’s work. He had
not struck more than six chords before there was an agitated knocking at
the door. The manager of the hotel stood outside, wringing his hands.

“Mr. Paderewski! Playing the piano at this hour?”

“But I have to practice for my next concert. And nighttime is the only
time I have free!”

“Yes, but Mr. Paderewski, we have so many elderly people living in the
hotel. We can’t possibly have you practicing the piano at midnight. You
can understand that!”

He could understand it, yes, but what could he do about it? Suddenly
from the depth of his memory came a clear picture of the Kerntopf
factory in Warsaw, with its room after room of inviting pianos. He
grabbed his coat and called to his secretary, “Goerlitz! Come on! We’re
going out!”

“Going out? At this hour? Where to?”

“To the Steinway warehouse!”

The nightwatchman at the Fourteenth Street office was surprised to be
roused from his slumbers by a wild-eyed man pounding at the door. “I
must have presented a strange appearance,” Paderewski recalled. “The
watchman, however, opened the room where the pianos were stored, and
there, in that cold and gloomy loft, I began practicing. There were no
lights except the two candles on the piano. It must have been a strange
sight as I think back on it—the empty room, with two fluttering candles
and the two men, the night watchman and my secretary, each snoring
loudly in his corner as I worked on until morning. That was all I had
for inspiration!”

Yet in spite of his fatigue, this concert was a greater success than the
first one. The reviews of the debut had been of the sort usually
described as “mixed.” But after the second concert the _New York Times_
headlined its account with the flat statement, “The Success of Ignace
Jan Paderewski is Assured.”

His success might be assured, but poor Ignace Jan Paderewski himself was
in sad shape as he doggedly returned to the Steinway warehouse to
practice the arm-wrenching Rubinstein Concerto. How long, he wondered,
could he go on at his present pace? No wonder Rubinstein himself had
made only one American tour in his life and had said, when begged to
return, “May Heaven preserve us from such slavery!”

The third concert, a matinee for which he had practiced a total of
seventeen hours, was an unqualified triumph, “the real beginning of my
career in America.” It was not only the critics who were ecstatic. So
was Mr. Tretbar. Three thousand dollars, an unheard-of amount of money
for a single concert, was taken in at the box office. By the end of the
season, Paderewski’s appearance in the same hall would bring in nearly
twice that amount.

Mr. Steinway himself, although pleased by the box office receipts, did
not really care whether he made money out of these concerts. The
Steinway firm had thought of the Paderewski tour as a means of
advertising its pianos. And what an inspiration the idea turned out to
be! In the mind of the public the name “Steinway” became inextricably
linked with the name “Paderewski,” and the latter was about to move into
the household-word category.

Successful as it undoubtedly was, the first American season was full of
trials—some small, one a near tragedy. Mr. Tretbar (who, it should be
recorded, later became Paderewski’s staunch friend and ally) had indeed
had little faith in the success of just one more piano player from
Europe. To Paderewski’s great annoyance he found that his six solo
recitals to be given the week after the three orchestral concerts would
not be played in Carnegie Hall, but in a small recital room in Madison
Square Garden.

“But why?” he asked. “Why? I’ve just filled Carnegie Hall for you! Why
should I play my recitals in a small place?”

Mr. Tretbar shrugged. A solo piano recital would never fill Carnegie
Hall, he said. Besides, it was in the contract that Mr. Paderewski would
play where and when he was told to play, and he was being told to play
in the small hall of Madison Square Garden!

He played three out of six recitals there. When hundreds of would-be
ticket-buyers were turned away, disappointed, from the third one, Mr.
Tretbar had nothing whatever to say. Mr. Steinway himself ordered the
last three recitals moved to Carnegie Hall.

Paderewski’s brilliant concerts shed a special lustre over the new hall
which until then had simply been one of several possible places to
appear in New York City. But soon a new artist’s appearance in Carnegie
Hall came to be regarded as the real sign that he had “arrived.” It was
Paderewski’s successes there that established the trend more than any
other single factor.

Paderewski left New York with the audiences and critics alike solidly
behind him. His New York success was repeated all over the country.
Although he was naturally delighted to play before packed houses, the
economic aspects of the tour were more and more irritating. He was being
paid an average of $375 for each appearance, yet the box office income
was running upwards of $3,000! Far more serious was the frightening
problem that soon began to plague him. As the strenuous weeks wore on,
as solo recitals and orchestral concerts piled up, the strain of playing
so often in public began to produce a violent physical reaction in his
right arm. Before long he found himself playing in almost constant pain.
The actual physical basis of his trouble lay in the action of the
Steinway pianos of that day. As Paderewski said, they were “universally
recognized as the most marvelous instruments in the world.” But they had
an action that he found extremely heavy and tiring. It simply took too
much pressure to move the keys. After much arguing back and forth he
finally persuaded the factory to regulate the action of the seven pianos
he was using for the tour.

The relief was immense and the discomfort in his arm, although still
present, became bearable. Then one dreadful night in Rochester, as he
was playing the opening chords of his recital, he felt an excruciating
pain tear through his right arm. (Afterwards, when it was too late, he
found out what had happened. The piano used in the Rochester concert had
just come back from the factory, where a new and unbriefed workman had
carefully changed the action back to its original stiffness.) Yet
Paderewski stayed on the platform to play the Beethoven “Appassionata”
Sonata, one of the most taxing works in the repertoire. He finished the
program in a state of near collapse, then rushed off to find a doctor,
and to hear the terrifying truth. He had torn some tendons in his right
arm and could no longer move his fourth finger. The doctor said, “The
situation is very grave, and there is nothing that I can do for you.
Nothing but time will help. You must rest.” This was easy advice to
give, but how does a pianist rest when he has concerts ahead of him for
which tickets have been sold? Paderewski did it by rearranging the
fingering in every piece of music on his programs so that he could play
with only four of the fingers on his right hand. This is like asking a
baseball pitcher to fire a curve ball without using his thumb!

It was not the first time that Paderewski had demonstrated the peculiar
iron of his constitution. It was certainly not the last.

At the end of the tour he returned to New York exhausted and
discouraged, but relieved that the gruelling months were over. He was
met by news that both pleased and horrified him. Mr. Steinway, all
smiles, announced that various cities not included in the tour were
besieging the office with requests for Paderewski! “Now Paderewski,” he
said expansively, “you are going to give those extra concerts and we
will pay all expenses—everything. Every cent that is taken in will be
clear gain for you. That will be our small contribution to reward you
for what was, I am sorry to say, badly managed at the beginning of your
tour.”

Generosity of spirit was a factor that meant a great deal to Paderewski,
but although Mr. Steinway’s thoughtfulness touched him, he was aghast at
the thought of playing more concerts. He was also struck by the sobering
thought that since his career had probably been wrecked forever by this
tour, he might as well make the most of it. He gave the concerts and
made more from the extra ones than he had made out of all the others put
together.

Paderewski’s bleak conviction that the American tour might be his last
happily proved to be mistaken. Actually it was only the first of twenty
triumphant tours during which he would play more than fifteen hundred
concerts for more than five million people. Only one other person has
ever equaled his success at the box office—the beloved soprano, Amelita
Galli-Curci. The two artists still stand supreme as the greatest
money-makers in the musical history of America.

During those American tours, Paderewski did much more than make music
and money. He also made friends in high places—firm, devoted friends who
respected him for his great spirit as well as for his fleet fingers. And
he captured the imagination and affection of the American public as no
other artist has ever done.

How to describe Paderewski’s electrifying effect on the public! Many
people have tried. Arthur Loesser, in his fascinating book, MEN, WOMEN
AND PIANOS, does it as well as anyone. He says: “The most flaming
pianistic glory in America’s history broke out when the Steinways first
put forth Ignace Paderewski in the autumn of 1891. He was indeed a
performer of very high ability, an artist of unusual expressive power;
yet that was only one element of his peculiar appeal. His total
personality was just what, in the American idea, a concert pianist’s
ought to be, if one were to marvel at him and respect him at the same
time. His chrysanthemum of pale red hair, the feminine dreaminess and
brooding of his looks coupled with his aggressive, solid muscularity—all
this was strange and might have seemed ridiculous to Philistines. But
the reserve of his bearing, the hypnotic deliberateness and lordly
courtesy of his movements, were the signs of a profound inner dignity
before which a measure of awe could not fail to be felt. He seemed,
verily, the prince of a foreign realm. No pianist has ever captured the
American imagination as he did, keeping his hold over it for thirty
years. He became a legend: his mispronounced name drew farmers from
their barns, schoolboys from their baseball, real estate speculators
from their offices—all manner of unlikely persons from their dens—into a
concert hall to have a look and a listen at him.”

The day would come when Paderewski’s hold over the affection of the
American public would mean more to him—and to his country—than he could
even begin to imagine as he sailed back to Europe at the end of his
first visit to America.



                               CHAPTER 5
                          A PROMISE FULFILLED


                       [Illustration: Quill pen.]

The money he had made in America was important to him for one reason:
Alfred. At last he was able to afford the kind of country holiday he
felt would be best for the boy’s health. Father and son spent a few
wonderful months together in northern France. To his great joy, both his
sister, Antonina, and Edward Kerntopf came from Poland for a visit.
Antonina brought with her the love and blessings of their father, Jan
Paderewski, who was too ill to travel, but the sister could report at
first hand how his great pride in his son had illumined the good man’s
last years.

While Paderewski gave his sore arm a chance to recuperate, he devoted
himself to composing. He began work on an opera called “Manru,” a folk
story of the gypsies who lived in the Tatra Mountains of which he had
such happy memories.

His return to the stage was delayed for over a year, for the injured arm
was not responding well to the treatments of the numerous doctors who
worked on it. The combination of time and a gifted Parisian masseur
finally restored the use of his fourth finger, but it never, he felt,
regained its original strength.

It was the last year off he would have for some time. During the next
decade his spiraling career would carry him at dizzying speed over
thousands of miles on five continents. In America, at least, he quickly
found a way around the tyranny of train schedules and hotel
reservations. He rented his own private Pullman car. In it, together
with his secretary, chef and piano tuner, he traveled all over America.
The Pullman car was the home where he lived, ate, slept, and practiced
during his tours. Although it cost him the equivalent of twenty-five
first class fares, it was well worth it. It was, in fact, the reason why
his tours could include so many out-of-the-way places and why so many
people had a chance to hear him. But the principal advantage to railroad
living was the fact that at last he could practice as loud, as long, and
as late as he wished!

This was the golden age of American railroading. What rare, romantic
moments were added to its history by the roving pianist! All over the
country the same sort of scene repeated itself: a lone Pullman car,
sitting at night on a siding—waiting, perhaps, to be coupled to the next
express train going through Boston, or Chicago, or San Francisco;
railroad workers, and even passing hobos, silently gathered around it
listening to the glorious sounds of music that poured out across the
almost deserted railyard.

Music was not the only thing that came out of that famous car. The hobo
population, with its rapid communication system, soon spread the word
that the Paderewski car was always good for a free meal. When Mr.
Cooper, the magnificent but temperamental chef, finally put his foot
down, Paderewski instructed his secretary to have fifty-cent pieces
ready for the men instead of food.

Not everyone would find it possible to live happily in a Pullman car.
But Paderewski had a happy combination of physical and mental gifts that
made this life seem quite pleasant. He slept without any difficulty,
putting worries aside and falling into a sound sleep as soon as he went
to bed. His bedtime, to be sure, was rather erratic on concert nights.
Whenever he played he worked himself up to such a frenzy of excitement
that it took him hours to “unwind.” But he had two unfailing methods of
relaxation—billiards and bridge. He was fiendishly expert at both.

Paderewski’s generosity—whether to whole audiences or to individuals—was
boundless. Many railroad companies ran special Paderewski excursion
trains from the country into the cities where he was playing. If one of
these trains was delayed by bad weather, Paderewski would simply wait
for its arrival or would add an extra hour of music at the end of the
recital for the benefit of disappointed late-comers.

[Illustration: _Hobos gathered around to listen._]

As for his generosity to individuals—it was the despair of poor
Goerlitz, who tried hard to set some limit to his employer’s
open-handedness in money matters! There was no point at all, Goerlitz
knew, in even trying to reason with him if the people asking his help
were Polish. In such cases, he was hopeless. But the secretary often
wished that he would not be quite so generous about matters that were
strictly business. Like fees! There was that incident in California, for
example....

A young engineering student named Herbert Hoover was working his way
through Stanford University by a variety of methods. First he organized
a laundry pick-up and delivery service. Then, with another student for a
partner, he opened a lecture and concert bureau. The amateur managers
had not done well with their last attraction—a speech by William
Jennings Bryan—and they hoped to recoup with their big spring
attraction, Paderewski. But the concert business is filled with pitfalls
for the unwary, as the young men were about to learn. Paderewski’s fee
was high for those days—$2,000. Therefore the price of the tickets was
high—higher than the residents of San Jose and environs were used to
paying. The managers had also failed to notice that the date selected
for their concert was in Holy Week, which cut down attendance still
further. Their Paderewski concert turned out to be an artistic
triumph—but a financial disaster. When the last word was in from the box
office, the poor impresarios found themselves somewhat short of their
expenses. It was a solemn moment.

The two students held a hasty conference. The first obligation, of
course, was to pay the artist. The local people to whom they owed money
for the rental of the hall, the advertising, the printing, and all the
rest, would probably accept i.o.u.’s until they could find a way to pay
their debts. Fortunately for the two students, word of this leaked out
to Paderewski. He took quite a different view of the situation.

“Add up all the expenses of presenting this concert, down to the last
penny,” he told the young men. “Then subtract it from the box office
receipts. Whatever you have left is enough for me.”

“But Mr. Paderewski—that will leave you $400 short of your fee! Let us
give you a note and pay it back as soon as—”

“No, no, no.” He waved aside the suggestion good-naturedly. “It is
enough. After all, if I did not _earn_ my fee for you, why should you
pay it to me?”

This was the sort of fuzzy remark that nearly drove poor Goerlitz out of
his mind.

“I hope that some day there’ll be something I can do for you!” young
Hoover said, as managers and artist shook hands. But he felt slightly
foolish as soon as he said it. It was unlikely that a poor engineering
student would ever be able to do anything for the most famous concert
artist in the world.

It is possible for a person to be blessed with generosity and yet be a
little short on patience. Since Paderewski had both virtues to an
amazing degree, he gave his time as easily as he gave his money, and of
the two commodities, time is often more valuable. Although it often
bored him to the point of stupefaction, he was unfailingly polite about
hearing young pianists play. A night in Kansas City was typical.
Paderewski had played a tremendous recital before an enormous
audience—nearly seventeen thousand people. After the performance, as he
greeted his friends and admirers backstage, he recognized a lady whom he
knew as a former Leschetizky pupil. Her name was Mrs. White. A
serious-looking boy of about twelve or thirteen was standing with her as
she waited for the crowd to disperse.

After mutual greetings she came straight to the point. “Mr. Paderewski,
this boy is one of my prize pupils. Right now he’s working on the
Minuet. And he’s having some difficulty with the turn.” Paderewski
smiled. Ah the Minuet! The Paderewski Minuet in G! How many youngsters
all over the world were “working” on the Minuet! And most of them were
having trouble with the turn.

Paderewski looked at the boy. “Sit down at the piano, young man!” he
said sternly, his eyes twinkling.

(“He scared me half to death!” the student, glancing back over that
evening from a vantage point of sixty years, would say.)

[Illustration: _Paderewski married Mme. Gorska._]

The boy sat down and played the Minuet. When he got to the problematic
turn, the composer stopped him and gave him careful instructions in the
exact fingering necessary to bring it off properly. When the
master-class was over, he shook hands and wished the lad success in his
musical career. The boy went home in a glow of inspiration and for days
worked at the piano even harder than usual. (He was already in the habit
of getting up at 5 A.M. in order to practice two hours before going to
school.) A few years later, however, the eager young piano student
suddenly decided that piano playing was not for big boys. He gave up his
idea of a career in music and went on to other things, including the
White House. His name was Harry S Truman.

On the night of their meeting, of course, neither Paderewski nor the boy
had any way of knowing that on a night in Kansas City the future
President of Poland had just given a piano lesson to the future
President of the United States.


It was not until the year 1899, with a widespread reputation firmly
established, that Paderewski accepted an invitation to play a series of
concerts in Russia. He had not been back there since the youthful
venture twenty years earlier, from which his father’s dream had so
literally rescued him. On the way to Russia, he played three concerts in
Warsaw, returning to his boyhood home where he was received with every
kind of honor. It was not so when he arrived in Russia. While audiences
everywhere were enthusiastic, Paderewski felt keenly the strong
hostility of the conservatories of both Moscow and St. Petersburg.

The real problem lay in the hatred many Russians held for anything
Polish. As a Pole, Paderewski felt many slights, heard many unfriendly
remarks and even open hissing during his tour. He was not sorry when it
was over.

Soon after his return from Russia, Paderewski married the beautiful Mme.
Gorska with whom he had fallen in love during the years that she had
done her best to act as a mother for Alfred. With his son and his new
wife he settled down for a rest on the beautiful estate, Riond-Bosson,
on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. He had bought the villa so that Alfred
could have the quiet, open-air surroundings prescribed for him.
Paderewski was happier than he had been for years.

Riond-Bosson also gave Mme. Paderewska an opportunity to indulge one of
her favorite hobbies: poultry farming. The chicken houses as well as the
fruit trees of the place became famous.

The grapes of Riond-Bosson were of surpassing sweetness and juiciness.
One of their greatest admirers in later years was Paderewski’s devoted
friend, Achille Ratti, the papal nuncio in Poland. Paderewski always
made it a point to supply him with the first growth of these luscious
grapes. Even when the papal diplomat took up permanent residence in Rome
and could no longer visit at Riond-Bosson, he received his grapes.
Border officials sometimes balked at passing the fruit through the
customs, but what could a mere customs officer do when told that the
grapes were a gift from the beloved Paderewski to his friend, Pope Pius
XI.

And when Paderewski went on tour, his wife was his constant companion,
remaining in the dressing room while he played and doing everything in
her power to shield him from the prickly harassments of concert work.

The great happiness that came to him at his marriage was followed very
shortly by a great but not unexpected sorrow. Paderewski, while playing
in Spain, was called home by the news that Alfred had died. A lifetime
of care, of watchful attention and special treatments had not been able
to save him. At twenty, he was buried in the Cemetery of Montmorency in
Paris, near the tomb of Chopin.

For Paderewski, work had always been the surest antidote for grief. He
now turned all of his energy to the finishing details of his opera,
“Manru,” which was to be produced at the Dresden Opera in May, 1901.
Eight years of work lay behind the premiere of “Manru,” which was
shortly thereafter performed in many of the leading opera houses of
Europe. The following winter the Metropolitan Opera in New York
presented it with an all-star cast and included it in five cities of its
annual tour. While the opera had, generally, a friendly reception, one
critic remarked sourly, “What a pity that Paderewski is now composing,
for he is no more a great pianist.” He stood firmly alone in his
opinion.

Paderewski had been the favorite pianist of Europe and North and South
America long enough for the news of his greatness to spread clear around
the world. In the spring of 1904 he set out on a tour of Australia. On
this trip Paderewski’s baggage problem was complicated beyond memory.
The Paderewski menage was enlarged by the addition of some forty
parrots. Mme. Paderewska had a fondness for all types of birds, and the
talking variety fascinated her.

One of these animals became a special favorite of Paderewski’s. Named
Cockey Roberts, he was, according to his master, “more than a parrot. He
was a real artist in his way.” Paderewski’s particular delight was
Cockey Roberts’ habit of perching on his foot during practice sessions.
“He would sit perfectly still,” Paderewski recalled, “and then from time
to time, he would say in a very loving and scratchy voice, ‘Oh! Lord,
how beautiful!’ It was touching.”

Very few pianists ever retire from public performance, even briefly, at
the height of their careers. Paderewski, however, did so in 1906. From
causes he describes as partly physical and partly psychological, he had
begun to feel a curious but very real aversion to the piano. Not even
the estate in Switzerland, where he could let the sometimes healing
forces of farming work on his nerves, helped much. When, in order to
earn some money, he returned to concerts for a time, he found the
distaste for the piano still strong. Physicians tried their arts on him,
one even resorting to hypnosis. By 1909 Paderewski said, “The easiest
pieces in my repertoire I could not manage. The touch was strange to me.
It was torture.” Perhaps Paderewski’s sudden distaste for his lifelong
routine came about because he was beginning to prepare himself
subconsciously for a new and wholly unexpected career.

In 1910 an event occurred that was both important in itself and of great
significance for the future. 1910 was a year of doubly historic moment
in the history of Poland. It was the centenary of the birth of Chopin.
It was also the 500th anniversary of the Battle of Grünwald, in which a
victorious Polish army had driven out a foreign invader. Paderewski had
never once during the past forty years forgotten that a small boy of ten
had vowed to build a great memorial in honor of that battle for Polish
freedom.

He had commissioned a talented Polish sculptor to design such a
monument, and on the 500th anniversary of the battle it was unveiled and
presented to the city of Cracow. On the base of it were carved these
words:

  “For the glory of our ancestors and the encouragement of our
  brothers.”

As the donor of the new monument, Paderewski made a presentation speech
which was marked with the deepest patriotic fervor. Though he spoke
quietly, the Cracow speech strongly showed Paderewski’s deep knowledge
of political affairs. And at a reception in his honor, after the formal
presentation, the voice of the pianist was heard in a piece of
peculiarly accurate political prophecy:

“Brothers, the hour of our freedom is about to strike. Within five years
a fratricidal war will soak with blood the whole earth. Prepare,
compatriots mine, brother Poles, prepare, because from the ashes of
burned and devastated cities, villages, houses, and from the dust of
this tortured soil will rise the Polish Phoenix.”

It was during these days at Cracow that those in charge of the Chopin
centenary asked Paderewski to be present at Lwow for the ceremonies
there. At that time, also, his symphony was to be heard for the first
time in the country whose story is enclosed in its measures. For the
symphony’s first movement is entitled “_In Memoriam_.” Its second, a
song of hope, is called “_Sursum Corda_,” and the finale is a symphonic
poem based on heroic Polish melodies. At Lwow, the composer and the
orator spoke with equal eloquence.

Paderewski’s voice rang with determined courage as he recalled Poland’s
glorious history, even under long oppression. His words closed with a
promise of triumph as powerful as the final pages of the symphony, as he
said, “Let us brace our hearts to fresh endurance, let us adjust our
minds to action, energetic, righteous; let us uplift our consciousness
by faith invisible; for the nation cannot perish which has a soul so
great and immortal.

“Let the oppressor hear, I do not fear him!”

Small wonder that the Russian police, when the symphony was played in
Warsaw the following year, forbade the printing of any program notes
referring to the significance of its themes. But by that time every Pole
had heard Paderewski’s words and knew the meaning of his music.



                               CHAPTER 6
                           “THEY WILL LISTEN”


                        [Illustration: Statue.]

All summer long the lovely town of Morges had its share of the Swiss
tourist business, but no date in the year meant more to the hotel
keepers, bakers, florists and other local businessmen than July 31. It
was the happiest town holiday of the year. July 31 is the feast of the
great St. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus. It was,
therefore, Ignace Paderewski’s feast day. Paderewski had a great
devotion to his noble patron, and St. Ignatius’ day was the occasion on
which friends from all over the world gathered at Riond-Bosson to
celebrate with him.

As the years passed, the Paderewski feast day parties became famous as
the most brilliant gatherings in Europe, for among the guests were the
world’s most talented and witty people. Great care was expended on these
festive occasions not only on the refreshments, which were superb, but
on the entertainment, which was unique!

The celebration of July 31, 1914, was as lovingly and carefully planned
as all the others, but a cloud of apprehension hung over the day. One
month had passed since the assassination of the Austrian Archduke, Franz
Ferdinand. This act of violence had triggered the chain of events that
would lead to the catastrophe of world war. An uneasy peace was still in
effect, but no one could guess how long it would last. After Mass, the
day, usually devoted exclusively to fun, was punctuated by closed-door
conferences with military and diplomatic leaders.

But when the time came for the evening’s festivities, everyone tried to
relax and forget the troubles of the world, if only for a few hours. The
dinner was one of Antonina’s and the chef’s greatest triumphs. The
decorations—this year everything was ultra-Chinese—were a delight. The
dancing was especially amusing because of the newly-imported American
ragtime. The “ragging” music was provided by eight hands on two pianos.
The hands belonged to Olga Samaroff, Josef Hofman, Ernest Schelling, and
Rudolf Ganz. As for the entertainment! Schelling, who was Paderewski’s
favorite pupil, was its mastermind. At midnight he summoned the guests
to the drawing room, where chairs had been set up for the performance.
Tonight, the guests were told, they were in for an unprecedented treat—a
world premiere! They were to hear the first performance of “a symphony
by Schoenberg!” Arnold Schoenberg was the leading composer of a type of
new music that was understood by very few people, and Paderewski was
known to turn a particularly deaf ear in its direction. Hence the
delighted laughter and applause when the audience heard that a
“Schoenberg Symphony” had mysteriously turned up in manuscript at
Riond-Bosson. Paderewski, for whom the entertainment was always a
jealously guarded surprise, threw up his hands in mock horror.

[Illustration: _Riond-Bosson_]

To perform the new “symphony,” Schelling and his fellow members of the
“orchestra” had raided the kitchen and the rest of the estate for every
noise-making instrument they could lay hands on: pots and pans, cups and
saucers, eggbeaters and typewriters, hoses and horseshoes. With
Schelling’s frenzied conducting to urge them on, the musicians turned in
a truly superb performance. At the climax of the work, pots, pans,
dishes, garden tools, everything went hurtling into a large rain barrel,
with a crash that could probably be heard across Lake Geneva. Overcome
by the beauty of it all, the exhausted conductor himself plunged head
first into the barrel.

As the last echo of golden sound died away, as the audience gathered its
collective breath to unleash a chorus of “bravo’s,” the telephone rang.

The telephone had been ringing all day, bringing greetings from missing
friends. Why, then, was there so ominous a quality in the sound of it
now? Paderewski was summoned by the butler and disappeared up the short
flight of steps that led from the drawing room. A few minutes later he
appeared at the top step and looked down at the guests who were now
conversing in tense whispers.

“My friends,” he said quietly, “the war is here.”


The war had come, as inevitably it would. The cost of the next four
years in human life and human misery was something so dreadful that few
people could even begin to imagine it. How ironic, thought Paderewski,
that in the cataclysm of war would be found the means of freeing Poland
from a century and a half of bondage. “We have known it would come,” he
told the men who gathered in his study at dawn on August 1, “yet we are
not prepared. The gigantic armies of Germany and Russia will clash on
this helpless body!” He pointed a finger at the map of Poland that lay
on the table before him. “But while Poland’s jailers attack each other,
their captive will escape!”

Yet he shuddered at the thought of what would happen to his country in
the immediate future. The geographical location of Poland made it an
absolute certainty that the full impact of war would fall upon the
defenseless country. The armies of Poland’s three masters would ravage
the land and strip it bare.

Politically, too, the situation immediately became dangerous so far as
Poland’s future was concerned. Within two weeks after the beginning of
the war, the Czar of Russia issued a proclamation offering freedom and
love to his beloved Poles! “The time has come when the dream of your
fathers and forefathers will at length be realized!... Under the
[Russian] sceptre Poland will come together, free in faith, in language,
and in self-government!... With open heart, with hand fraternally
outstretched, great Russia comes to you!”

Paderewski and his fellow-Poles could hardly keep from laughing a very
bitter laugh indeed at this sudden change of heart on the part of
Russia, for Russia had until then emphatically denied that there was
such a country as Poland. It couldn’t be, could it, that the Russians
were hoping to line up Polish support against Germany and Austria, by
dangling the hope of freedom before the Poles? The worst of this hollow
offer was the fact that Russia was one of the allies of England and
France. When the question of a free Poland finally came up, might the
allies not be unwilling to act against one of themselves? Might they not
say, “The question of Polish freedom is settled. Russia will take care
of it!”

These problems and hundreds of others were all on Paderewski’s mind
during the next hectic weeks at Riond-Bosson, as he contemplated his
country’s future—and his own. Paderewski had already made himself a
career rich enough and rewarding enough to fill the life of any one man.
Now he was standing on the brink of a second career—a greater one, he
believed. “My country before everything else,” he had said so many
times. “After that—art!”

The group at Riond-Bosson realized that the first thing they had to do
was to organize a relief committee for the Polish victims of war. They
asked the great Polish writer, Henry Sienkiewicz, author of _Quo Vadis_,
to manage its affairs in Switzerland. The Paderewskis themselves then
prepared to leave their home and go to Paris and London. Antonina was
left in charge of Riond-Bosson, which overnight had become a refugee
shelter.

In Paris, Paderewski conferred with his countryman, Roman Dmowski, who
was attempting to organize some sort of national committee to represent
Poland before the other nations of the world.

In London he renewed old acquaintances, social and political. A peppery
little Welshman named Lloyd George was Prime Minister. He thought the
idea of a free, restored Poland one of the most ridiculous ideas he had
ever heard. Others did not. Paderewski’s friends from happier days now
rallied around him to help with Polish relief work, even though England
herself was beginning to feel the economic hardships of war. A Polish
Relief Committee was formed and within four months had raised a quarter
of a million dollars for relief. At its head was Miss Laurence
Alma-Tadema, who had admired Paderewski since the long past day when she
had first seen him posing for his portrait in her father’s studio.

With affairs in Switzerland, Paris, and London under control, Paderewski
was now free to turn his face towards the country that he firmly
believed held the key to Poland’s future. In January of 1915, he sailed
for America.


When Paderewski returned to the United States in January of 1915 he had
two missions to accomplish. The first was to raise money to feed the
starving people of Poland. No one thought there was anything odd about
the world-famous pianist devoting himself to the cause of his suffering
countrymen. It was the sort of thing one expected of artists.

The second part of his task was much more complex. The war was only six
months old. No one knew how long it would last, but some day it would be
over. That much, at least, was certain. And when that day came,
statesmen from all over the world would sit down in conference to draw
the new boundary lines of Europe. If the dream of a free Poland were
ever to become a reality, it would be then. But who among these
statesmen knew or cared anything about the fate of a country that
geographically had ceased to exist one hundred years ago? At the moment
they had other things on their minds—such as winning a war. And in
neutral America, the chief concern of responsible statesmen was the
question of staying out of the war.

In Washington, D.C., Robert Lansing, the United States Secretary of
State, and therefore the most important man in the field of foreign
policy, was surprised one day when his secretary told him that the
pianist Paderewski had asked for an appointment. He was even more
surprised when the famous man arrived in his office and began to talk,
eloquently he admitted, about the ideal of a united and independent
Poland.

Secretary Lansing was a true diplomat. Although the question of
reuniting the former country of Poland was about the last thing in the
world he had time to discuss, he listened courteously. His thoughts were
all negative. “This man is way out of his depth. He’s a sentimental
idealist. What does he know about the cold, cut-throat facts of
international politics? He’s trying to do something that’s impossible.”

As gently as he could, Lansing asked a few pointed questions. Whom did
Paderewski represent? The Polish government? There was no Polish
government. The Polish people? But which ones? The German-Poles? The
Austrian-Poles? The Russian-Poles? There was no such thing as a unified
Polish people whose ideas the statesmen of the world would respect
because of sheer force of numbers. As for the Poles in America, Lansing
pointed out, they were more hopelessly divided than the Poles who
actually lived in the divided country! Paderewski was only too well
aware of this fact. He had often smiled over the old joke that says,
“Put two Poles on a sofa and you have a new political party!”

In the United States several Polish relief committees were already in
existence. Naturally each group was trying its best to snare the famous
pianist for its own ranks. The minute his ship had landed, he had been
besieged by their representatives. He had walked by the hour with them
in Central Park, listening to each man’s arguments in favor of his own
point of view. He had committed himself to none of them.

The man who could actually bring off the task of unifying the American
Poles would have to be a political genius, not a musical genius, Lansing
thought. As he studied the flying hair and romantically flowing tie of
his visitor, he decided that this was decidedly not the man to do it.

During the next few weeks Paderewski became accustomed to the faint
smile with which government officials greeted him. He knew so well what
they were thinking. “What does a pianist know about international
affairs?”

As Paderewski prepared to cross the country and begin his tour, he felt
discouraged but not despondent. The men he had seen in Washington were
important men, but they were not the ones who would really count in the
end. There was a man—exactly the right man—whose support he needed, the
“providential man” for whom he prayed and waited. But he knew that God
would send him when it was time.


The city of San Francisco was holding a great exposition. The committee
had asked Paderewski to play a concert for the occasion, since he had
always been San Francisco’s favorite artist. When he replied that he was
in the country to speak for Polish relief, not to play concerts, they
willingly changed their offer. He could talk, he could play, he could do
anything he liked. They in turn would guarantee him an audience of
thousands who would be glad to hear whatever he had to say. It was a
fine way to begin his career as a speaker, Paderewski thought. But as
the day and finally the hour itself approached, he grew more and more
nervous.

“What makes me think I can persuade an audience?” he asked his wife. “By
playing—perhaps. But by speaking! And in English! How do I know they
will even listen to me?”

Madame Paderewska’s eyes did not stray an inch from the sock she was
knitting. She smiled patiently and said for the tenth time that day,
“They will listen.”

As Paderewski walked toward the stage of the enormous auditorium that
night, he longed for the blissful assurance he had once had of knowing
exactly how every note was going to sound. He stepped out from the
wings—and then stopped in his tracks at the breath-taking sight that
greeted him.

The stage was bare except for the piano. Hanging behind the piano was an
enormous flag that had been made only a day before. It covered the huge
back wall of the building from one side to the other, and from ceiling
to floor. A triumphant white eagle on a blood-red field! The flag of
Poland!

Paderewski’s nervousness vanished. He felt a great surge of confidence
both for the present moment and for the future. The audience was
cheering wildly, but as he walked to the front of the stage and bowed, a
deep silence settled over the hall.

He said, “I have to speak to you about a country which is not yours, in
a language which is not mine.”

[Illustration: _The flag of Poland!_]

It was the first of over three hundred speeches. It was the opening of a
journey that would carry him to every state in the country. He would
travel thousands of miles to speak thousands of words. And with the
unerring instinct of an artist, he had begun with a phrase that sent an
electric shock through that first audience and every future audience
that heard it.

“_A country which is not yours_—” Yet as Paderewski traveled from city
to city, from platform to platform, more and more Americans began to
sense a kinship with the country that did not even appear on the map.
For the first time the bitter irony of the Polish situation became clear
to them. Here was a country that had lost its freedom four years before
America’s had been declared. Yet Poland had been one of the first
nations in the world to advance the beliefs on which America had been
founded. “Already in the fifteenth century a self-governing country,
Poland became, in 1573, a regular republic, with kings elected. In 1430,
consequently 259 years before the habeas corpus of England ... Poland
established her famous law ‘No man shall be detained unless legally
convicted.’ Our broad, liberal Constitution of 1791 preceded by 57 years
the Constitution of Germany and Austria, and by 114 years the so-called
Constitution of Russia. And all these momentous reforms ... were
accomplished without revolution, without any bloodshed, without the loss
of one single human life. Does it prove our dissensions? Does it prove
our anarchy? Does it prove our inability to govern ourselves?”

“_In a language which is not mine_—” Yet somehow he had made it his.
Audiences that had loved Paderewski the pianist now realized that he was
equally great as an orator, although he spoke simply and without
dramatic gestures.

When he finished speaking, he would turn to the piano and continue his
plea for Poland in still another language. He would play the music of
Chopin, and when the listeners finally left the hall, they knew that
they had lived through a unique emotional experience.

It was no wonder that money for Polish relief began to pour in. Few
people who heard Paderewski say “Give me seed for this trampled, wasted
land, bread for these starving!” could resist the appeal. Generous
America took the forgotten Polish people to its heart. By presidential
decree a special “Polish Day” was established, because in the eyes of
America “Poland” had become synonymous with “Paderewski,” the beloved
artist who had so enriched the golden era of peace.

Although the first half of his mission had flourished beyond his
greatest hopes, Paderewski felt that so far he had done very little
about the second half. He had talked to plenty of government officials
and diplomats, but they had little to offer beyond polite interest. Not
until he had been in the United States for a year was he able to take
the first sizable step. As he had known it must, it came through the
intervention of one man, a man who was neither government official nor
diplomat. He was the man to whom Paderewski would write, “It has been
the dream of my life to find a providential man for my country. I am now
sure that I have not been dreaming vain dreams.”



                               CHAPTER 7
                          THE PROVIDENTIAL MAN


                [Illustration: Coat of arms with Eagle.]

Colonel Edward Mandell House, who had never accepted a political office,
was more powerful than any man in Washington. He was the confidential
adviser of President Woodrow Wilson. “His thoughts and mine are one,”
Wilson said of House, whom he regarded as the most unselfish, patriotic
man he knew. No one in the country had a greater understanding of
European affairs than House. “A super-civilized person,” the French
statesman, Clemenceau, said of him, “escaped from the wilds of Texas,
who sees everything, who understands everything ... a sifting, pondering
mind.”

From the day he had left England, Paderewski had known that he could not
succeed unless he somehow got to House and convinced him of the justice
in Polish claims. But Paderewski was not the only foreigner in the
country who wanted something from the Colonel. House was under constant
siege by representatives of small countries who were hoping to gain
something by the peace settlement. Since America was still neutral,
House had to be careful in dealing with these men or even in seeing
them. This is why Paderewski proceeded cautiously in his opening moves
toward the Colonel. The fact that House’s apartment was a three minute
walk from Paderewski’s hotel was an added source of frustration. So
short a distance separated him from the man who could do so much for
him!

Then one day early in 1916, his prayers were suddenly answered.
Paderewski’s discreet diplomacy had born fruit in a typical way. A
Paderewski friend had wangled a letter of introduction from an Assistant
Secretary of Agriculture to Mr. Robert Wooley, director of the U.S.
Mint. Mr. Wooley was known to be a close friend of Colonel House. One
day he sent word from Washington that he would be in New York in two
days and would try to arrange a meeting between Paderewski and the
Colonel. Paderewski was learning his new role in a practical way. As
many a diplomat had done before and after him, he had gained his
objective through a friend of a friend of a friend of the man he wanted
to meet.

Mr. Wooley had sternly cautioned Paderewski against over-optimism. So
his heart sank when he was greeted at the door by a radiant Madame
Paderewska. “You are going to save Poland!” she cried, her beautiful
eyes filled with tears. “I know it!” And as the two men walked the few
blocks to House’s East Fifty-third Street brownstone home, the practical
man of business wondered even more at the Polish pianist’s calm and
complete faith in the events of the next few minutes. Well, perhaps he
was right, but Wooley was inclined to doubt it.

Colonel House had marked half an hour off his tight schedule for his
interview with Paderewski, so the two men did not waste time on small
talk. Paderewski had been waiting a long time for this moment. He was
ready for it. Pacing up and down the Colonel’s library, he began to tell
his story. Point by point he built his arguments for Poland, with a
mixture of logic and eloquence that an experienced lawyer might have
envied.

The half hour flew by. Nervously Mr. Wooley looked at his watch and then
glanced at the Colonel. “Let him go on,” House muttered. “Don’t
interrupt him.”

An hour passed and then another hour. Whatever Colonel House’s later
appointments were, they were cancelled. Never in his career of listening
to people who wanted something had he heard a man plead his cause so
irresistibly.

When he had made his last point, Paderewski stopped and waited for the
Colonel to speak. House’s part in the two hour conversation was limited
to three sentences, but they were the most beautiful words Paderewski
had ever heard. “You have convinced me,” he said, rising and holding out
his hand. “I promise you to help Poland if I can. And I believe I can.”

It was the beginning of a profound friendship between the two men, one
so eloquent, and one so silent. And with the Colonel completely won over
to his side, the door to the White House stood open to Paderewski at
last. By the summer of 1916 House felt that the time had come to
introduce the pianist to President Wilson. He arranged to have the
Paderewskis invited to a diplomatic dinner at the White House.

Woodrow Wilson was a scholar and a statesman. He had been a college
president before he went into politics. Such a man, Paderewski believed,
would understand the justice of his cause.

There was great excitement after dinner that night when guests saw the
piano in the East Room being opened. Was Paderewski really going to
play? He was, they were told, since the President had asked him to do
so.

Although President Wilson did not know a great deal about music, it did
not take any special knowledge to get the message that the Polish artist
was trying to convey by means of Chopin’s music. Paderewski and Chopin
had become partners in this enterprise, and never had the two worked
together so eloquently. As Wilson and Paderewski talked briefly together
after the performance, the pianist felt that he had won his country
another powerful ally.

[Illustration: _Woodrow Wilson had won an ally._]

It worked both ways. Wilson, too, had won an ally. 1916 was an election
year. Paderewski campaigned actively for Wilson’s reelection all during
the fall. Many Polish voters, following the lead of the Polish clergy,
were Republicans. Paderewski convinced them that their country’s first
real hope in a hundred years depended on a victory for Wilson. In the
end he delivered the large Polish vote almost one hundred percent.

On the day before elections, when the campaigner had expected to relax a
little, came shattering news from Europe. Germany had issued a
proclamation declaring that Poland was a free and independent nation.
The freedom and independence, of course, were the affectionate gift of
the German government. The story behind the “gift” was actually a simple
one. Germany had previously shown no sign of any such good will to the
Polish people. Far from it. As soon as the Russians had been driven out,
the German and Austrian leaders had gathered over a map of Poland and
had once more divided it up, this time in a two-way split—one half for
Germany, one half for Austria. Now suddenly they were declaring the
country reunited and free! Why?

Paderewski knew why. It was not Polish freedom the German leaders
wanted. It was Polish manpower. They were convinced that if they
presented Poland with independence, a million Polish volunteers would
gratefully flock to enlist in the German army and could be used to fight
the Russians in the East. The other reason for the move was a more
subtle danger. If the Poles appeared to accept the offer and consented
to be taken under the loving wing of Germany, then America and the
Allies would lose interest in the cause of Polish freedom. Poland
herself would be regarded as a friend of the enemy.

Paderewski saw through the trick easily. “This means only more suffering
for my people,” he told House. “It means that another army will be
raised and that there will be more killing and more devastation!” He
realized that everything he had won during the past few years was in
danger of being destroyed in one day. Unless he acted quickly. But what
could he do? Never before had he felt so cruelly his lack of real
authority. If only he were the official spokesman for some truly
representative Polish groups, so that when he spoke a firm majority of
Poles spoke with him.

There was only one thing to be said for the fact that he had everything
to lose: he could afford to take a desperate gamble. Cable lines buzzed
between New York and Paris, Paris and Chicago, Chicago and New York.
Within a few hours a statement was issued and flashed to every Allied
country. The German offer was rejected, flatly and permanently. The
message was signed by Paderewski and was approved by the Paris Committee
and by several groups in the United States.

But what about the rest of his countrymen, Paderewski wondered. What
about the millions of poor Poles who were not trained thinkers, who
might not see the worm in the shining German apple? Would they support
him, or would they demand the right to seize their freedom no matter who
offered it to them?

He soon had his answer. Every Polish society in the country immediately
voted to make Paderewski its official representative. They gave him full
power of attorney to make decisions and to act for them in all political
matters. From then on, when he spoke he was speaking with the voice of
three million Polish-Americans.

Of everything that Paderewski had done, this was the coup that really
made its mark on official Washington. “The first direct evidence of his
capacity as a leader which impressed me,” wrote an observer, “was his
successful efforts to unite the jealous and bickering Polish factions in
the United States.... I am convinced that Mr. Paderewski was the only
Pole who could have overcome this menace.... His entire freedom from
personal ambition made him the one man about whom the Poles, regardless
of factions, appeared to be willing to rally. It was a great
achievement, a triumph of personality.”

The man who wrote this was Robert Lansing, the Secretary of State who
had once smiled when an eccentric piano player had tried to talk to him
about Poland.

The exhausting events of November 5 and 6 should have provided quite
enough excitement and tension for any two days in a man’s life. But they
were only one part of the affairs that occupied him during those
forty-eight hours. November 6, remember, was election day!

Woodrow Wilson had gone to Shadow Lawn, his summer house on the New
Jersey shore, to wait for the election returns in comparative peace. It
was a trying day for him, following a hard, bitter campaign. It was a
day on which he chose his visitors with care. One of them was
Paderewski.

In the quiet study at Shadow Lawn the two men talked for nearly an hour.
Wilson spoke of his idealist’s dreams of world peace and mutual trust
between nations. He listened attentively while Paderewski, in turn,
described his hopes for his own country. The President asked searching,
practical questions. How could Poland survive without an outlet to the
sea? Paderewski and House had often discussed this point over a map of
Europe. He explained their ideas to the President. When the interview
was over, Wilson said solemnly, “My dear Paderewski, I can tell you that
Poland will be resurrected and will exist again!”

Paderewski went home exhausted but intensely happy. It had been quite a
pair of days! He longed to go to bed, but the election returns were
coming in faster and faster now and he could not settle down for the
night until he knew for certain that everything was going as expected.
He heard the then familiar—and now extinct—cry for which all America had
once waited. “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” But the rest of the
newsboy’s cry was a catastrophe. “Wilson defeated! Hughes elected!”

Wilson defeated? Wilson who had just promised him his country’s freedom?
For two years he had worked inch by inch in the direction of the words
he had heard only a few hours before. And now it meant nothing.

It was a cruel night, unnecessarily cruel as it turned out. By five the
next morning the newspapers were out with a somewhat different story.
Wilson had not been defeated. The Extra-hungry papers had simply
neglected to wait for the California votes to be counted!

“I can tell you that Poland will be resurrected and will exist again,”
Wilson had said. And the promise was still good.



                               CHAPTER 8
                          THE THIRTEENTH POINT


                       [Illustration: Quill pen.]

Paderewski was playing a war relief benefit the next afternoon. He had
played so little except his Chopin since his return to the United States
that he was preparing for the much-heralded Carnegie Hall recital with
even greater care than usual. It was Monday, January 8, 1917.

While he was practicing, a message came from down the street that
Colonel House would like to see him. Very little else would have taken
him away from the piano at that moment, but he was soon in the Colonel’s
study.

Colonel House came quickly to the point, as usual. “Next Thursday I am
going to leave for Washington, and I wish to have with me your
memorandum on Poland.”

What the Colonel meant was this: he had decided that the time had come
to present President Wilson with a full-scale study of the Polish
situation. What he needed from Paderewski was a memorandum telling
exactly what he wanted for his country and how he thought it should be
accomplished. It was the sort of document that half a dozen trained
diplomats might work over for three weeks!

Paderewski felt as though a large mallet had just thumped him on the
head. “Thursday! But I have my recital tomorrow! And besides, it is
impossible to prepare such a document without the necessary data, and
besides—”

“I must have that memorandum by Thursday morning!”

Paderewski had by this time learned one thing about the Colonel. He
might be a man of few words, but he meant every one of them.

He walked back to his hotel slowly. At all costs, he told himself, he
must keep his wits about him and not panic. During World War II there
was a Seabee slogan that would have appealed to Paderewski, had he heard
it. “The difficult we do immediately. The impossible takes a little
longer.” He himself operated along these lines. This job was impossible.
It would take a while. He went up to his rooms and began practicing for
four hours.

The program of that Tuesday afternoon recital included the Beethoven C
minor piano sonata, Op. 111. This is one of the most taxing of all the
sonatas in the kind of intellectual demands it makes on the performer.
In addition to the Beethoven he played the Schumann “Butterflies,” one
of his favorite recital pieces, and his own piano sonata Op. 21. Shorter
works by Chopin, Liszt, Mendelssohn and his composer-friend Stojowski
completed the program. And as usual in a Paderewski recital, the encores
he played so generously were almost as extensive as the printed program.

Next morning the critics were enthusiastic about the pianist’s “bravura
performance.” They spoke of the wild delight of the audience which
agreed to go home only after the lights in the hall had been turned off.
It was, in other words, “a typical Paderewski recital audience,” wrote
the man from the _Tribune_. In it were “men and women of society,
musicians, and many young persons, even boys and girls who will grow up
to tell their juniors about the time ‘when I heard Paderewski.’”

Yet neither the critic nor the boys and girls knew what a fantastic
scene they had just witnessed: Paderewski locked in absolute
concentration on Beethoven and Schumann and the others, while the fate
of his country waited silently for him on his desk.

When the recital was finally over—and he did not deprive the audience of
so much as one bow—he went home and ate dinner. Then he went to work on
the memorandum. Thirty-six hours later—at eight A.M. on Thursday
morning—it was delivered to Colonel House. Paderewski went to bed for
the first time since Monday night.

His fatigue seemed well worth it a week later when the Colonel came back
from Washington. “The President was very much pleased with your
memorandum,” he said. “Now get ready. The first shot will be fired very
soon!”

On January 22 President Wilson addressed Congress on “Essential Terms of
Peace in Europe.” Paderewski, who was touring in the South at the time,
picked up a newspaper the next day and read these words: “No peace can
last or ought to last which does not recognize and accept the principle
that governments derive all their just powers from the consent of the
governed, and that no right anywhere exists to hand people about from
sovereignty to sovereignty as if they were property. I take it for
granted ... that statesmen everywhere are agreed that there should be a
united, independent, and autonomous Poland, and that henceforth
inviolable security of life and worship ... should be guaranteed to all
people who have lived hitherto under the power of governments devoted to
a faith and purpose hostile to their own.”

The words swam before his eyes. For the first time, the fate of Poland
had been publicly mentioned as an official concern of the United States
government.

On April 2, 1917, President Wilson came to an anguished but inevitable
decision. He called upon the Congress to declare war against Germany.
Full mobilization of the country’s manpower was immediately begun. Two
days later, Paderewski, addressing the “Union of Polish Falcons,” the
most important Polish-American group, called for the formation of a
separate Polish army, to fight side by side with the Allies. An
independent Polish army, he felt, would prove to the world as nothing
else could that there was truly a Polish nation waiting for its moment
of rebirth. After almost insurmountable difficulties, he finally won his
point, and the governments of France and the United States allowed him
to go ahead with his plans for the formation of the army. Two training
camps for Polish volunteers were founded, and soon twenty-two thousand
Polish-Americans had enlisted in “the Army of Kosciuszko.” For help in
transporting so large a number of men to Europe, Paderewski turned to
the Secretary of the Navy, Josephus Daniels. He, in turn, knew just the
man to assign to the Paderewski case—a young Assistant Secretary named
Franklin Delano Roosevelt whose admiration for the pianist dated from
childhood. With Roosevelt’s enthusiastic, red-tape-cutting aid,
Paderewski’s volunteers were quickly sent to Europe. There they joined
with the European Poles to form an army numbering nearly one hundred
thousand men, fighting under the banner of the white eagle.

Statesmen who had once believed that Poles could never be united were
now confronted by the fact of a hundred thousand men joined by a common
oath. “I swear before Almighty God, One in Three, to be faithful to my
country Poland, one and indivisible, and to be ready to give my life for
the holy cause of its unification and liberation. I swear to defend my
flag to the last drop of my blood, to observe military discipline, to
obey my leaders, and by my conduct to maintain the honor of a Polish
soldier.”

The Polish army paid tribute to Paderewski in a superb and moving way.
His name was inscribed on the membership list of each company. Every day
at roll call, when the name “Ignace Jan Paderewski” was read, one
hundred thousand voices shouted back, “Present!” This honor had been
paid to a soldier only once before in history—to Napoleon. It had never
before been paid to a civilian.

And then at last came the day on which the unselfish labors of the last
three years bore glorious fruit. On January 8, 1918, as the war entered
its last phase, President Wilson spoke to Congress on the peace that lay
ahead. He offered a fourteen point program for what he hoped could be a
just and permanent settlement of the world’s disputes. The thirteenth of
these points was this: “An independent Polish state should be erected
which should include the territories inhabited by indisputably Polish
populations, which should be assured a free and secure access to the
sea, and whose political and economic independence and territorial
integrity should be guaranteed by international covenant.”

As Paderewski read the electric words, he realized that they were taken
almost verbatim from the memorandum he had written for Colonel House
after his Carnegie Hall recital exactly one year before. Paderewski’s
work in America had been crowned with a success that not even he, full
of faith as he was, could have imagined.

In Poland, news of the thirteenth point brought life-saving hope to the
hearts of the beleaguered Polish people. On an entirely different level
an earlier incident had already kindled a new flame of courage in the
hearts of the people of Warsaw. It had happened during the final rout of
Russian troops by an advancing German army. To gain time for their
retreat, the Russians blew up the Poniatowski Bridge that spanned the
river Vistula in the very heart of the city. The devastating roar of
dynamite smashed windows and shook buildings for miles around. Even the
solid Zamek shuddered to its foundation stones. The blast almost
uprooted the statues in Palace Square. As the powerful vibrations ripped
past him, King Sigismund tottered but stood firm. Yet even in their
fright the people who ran through the square seeking shelter could not
fail to understand his message. Soon the magical words were flying
through the city. “_Sigismund has shaken his sword!_”

[Illustration: _The warship sped toward Danzig._]

At last the signing of the Armistice on November 11, 1918, brought the
long horror to an end: Paderewski’s work in the United States was over,
the greatest tour in his career a complete success. The next step in his
mission would have to be carried out in Paris, where the statesmen of
the world would soon gather to write treaties and to rearrange the
border-lines of Europe.


In Arthur Balfour, the British Foreign Secretary, Paderewski had a
powerful friend. The experienced statesman now gave him some strong
advice. It was essential, as Paderewski knew better than anyone else,
that Poland be represented at the Conference table. But the Allies would
never recognize a Polish government unless they felt that it truly
represented all factions in Poland. At the moment most Allied leaders
leaned toward Dmowski’s Polish Committee in Paris. But others were
asking, “What about Pilsudski?”

What, indeed, about Pilsudski! A hundred times a day the name drifted
across Paderewski’s mind like an ominous shadow.

Józef Pilsudski, the soldier-hero of Poland, had fought his country’s
enemies for years on home ground. He had escaped from both Russian and
German prison camps to organize a Polish army and a Polish underground.
At the end of the war he had marched triumphantly into Warsaw and been
acclaimed Chief of State. The government he had organized was strongly
socialist, almost communist in character. It represented the left-wing
factions in Poland, just as Dmowski’s Polish National Committee
represented the right-wing factions. Naturally the peace negotiators
would not do business with both groups.

“Someone,” Balfour said, “must unite these factions. Someone must go
into Poland and persuade Pilsudski to cooperate with Dmowski to form a
government that is truly representative of all Poles.” Obviously there
was only one man in the world who had any hope at all of accomplishing
such an assignment.

On Christmas Day the British warship that had carried the Paderewskis
safely through the treacherous mine-infested waters of the North Sea
dropped anchor in Danzig, Poland’s ancient seaport.

Danzig was in German territory and the Germans were not in the least
enthusiastic about welcoming the man who was trying as hard as he could
to relieve them of their share of Polish land. In the city of Poznań to
which Paderewski proceeded from Danzig, a procession of school children
carrying Polish flags was fired on by sniping Prussian soldiers. The
windows of Paderewski’s hotel room were shattered by flying bullets,
while he himself calmly tied his necktie. Street-fighting between Poles
and Prussians immediately broke out and lasted for three days. “There is
no doubt,” Paderewski wrote to Colonel House, “that the whole affair was
organized by the Germans in order to create new difficulties for the
Peace Conference.”

But no amount of threats and terrorism could stop the people of Poland
from lining the railroad tracks between Poznań and Warsaw to cheer and
shout and weep tears of joy while they waited in the snow to catch a
glimpse of the man whose name had shone like a beacon of hope for four
devastating years.

Paderewski reached Warsaw on New Year’s Eve. The ovation that he
received from the jubilant city was heart-warming, but it was not really
significant. Tens of thousands of people in Warsaw might be parading the
streets in his honor; but the success or failure of his mission depended
on one man alone. On the first day of the hopeful New Year, Paderewski
presented himself at the Belvedere Palace for his first meeting with
Marshal Józef Pilsudski.



                               CHAPTER 9
                          REBIRTH OF A NATION


                        [Illustration: Statue.]

If a modern “electronic brain” were fed data about every statesman of
the twentieth century and then asked to pick out the two men most
completely opposite and uncongenial, it would without a moment’s
hesitation settle on Józef Pilsudski and Ignace Jan Paderewski. Even
before their meeting each man had a fairly good idea of what the other
man was like. Now for the first time they could size each other up in
person.

Pilsudski, eying Paderewski’s elegant clothes and quietly assured
manner, recalled that this man was the darling of a capitalistic society
in whose image he would try to rebuild Poland. Paderewski, noting the
Marshal’s rough, purposely shabby uniform, drooping mustaches, and
abrupt, nervous behavior, remembered that this bold revolutionary had
spent most of his adult life in prison, or in hiding, or in working
under cover, always in the shadows of conspiracy. He was the sort of man
who would stop at nothing, including murder, to gain his objective
because he firmly believed that if the end was good, then the means were
unimportant. Yet there was one point of agreement between them,
Paderewski reflected, and surely it was a strong enough basis for
cooperation. Each man, in his own way, loved his country and would
gladly have given his life for her.

By the end of the exhausting interview Paderewski had come to the
conclusion that this was not enough. Pilsudski remained absolutely
unshaken in his refusal to have anything to do with Dmowski’s Committee.
Poland, he believed, belonged to the proletariat—the working man—alone.
He would not admit that any other class of people had any right to be
represented in the new government. As to the question of Allied
recognition, he simply brushed it aside. He could take care of Poland
all by himself, he seemed to imply.

It was a frustrating two hours.

The next day Paderewski left for Cracow, convinced that his mission had
failed. But at three o’clock on the morning after his arrival, he was
roused from sleep by a special messenger from Pilsudski. The Marshal, he
was informed, requested his immediate return to Warsaw for further
negotiations.

What could have happened, Paderewski thought, to change Pilsudski’s mind
even to this small extent?

What had happened was this: on January 4, representatives of the
American Relief Administration had arrived in Warsaw to study conditions
and to discuss terms with Pilsudski. The starving people of Europe had
good reason to be familiar with the heroic work of the A.R.A. which had
already saved millions of lives during that cruel winter of armistice.

In charge of the mission to Warsaw was Vernon Kellogg, gifted both as a
scientist and an administrator. Somehow he managed to get the point
across to the iron-willed Marshal that if he expected American Relief
supplies and money to feed and clothe the desperate Polish people, he
would have to find a way of cooperating with Paderewski and the Paris
Committee. Faced with so practical a necessity, Pilsudski capitulated
and asked Paderewski to help him form a representative government.
Paderewski himself was named Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign
Affairs. Pilsudski remained “Chief of State.” It was a rather
all-inclusive title.

The Americans were as good as their word. Better, in fact, because once
they had reported back to their chief in Paris about the ghastly
conditions in Poland, miles and miles of red tape were instantly cut in
order to rush in the first supplies. Within a few weeks a life-giving
stream of food, clothing, fuel, and medical supplies were pouring
steadily into the country. Even Pilsudski was impressed. The A.R.A did
its best for all suffering countries. But there seemed to be something
special—almost personal—about its feeling for Poland, even though there
was not yet an officially recognized Polish government. The pianist was
a nuisance, Pilsudski must have thought privately, but he had his uses
if his popularity made the Americans so generous.

What Pilsudski did not know was that there was indeed a personal
attitude involved in the work of the American Relief Administration for
Poland. For at the head of the organization was a man with a long
memory—a former Stanford University engineering student who had once
taken a flyer in the business of staging concerts.

Paderewski had completely forgotten that he had once saved a young man
named Herbert Hoover from great financial distress. But Herbert Hoover
had never forgotten it. The $400 debt that had meant so much to the
student and so little to the artist had now been paid a thousandfold.

As Prime Minister of Poland, Paderewski moved his household into the
Zamek. Did he remember the many times that the young music student had
passed the royal palace and prayed for the day when a Polish leader
would once more be in residence there? Perhaps. But Paderewski was too
busy to spend much time reminiscing. The work of forming first a
National Council of a hundred men and then a coalition cabinet of
sixteen was incredibly difficult. In the course of his former career he
had grown accustomed to long, hard work, but it was nothing compared to
this! Poles, as we have seen, were not the easiest people in the world
with whom to do business politically. And complicating life almost
beyond endurance was Pilsudski. The Chief enjoyed long, drawn-out,
usually pointless conferences that accomplished nothing except the
complete exhaustion of the Prime Minister. He enjoyed them most at two
or three o’clock in the morning, preferably just after Paderewski had
finally managed to retire for the night.

“There is a smell of sulphur in the air whenever that man walks into a
room!” Paderewski said, and he looked forward with increasing eagerness
to the day when he could leave Warsaw for Paris and the Conference. What
a joy not to be in the same city as Józef Pilsudski!


If the full story of Paderewski’s accomplishments at the Paris Peace
Conference were told in this book, there would scarcely be room in it
for anything else. The work of the next three months was the climax and
the crowning achievement of his second career.

When Paderewski finally reached Paris, the Conference was in its
eleventh week. His unavoidable delay in Poland, he quickly realized, had
been a costly one. Dmowski had done his best in presenting the Polish
claims. His five hour speech to the delegates was acknowledged as a
masterful and scholarly treatise. But here was Dmowski himself to tell
Paderewski that the Polish questions were all but decided and decided in
the negative! Somehow nothing was going according to plan. Hostility,
open and hidden, dogged his best efforts. “There is nothing to be done
about it,” he announced flatly. “Everything is settled.” The opposition
of Lloyd George to every one of his points, for example, practically
guaranteed failure. What nation would go against the British leader just
because of a minor issue like Poland?

[Illustration: _Nothing was going according to plan._]

Poor Paderewski, weary from months of trying to establish order in
Pilsudski’s peculiar brand of chaos, now realized that he had a
tremendous job of political “fence-mending” to do in Paris. For the
problem was Dmowski himself. The small nations at the Conference—those
whose main business was asking rather than dispensing favors—had to
depend to an enormous degree on influence. And influence was largely a
question of personality. In personality Dmowski was sheer disaster. Not
only did his cold and academic manner do little to win him friends among
the delegates, but his terrible anti-Semitism won him active enemies
among Jewish and non-Jewish delegates alike. And of all the delegates
who hated Dmowski, Lloyd George hated him the most. So irked, in fact,
was the fierce little Welshman that Paderewski’s arrival only succeeded
in rousing him to greater heights of anti-Polish feeling. “After all,”
he said, “what can you expect from a country that sends as its
representative a pianist!”

Paderewski decided to start repairing the damage at the very top.
Immediately after his arrival he paid a call on the powerful President
of the Conference, Georges Clemenceau—the “tiger of France.”

The present “tiger” met the former “lion” with a ghost of a twinkle in
his stern eyes. “Are you, by chance,” he asked solemnly, “a cousin of
the famous pianist Paderewski?”

Paderewski, with equal solemnity, bowed and said, “I am the very man,
Mr. President.”

Clemenceau sighed deeply. “And you, the famous artist, have become
merely a Prime Minister! What a comedown!”

The two men laughed as they shook hands warmly. They were off to a good
start.

It was not long before nearly every delegate to the Conference—even
Lloyd George—came to the conclusion that the Polish question must
definitely be reconsidered before any final decision was made.
Paderewski quickly became one of the most admired and therefore
influential men in Paris. He was useful, too, as it developed. President
Wilson and Colonel House sought his help in explaining some American
attitudes to the Europeans, while the European delegates could always
count on him to interpret their feelings for the Americans. More than
any other man in Paris, Paderewski belonged both to the old world and
the new.

“He came to Paris,” Colonel House later wrote, “in the minds of many as
an incongruous figure, whose place was on the concert stage, and not as
one to be reckoned with in the settlement of a torn and distracted
world. He left Paris, in the minds of his colleagues, a statesman, an
incomparable orator, a linguist, and one who had the history of Europe
better in hand than any of his brilliant associates.”

One of the delegates, a smooth, professional orator, summed it all up
rather nicely after a particularly wonderful speech by Paderewski. “Ah,”
he sighed to a group of his colleagues, “if we could play as Paderewski
speaks!”

The gains that Paderewski eventually won for his country were not all
that he had hoped for, but they were far greater gains than any other
man in the world could have made. They represented, as one statesman put
it, “a triumph of personality.” Matters of boundaries, perhaps, left
something to be desired, but these were not the major issue. The
establishment of Poland as a nation, free and independent among the
nations of the world—this was the major issue, and this was finally
brought about on June 28, 1919, when the Treaty of Versailles was at
last presented to the delegates for their signatures.

[Illustration: _The Treaty of Versailles was signed._]

“What M. Paderewski has done for Poland will cause eternal gratitude,”
wrote Secretary of State, Robert Lansing. “... His career is one that
deserves to be remembered ... by every man to whom love of country and
loyalty to a great cause stand forth as the noblest attributes of human
character.”

In the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a roar of applause and approval
greeted Paderewski as he stepped forward to sign the treaty for Poland.
No other delegate except those of the “big four” nations received such
an ovation. But Paderewski’s ears were accustomed to the sound of
applause, and it was probably the last thing in his mind as he signed.
His whole life had been directed toward this moment. He had worked, he
had prayed unceasingly for the new life of his country. Now it was an
accomplished fact, acknowledged by the whole world, witnessed by a
stroke of his own pen.


Paderewski’s career as a statesman was drawing to an end. It lasted only
six months longer, and the half year was a bitter anti-climax. When the
Paderewskis returned to Warsaw they found the atmosphere unbearably
hostile. Now that Pilsudski had “used” his rival to gain Allied support,
he was determined to get him out of the way as quickly as possible.

Growing opposition of the meanest kind blocked Paderewski’s attempts to
build an honorable, democratic government for his country. Pilsudski had
little interest in democracy and no interest at all in maintaining the
peace. He yearned for the smell of powder again, and he planned to
strike for further Polish gains by making war on Russia. But first he
must eliminate the peace-loving Prime Minister.

Political intrigue is a merciless game. Paderewski found himself
attacked through the two things he loved most in the world: his faith
and his wife. Anti-clerical feeling ran high among the socialists of the
country. They used Paderewski’s staunch and well-known devotion to the
Church to “prove” that he was a “tool” of the clergy and was therefore,
somehow, dedicated to the enslavement of the working man. It was a
fantastic charge from start to finish, but people believe what they want
to believe, and disgruntled elements in the Sejm—the Polish
assembly—eagerly spread the story.

Even more cruel were the charges leveled against Mme. Paderewska, she
who had worked herself almost to the breaking point not only to ease her
husband’s arduous life, but to further the cause of Polish relief. She
was accused of undue interference in matters of state, of being a bad
influence on the Prime Minister, of any vindictive thing that could be
thought of to discredit her husband.

A man of Paderewski’s moral courage can weather almost any attack made
against him, but the abuse of his wife cut him to the heart. For weeks
he wrestled with his conscience. He was thinking, as usual, first of
Poland; last, of himself. If he stepped aside now, would it not end the
terrible dissensions that rocked the newborn country? But if he did so,
would he not be deserting his country when she needed him, deserting
her, perhaps, out of a selfish, if natural, longing for personal peace?

At last, on December 5, 1919, Paderewski announced his resignation from
office. A few days earlier, at a wildly agitated meeting of the Sejm,
his government had received a vote of confidence, but the vote had been
carried by a very slim majority. Too slim a majority, Paderewski felt,
to represent a true mandate of the people, particularly since one of the
parties that voted against him in the Sejm actually had more followers,
numerically, than any of the parties who voted in his favor. If he
stayed on, nothing could follow but further discord. If he left now,
then surely the country would somehow make her way to internal peace and
unity.

Paderewski generously agreed to the panic-stricken request of the Sejm
that he try to form a new cabinet. Then he quietly left Warsaw, and
after five years of voluntary exile returned to his beloved home on the
shining Swiss lake.



                               CHAPTER 10
                           “AFTER THAT—ART!”


                [Illustration: Coat of arms with Eagle.]

An announcement the world had been hoping to hear came from Paderewski
on July 14—Bastille Day—1922. As he boarded the _S.S. Savoie_ in New
York for a trip back to Europe, he announced that in the fall of that
year he would return to the United States to resume his concert career.
He had not played in public for five years, not since the night he
played in the Metropolitan Opera House at a special concert in honor of
the French hero, Marshal Joffre. But now he was ready to move back to
Carnegie Hall and the other concert platforms of the world. Or at least
he would be ready, he felt, after four more months of the kind of hard
work he had been doing behind closed doors for over two years.

Although certain of his friends advised against the step, the fact of
the matter was that Paderewski had no choice. He had to return to the
stage because it was the only way he knew how to make a living. He had
to work for a living because he had no money. He, who had been the
richest artist appearing before the public, was now all but penniless.
Nearly all of his great fortune had been given away to the war-hungry
people of Europe.

The announcement created a sensation. Paderewski was returning to the
stage! Newspaper editorials around the world—and even his close friends
and staunchest admirers—asked the same question: would his second
concert career be a triumph or a failure? Yet the answer should have
been clear to anyone who gave a moment’s thought to Paderewski’s life
and work. Clearly he would never have made the decision to return to the
scenes of his former greatness if he had not been sure of his own powers
and of his ability to use them again as fully as before.

But never before had Paderewski spent more painstaking hours on his
beloved music than he did in the months just before his second Carnegie
Hall debut. The great French violinist, Jacques Thibaud, who crossed the
Atlantic with him, said that Paderewski even sacrificed his favorite
pastime of bridge in favor of extra hours of practicing.

It was thirty-one years, almost to the very day, since his
well-remembered debut in Carnegie Hall in 1891. Now, on November 22,
1922, he walked out on the famous stage to begin again. This time an
audience that months before had bought every seat in the house filled
the hall with a great cheering at his entrance, and kept up the applause
until he seated himself at the Steinway and struck the few chords with
which he always liked to quiet his listeners. That he was nervous was
certain. But that his fingers had every ounce of the control, of the
magic singing sound, and the thundering excitement they had had in the
past was clear to him and to his audience. It was clear, also, to the
critics, who were unanimous as they sought, almost desperately, to
describe the mature playing of this man who was now so much more than a
pianist.

There was no dissent anywhere from the critical opinions. But there was
one special friend who, under unique circumstances, summed it up better
than any other. He was Georges Clemenceau, France’s wartime premier.

On the night before his own return concert in Carnegie Hall, Paderewski
had gone to the Metropolitan Opera House to hear Clemenceau speak. But
Clemenceau had to make another speech on November 22 and had not been
able to hear the great triumph of Paderewski’s return. When Paderewski’s
concert was over, he was driven to the home of Charles Dana Gibson, a
fashionable artist of the day, with whom Clemenceau was staying. There,
the two men greeted each other with the deepest affection.

Paderewski said to Clemenceau, “You are the greatest man I ever knew.
You told them the truth in a splendid way of which you alone are
capable.” He was referring to Clemenceau’s speech at the Metropolitan
Opera, when the “tiger of France” had called upon America to help Europe
in the difficult postwar days.

“No, no, you are the greatest man,” Clemenceau replied. “At the peace
conference you made such a wonderful speech that I was nearly moved to
tears.” Then the old Frenchman paused. “I missed your concert,” he said
apologetically. “When will you play for me?”

“Master,” Paderewski answered. “I will do anything for you. I will play
for you now!” And for nearly an hour, the man who had only a short time
before played for three hours in Carnegie Hall played in the half-light
of the Gibson mansion. When it was over, Clemenceau said, “Marvelous,
marvelous. You are not only a great musician and a great statesman, but
a great poet also.”

From New York, Paderewski’s tour led him across America, as it had so
many times in the past. His private car again became a familiar sight on
the railroad tracks of the country. Again switchmen, brakemen, and the
freight handlers across the country were treated to the glorious sounds
that came from this very special Pullman car. In Minneapolis, Paderewski
played an entire impromptu recital in the car one day for ten nuns who
could not attend his regular concert. Sitting at his upright, with the
noises of switching cars and passing engines for background, Paderewski
played as if he were on the stage of a great auditorium. And surely he
had never had a more appreciative audience.

The world’s capitals, political and musical, saw and heard Paderewski
once more as he traveled from Hawaii to London in the old, familiar
crossing and recrossing pattern. Honors came to him, more than were ever
given to any pianist before or since. Universities vied with each other
to give him honorary degrees. One, from New York University, had to be
delivered to him in his hotel room when he was too ill to leave it for
the formal convocation. To the University’s Chancellor, Paderewski said,
with a smile, “You have come to a sick man to make a doctor of him!”

[Illustration: _Ignace Paderewski, 70 years of age_]

Paderewski easily recovered from a sudden appendectomy, in the fall of
1929, and made one of the longest of all his American tours the
following year, playing 87 concerts in the winter of 1930-31. The death
of his wife in January, 1934, was less upsetting to Paderewski than some
of his friends had feared it might be, because for five years before she
died, Mme. Paderewska had suffered from a loss of memory and her tragic
illness had actually withdrawn her from all the activities in which for
over 35 years she had played so busy a role.

On his tours, Paderewski played many benefits for war veterans. In the
years when the depression spread across the U.S. and Europe, he was
always glad to play concerts whose proceeds went to unemployed
musicians. One of these, in Madison Square Garden in 1932, raised nearly
$50,000. And in the midst of his renewed career, Paderewski kept in
intimate touch with the political development in Poland and throughout
Europe.

One of the greatest of his speeches was given in May, 1932, at a banquet
in his honor in New York City. Broadcast across the entire country,
Paderewski’s address that day was a magnificently outlined, superbly
delivered history and analysis of the so-called Polish Corridor. His
country’s vital need for an outlet to the Baltic Sea was at stake, and
Poland’s position and rights were being threatened. The entire speech
was later published in _Foreign Affairs_. It was built as a master
symphony is built, with its principal themes stated in varying manner
during its course, and its closing pages rising to a superb climax. As
he reached its final lines, Paderewski said:

“We do not wish to be crippled or enslaved again. We will never accept
so monstrous an injury, no matter by whom inflicted. The territory
restored to us is justly ours. And we will stand by it with all our
strength and uphold it by all our means. For if that restoration is
wrong, then the partitions of Poland were right—and nobody should expect
us to subscribe to such an iniquitous verdict....

“We do not want war. Everyone in Poland is longing for peace. We need
peace more than any other country in the whole world. Nevertheless, if a
war—and I am speaking now not as an official person, because I am not an
official; I am a plain citizen, and I assume my own responsibility—if a
war, I repeat it, by a formal declaration or by surprise is imposed on
us, we shall defend ourselves.” Once again Paderewski was speaking the
language of prophecy, though seven years still lay ahead before Poland
would once again be invaded, this time by the armies of Hitler.

The year 1936 brought a brand new career into a life already crowned in
two widely separated areas, music and politics. On August 8, Paderewski,
the movie star, was born. For months, Paderewski’s chief aide had been
working quietly, without Paderewski’s knowledge, to arrange the making
of a movie about Paderewski. Finally when negotiations with a British
company had reached a stage where Paderewski’s consent was necessary,
the subject was brought up and met with none of the resistance that had
been expected. Despite his lifelong dislike of bright lights, especially
while playing, Paderewski spent two weeks on a movie lot outside of
London making what is really a weakly sentimental production entitled
“Moonlight Sonata.” Its one distinguishing feature is the ennobling
sight and sound of the great artist moving through a few scenes.

The movie did have the effect of returning Paderewski to at least
semi-public playing for the first time since the death of Mme.
Paderewska, two years before. Late in 1938, Paderewski agreed to a short
tour of England, where he played with ease and vigor. Their surprise
turned to genuine dismay, however, a few weeks later when Paderewski
announced his return to the U.S. for the early spring of 1939. The cold,
undeniable fact was that Paderewski once again needed money. He could
only earn enough to meet his obligations by returning to the United
States at the age of 79 to play again for the thousands who clamored to
hear him. He had never saved any money for the days when he might need
it for himself. There had always seemed some better reason for giving it
away. Against this real need was Paderewski’s rapidly failing health. In
her diary, a friend said of him at this time, “He looks so feeble and
moves about with such difficulty that I simply don’t see how he can
contemplate a concert tour of the U.S., of all places.... How on earth
will the President walk on the stage during his recitals? Surely not
with the support of his cane, which he uses to get from room to room!”

[Illustration: _Studio 8-H of Radio City_]

He did come to the United States and played the first concert of his
20th tour in that country in Studio 8-H of Radio City, before an invited
audience of several hundred and a radio audience that was estimated at
fifty million. Olin Downes said of Paderewski’s playing of the
_Moonlight Sonata_ on that day, “We had not heard him play this music
with such tonal beauty and poetical effect.” The program included Liszt
and Chopin, and at the end, naturally, _the_ Minuet, of which the
audience literally forced an encore.

Several more concerts followed, each of them packed to the rafters. Then
came May 25, the day of the final concert scheduled for Madison Square
Garden. It had been sold out for days, and as the hands of the clock
moved down to 8:30, more than 15,000 people full of a special expectancy
waited for the famous old man to appear. 8:35 came, and 8:40, and still
they waited. A little before 9 o’clock, an announcement came over the
Garden’s loudspeakers. “Ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Paderewski has had a
slight heart attack in his dressing room, and his doctor is moving him
back to his private car.” Slowly, not quite believing what had happened,
the crowd quietly began to leave, many of them without any thought of
getting their money back, for already someone had suggested that a fund
in honor of Paderewski could be started with the money that was in the
box office. Paderewski had played his last concert.

But still there was strength in the grand old lion. And he would need
every ounce of it. Five days after his collapse, Paderewski was strong
enough to sail for France on the _Normandie_. After resting in Paris for
several weeks, he returned to his beloved Riond-Bosson. On August 1,
1914, he had once stood and said, “My friends, the war is here.” And
here, on September 1, 1939, twenty-five years and one month later, the
news came to him that the Nazi army, at Hitler’s orders, had invaded
Poland. On that day Paderewski broke his long-standing rule never to
listen to the radio. The only set in the villa was brought down to the
dining room where, throughout the day, it poured out its tragic reports:
Warsaw and many other Polish cities being laid waste by German bombs.
His prophecy of a quarter of a century before had come true all too
soon!

Now the blows came faster, with the fall of France, and, in Paderewski’s
opinion, with the complete failure of the machinery of the League of
Nations to function as his old friend, Woodrow Wilson, had intended it
to. “Dishonorably discharged!” was Paderewski’s final verdict against
the League one evening after a long, discouraging discussion.

In 1940 Paderewski was named President of the National Council, which
was the Polish government-in-exile. Together with President Raczkiewicz
and General Sikorski, the three men were to operate wherever and however
they could to keep alive the body and the spirit of Poland. But when
France fell, Paderewski felt that he could do more if he could return to
America. He was also sure that the United States could not remain much
longer outside the conflagration that was sweeping across Europe.

In September Paderewski began his last (and what was to prove by far his
most hectic) trip. His friends had been urging him for weeks to leave
Switzerland as soon as possible. Great as his personal prestige and
international reputation were, it was feared that, as the living spirit
of exiled Poland, his life might be put in real danger at any moment.
There were seven passengers in the two cars that left Riond-Bosson on
September 23. One car was a Cadillac that Herbert Hoover had given
Paderewski in Warsaw. The other one helped to carry the luggage of the
party. At the Swiss-French border they were joined by an agent of the
Sûreté Générale, the political police. Monsieur Garric had been assigned
to the Paderewski party by the French Government to assist them in their
journey, and he proved an invaluable addition before they were out of
France. Time after time when the party was stopped for questions by
various authorities, M. Garric merely flipped his lapel, revealing his
badge, and the party continued on its way. And, of course, the name of
Paderewski had the greatest possible effect. An official in the customs
office at the Spanish border began to whistle the Minuet when he saw
whose passports were passing over his desk.

Saragossa in Spain is the city that will go down in history as the only
place ever to put Paderewski in prison. The President’s entire party was
placed under house arrest, and the fact that they were allowed to stay
in their hotel did little to relieve the affront.

[Illustration: “... _to remain until Poland is free_.”]

For five days, under a flimsy pretext of being concerned for
Paderewski’s safety, the authorities of Saragossa kept the seven
unwilling visitors confined to their hotel. Finally a cable from
President Franklin Roosevelt direct to Generalissimo Franco got them
out. No apology, no further explanation was ever heard from Saragossa.
But by October, after a happy and reasonably relaxed trip through
Portugal, they all boarded the American Export liner _Excambion_, and on
November 6 they sailed into New York harbor. It was Paderewski’s 80th
birthday.

The Americans, who had loved and admired Paderewski for almost half a
century, would have worn him out with receptions and dinners in his
honor. But settling himself quietly in the Buckingham Hotel, he spent
his time and strength in talking and corresponding with those who were
most important to the present and future welfare of Poland. In June he
asked to speak at a Polish war veterans’ rally in Oak Ridge, New Jersey.
The day was hot and the rally itself was a steamy, exhausting affair.
Paderewski went home very tired and feeling as though he had caught a
cold. Within a week, on the 29th of June, several hours after a priest
had given him the sacrament of Extreme Unction, Paderewski died.

At his funeral in St. Patrick’s Cathedral, with nearly 5,000 crowded
inside and 35,000 outside lining Fifth Avenue and the adjacent streets,
Cardinal, then Archbishop, Spellman eulogized Paderewski, saying “his
death steeps the entire civilized world in mourning.” And then the train
took his body to Washington where it lay in state in the Polish Embassy
until the following day.

The President of the United States had personally arranged for
Paderewski’s burial in a way that offered the greatest honor in the
country’s power. By special order, the body was taken to Arlington
Cemetery, ordinarily reserved for American citizens who have served in
their country’s armed forces. As Paderewski’s coffin, mounted on a
military caisson, entered the gates of Arlington, cannon fired a 19-gun
salute, the highest number possible to anyone not the head of a state.
Flanked by United States soldiers, sailors, and marines, and joined by a
squad of Polish soldiers in Canadian uniform, the caisson moved to the
very center of the Cemetery. There, under the mast of the battleship
_Maine_, Paderewski’s coffin was placed in a vault “to remain until
Poland is free.”

The world is indebted to Paderewski in a very special way. To it he
brought a flaming vision of great music-making. He placed before his
listeners in singular glory the music of Chopin, one of the greatest
composers of piano music the world has ever known. He carried to corners
of the earth some of the most powerful pianism ever to be heard, never
deviating from his own highest standards of excellence. Then, when his
country’s very existence was at stake, he proved himself an equal or
even, in the opinion of some, a greater master in the arena of
international politics. His genius extended to the devious ways of
statecraft with the same penetration it had shown in the mastering of
music’s subtlest arts. His ability to influence men was as forceful when
he spoke as it had been when channeled through the keys of a Steinway
concert grand. He was unique in his lifetime. Nor has he had a
successor.



                       FOR MORE ABOUT PADEREWSKI


  Fisher, H. H. _America and the New Poland._ New York: The Macmillan
  Co., 1928.

  House, Edward Mandell. “Paderewski, the Paradox of Europe,” _Harper’s
  Magazine_ (New York), 1925.

  ——, and Seymour, Charles (eds.). _What Really Happened at Paris._ New
  York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1921.

  Kellogg, Charlotte. _Paderewski._ New York: The Viking Press, Inc.,
  1956.

  Kellogg, Vernon. _Herbert Hoover, The Man and His Work._ New York: D.
  Appleton Co., 1920.

  Landau, Rom. _Ignace Paderewski._ New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Co.,
  1934.

  ——. _Pilsudski and Poland._ New York: The Dial Press, Inc., 1929.

  _War Memoirs of Robert Lansing._ Indianapolis and New York: The
  Bobbs-Merrill Co., Inc., 1935.

  Paderewski, Ignace Jan, with Lawton, Mary. _The Paderewski Memoirs._
  New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1938.

  Phillips, Charles. _Paderewski, The Story of a Modern Immortal._ New
  York: The Macmillan Co., 1933.

  Strakacz, Aniela. _Paderewski As I Knew Him._ New Brunswick, New
  Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1934.



                                 INDEX


                                   A
  Alexander II, 13
  Alma-Tadema, Laurence, 112
  American Relief Administration, 149-151
  Arlington Cemetery, 181


                                   B
  Balfour, Arthur, 144-145
  Beethoven, Ludwig van
      “Appassionata” Sonata, 81
      C minor Piano Sonata, Opus 111, 136-137
      “Emperor” Concerto, 75
      “Moonlight” Sonata, 175
      Thirty-two Variations in C minor, 58
  Brahms, Johannes, 49
  Bryan, William Jennings, 91
  Burne-Jones, Edward, 69-70


                                   C
  Carnegie Hall, 72, 74, 79, 134, 141, 164-167
  Chopin, Frederic, 28, 58, 98, 101-102, 120, 127, 134, 136, 175,
          182
  Clemenceau, Georges, 123, 155-156, 166-167
  Colonne, Edouard, 58, 60
  Cooper, chef, 88
  Cortot, Alfred, 59
  Czerny studies, 53


                                   D
  Damrosch, Walter, 75
  Daniels, Josephus, 139
  Dmowski, Roman, 111, 144-145, 148, 153-155
  Downes, Olin, 174
  Dresden Opera, 98


                                   E
  Essipoff, Annette, wife of Leschetizky, 44


                                   F
  Fourteen Points, 141
  Franz Ferdinand, Archduke, 105


                                   G
  Galli-Curci, Amelita, 83
  Ganz, Rudolph, 106
  George, Lloyd, 111, 153-154, 156
  Germany, offer of Polish freedom, 128, 130
  Gibson, Charles Dana, 166-167
  Goerlitz, Hugo, 76, 89, 91, 93
  Gorska, Helena, _see_ Paderewska, Mme.
  Gorski, Ladislas, 41-42
  Gounod, Charles, 57
  Grieg Concerto in A minor, 37
  Grünwald, Battle of, 16-17, 101


                                   H
  Hitler, Adolf, 172, 176
  Hofmann, Josef, 106
  Hoover, Herbert, 91-93, 151, 178
  House, Colonel Edward Mandell, 121-126, 129, 132, 134-135, 137,
          141, 146, 156


                                   I
  Ignatius Loyola, St., 104-105


                                   K
  Kellogg, Vernon, 150
  Kerntopf, Edward, 20-22, 26, 30, 55, 64, 86
  Kontski, Apollinaire de, 19, 23, 29-30, 36
  Korsak, Antonina, Paderewski’s first wife, 39-41


                                   L
  Lamoureux, Charles, 58, 60
  Lamoureux Orchestra, 60-61, 75
  Lansing, Robert, 113-115, 131, 159
  League of Nations, 177
  Leschetizky, Theodore, 44, 46, 49, 51-56, 93
  Liszt, Franz, 31, 59, 136, 175
      Hungarian Fantasia, 75
  Loesser, Arthur, 84
  Lucca, Pauline, 55


                                   M
  Madison Square Garden, 79, 170, 175
  Massenet, Jules, 57
  Mayer, Daniel, 65-66, 68
  Mendelssohn, Felix, 136
  Metropolitan Opera House, 99, 164, 166-167
  Modjeska, Helen, 46-48
  “Moonlight Sonata” (film), 172


                                   N
  Nicholas II, 109


                                   P
  Paderewska, Antonina, 15, 28, 86-87, 106, 111
  Paderewska, Mme. Helena, 63, 95, 97, 99, 116, 124, 161, 170, 173
  Paderewski, Alfred, 39-40, 62-63, 86, 97-98
  Paderewski, compositions of,
      “Manru,” 87, 98-99
      Minuet in G, 94, 175, 178
      Piano Sonata, Opus 21, 136
      Symphony, 102
      Variations in A minor, 44
  Paderewski, Jan, 12-13, 16-22, 34-37, 86-87
  Paris Peace Conference, 146, 152-153, 155
  Pilsudski, Józef, 144-153, 159-160
  Pius XI, Pope (Achille Ratti), 97-98
  Poland, early achievements of, 118
  Poland, partitions of, 13-14, 171
  Polish army, 139-140
  Polish Falcons, Union of, 139
  Polish Relief Committee, 112
  Pullman, Paderewski’s private, 87-89, 168


                                   R
  Riond-Bosson, 97, 105-106, 110-111, 176, 178
  Roosevelt, Franklin 139, 180-181
  Rubinstein, Anton, 44-45, 70
      Concerto in D minor, 77
  Rubinstein, Artur, 45
  Russia, offer of Polish freedom, 110
  Russia, Paderewski tours of, 31-35, 96-97


                                   S
  Saint-Saens, Camille, 57, 69
      Concerto in C minor, 61, 74
  Salle Erard, 57, 59, 63
  Samaroff, Olga, 106
  San Francisco Exposition, 116
  Schelling, Ernest, 106-108
  Schoenberg, Arnold, 106
  Schumann, Robert, 75, 136-137
      Concerto in A minor, 75
  Sienkiewicz, Henry, 111
  Sigismond III, statue of, 27, 142
  Sobieski, King John, 27
  Spellman, Francis Cardinal, 181
  Steinway and Sons, 71, 73, 78
  Steinway, William, 74, 78-79, 82
  Stojowski, Sigismond, 136
  St. Patrick’s Cathedral, 181
  Strasbourg Conservatory, 54-55
  Strauss, Johann, 49
  Strauss, Richard, 40-41


                                   T
  Thibaud, Jacques, 165
  Tretbar, Charles, 73-74, 78-79
  Truman, Harry S, 96
  Tchaikowsky, Peter, 57


                                   V
  Versailles, Treaty of, 157
  Victoria, Queen, 71


                                   W
  Warsaw Conservatory, 17-19, 21-24, 29, 35, 38
  Wilson, Woodrow, 122, 126-128, 131-133, 137-138, 141, 156, 177
  Wooley, Robert, 124-125


                                   Z
  Zamek, 27, 142, 151


                           THE AUTHORS AND THEIR BOOK

Ruth Fox Hume _was born in New York City and attended the College of New
Rochelle. She attended medical school briefly, where she discovered that
she was more interested in the history of medicine than in its
practice._ _The result was_ Great Men of Medicine _(Random House, 1947,
revised, 1961) and_ Milestones of Medicine _(Random House, 1950). While
she pursued her writing career, she taught at Holy Cross Academy and
Catholic University._ _Some recent books include_ Our Lady Came to
Fatima _(Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1957),_ Saint Margaret Mary
_(Farrar, Straus, and Cudahy, 1958), and_ Florence Nightingale _(Random
House, 1959). Mrs. Hume also writes book reviews for the Washington_
Evening Star.

Paul Hume _was born in Chicago and received a degree in music from the
University of Chicago. He became music director of a “good music” radio
station and then music critic of the Washington_ Post, _a position he
has held for sixteen years. He is a Professor of Music at Georgetown
University and has been the director of the Georgetown Glee Club for
twelve years. He is the author of_ Catholic Church Music _(Dodd, Mead
and Co., 1956), as well as many articles that have appeared in_ The
Saturday Review, The Sign, The Catholic Digest, _and others_.

THE LION OF POLAND _is the first book on which the Humes have
collaborated. They live in Washington, D.C., with their four children,
Paul, Michael, Ann, and Peter._

THE LION OF POLAND _(Hawthorn, 1962) was designed by Stefan Salter and
completely manufactured by American Book—Stratford Press, Inc. The body
type is Linotype Janson, based on the letters of Anton Janson, a Dutch
punchcutter who worked between 1660 and 1687._

[Illustration: A HAWTHORN BOOK]


                           ABOUT CREDO BOOKS

                      [Illustration: CREDO BOOKS]

Credo Books is an important news series of biographies that will appeal
to both boys and girls. The subjects of these biographies are Catholic,
but their stories are not of their faith so much as how that faith
helped them to lead remarkable lives. Past and present will be
represented here: a sculptor who left a priceless treasure of art to
mankind, or a movie star who was an idol to young and old alike; the
president of a South American country who fought against and lost his
life to Communist terrorists. Heroes are made by the greatness of the
human spirit and all the figures to be portrayed in Credo Books were
great in spirit, courage and effort, no matter what task they took upon
themselves.

The authors of these new books have been carefully chosen both for their
ability to make biography come alive for young people and their
knowledge of their subjects. Such authors as Gary Webster, Lon Tinkle,
Donald Demarest, Albert Orbaan, Terry Morris, Frank Kolars and Jack
Steffan will be represented.

To give Credo Books the benefit of their knowledge and experience, an
editorial board of distinguished representatives from the fields of
education, librarianship and the Catholic press, as well as Hawthorn’s
own editorial staff, choose both subject and author for each book in the
series.

As an example of the variety of personalities in this new series, you
will find the following figures portrayed.

  _Operation Escape: The Adventure of Father O’Flaherty_, by Daniel
  Madden

  _To Far Places: The Story of Francis X. Ford_, by Eva K. Betz

  _The Lion of Poland: The Story of Paderewski_, by Ruth and Paul Hume

  _The Conscience of a King: The Story of Thomas More_, by Margaret
  Stanley-Wrench

  _Pen and Bayonet: The Story of Joyce Kilmer_, by Norah Smaridge

  _The Man Who Found Out Why: The Story of Gregor Mendel_, by Gary
  Webster

  _The Tall American: The Story of Gary Cooper_, by Richard Gehman

  _Wings of an Eagle: The Story of Michelangelo_, by Anne M. Peck with
  Frank and Dorothy Getlein

  _The Door of Hope: The Story of Katharine Drexel_, by Katherine Burton

  _Fire of Freedom: The Story of Col. Carlos Castillo Armas_, by Jack
  Steffan

  _Doctor America: The Story of Tom Dooley_, by Terry Morris

  _The Sea Tiger: The Story of Pedro Menéndez_, by Frank Kolars

  _The First Californian: The Story of Fray Junípero Serra_, by Donald
  Demarest

  _Wilderness Explorer: The Story of Samuel de Champlain_, by Charles
  Morrow Wilson

                       [Illustration: Endpapers.]



                          Transcriber’s Notes


--Copyright notice provided as in the original—this e-text is public
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--In the text versions, delimited italics text in _underscores_ (the
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--Silently corrected palpable typos; left non-standard spellings and
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