There are three pianists I’ve met over the years who heard Josef Hofmann in his prime. Earl Wild acknowledged Hofmann’s style as the biggest influence on him gaining a fluid and flexible technique: ‘His interpretations were always delivered with great logic and beauty.’ Jorge Bolet admitted to me that whenever he heard either Rachmaninov or Hofmann, he always thought to himself, ‘Every note that they play – that is what I would like to play.’ Shura Cherkassky, Hofmann’s best-known pupil, told me that no recording Hofmann made came anywhere near to capturing his unique sound.

My introduction to his playing was when a friend gave me his copy of a Columbia Masterworks LP (ML4929) – the live recording of Hofmann’s Golden Jubilee concert at the Metropolitan Opera House on November 28, 1937. Despite the less than pristine sound (since reissued by Ward Marston, much improved and with extra items), I can’t describe the thrill of hearing for the first time this legendary, almost mystical, figure of whom I had only read about in books. Here was one of the greatest pianists in history, captured on the wing. Everything seemed so lucid, easy and natural, leading voices singing beautifully but with many subtly highlighted inner voices I had not noticed before; the skittering, unpedalled fioratura, the sudden electrical charges, and the inimitable way he would grab your attention with a phrase and then decrescendo.

‘I can't describe the thrill of hearing for the first time this legendary figure of whom I had only about in books’

Not everything came off perfectly that night. (A young pianist once mentioned to Godowsky the wrong notes he had heard at a Hofmann recital, to which Godowsky, Hofmann’s lifelong friend, merely commented: ‘Why look for spots on the sun?’) There are moments of incoherence and excess. Hofmann could be madly (and maddeningly) impulsive, a trait he inherited from his teacher Anton Rubinstein, and it is his now unfashionable brand of pianism – where the concept of a work is a fusion of the composer’s and artist’s thoughts – that offends many critics and pianists today.

Born in Poland in 1876, Hofmann was the epitome of the exploited child prodigy. When he was 11, he gave 50 recitals in America in the space of three months; the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children protested and, at a time when a respectable annual salary was $500, a philanthropist named Alfred Corning Clark stepped in and offered Hofmann’s father $50,000 to take the child away from the stage and not return until he was 18. ‘The problem with being a wunderkind,’ Hofmann was fond of saying, ‘is that the “wunder” disappears at the same time as the “kind”.’

Hofmann, a diminutive figure with small hands, made the transition. A giant among his peers, he maintained his position as one of the highest paid instrumentalists in the world for the next 54 years, though from 1939 onwards due to family problems and alcohol his playing deteriorated. He gave his final recital in 1948 and retired to Los Angeles where he lived the remaining nine years of his life in relative obscurity, devoting his time to developing such items as car windscreen wipers, pneumatic springs and piano amplification. At his death he held more than 70 patents.

In 1970, when I was given the ‘Jubilee LP’, no other Hofmann recordings were available other than this recital (and it had taken many years for Columbia to persuade the pianist to give permission to issue it). Now nearly all of them are on CD. Hofmann was the first famous pianist ever to make a recording: in 1886 Edison invited the 10-year old prodigy to his studio where he made a few cylinders (these seem to have disappeared, but three more cylinders from 1896 are shortly to be issued by Marston). He made his first commercial recording in 1903, his last in 1923 (some further sides for RCA in HMV in 1935 were never issued in his lifetime). Like Busoni and Godowsky, he seems not to have enjoyed the business of recording, though these studio discs include many performances of fabulous artistry.

Among the greatest Hofmann treasures are a complete recital given at the Curtis Institute (he was Director there) a few days after the Jubilee Concert, and live broadcasts from the late 1930s of the two Chopin concertos. There are moments in these which regularly move me to tears – and if I had to take just one piano recording to my desert island it would be Hofmann playing the Romanza from the E minor Concerto. Perhaps it’s some unfathomable connection, some personal identification with the way in which the music is played, but it is a rare artist who can have that effect on a listener.

The Essential Recording

Chopin 
Piano Concertos Nos 1 & 2

Josef Hofmann pf Philharmonic Society of New York / John Barbirolli (recorded live, Carnegie Hall 1938 & 1936)

(VAIA)

This article originally appeared in the January 2016 issue of Gramophone