It was much more challenging to learn about great pianists and obtain their recordings before the advent of the internet. When I first became fascinated with this topic in the mid-1980s, I had to scour libraries and shops for books about these artists and discs featuring their playing. Harold C Schonberg’s book The Great Pianists served as my unofficial training manual, providing a wealth of insight about legendary performers and their pianism. His elegant writing made me particularly curious about the subject of a chapter entitled ‘Perfection Plus’, the Polish-born pianist Josef Hofmann.

Schonberg wrote eloquently about the manifold qualities of Hofmann’s playing, noting that ‘his style combined an aristocratic musical line, a perpetually singing tone, and a range of dynamics from the most ethereal pianissimo to tigerish surges in which the piano erupted’, among other effusive descriptions that piqued my interest. I would soon discover that even the most expressive words are no substitute for an actual listening experience, just like looking at the black-and-white notation of a musical score is not the same as hearing it in performance.

My first encounter with Josef Hofmann’s playing is forever etched in my memory. One day at a second-hand record store I came across a two-LP set of a 1938 Hofmann recital released by the International Piano Archives on sale for only a few dollars. I raced home excitedly, put the needle on the first record, and then experienced my musical world-view disintegrating second by second as I listened to the pianist’s traversal of Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata. I sat in shock and wonder as I heard sonorities, voicings and phrasing unlike anything I’d imagined, particularly stunned by a melting effect that seemed impossible to achieve on an instrument with fixed notes like the piano. I was not immediately enamoured by everything I heard, but I knew this was at least in part due to the unfamiliarity of what I was hearing.

On 28 November 1937, Josef Hofmann’s Golden Jubilee Concert sold out the Metropolitan Opera House in New York

As I slowly added other Hofmann recordings to my collection and repeatedly revisited each performance, I moved past any shock I may have felt and began to appreciate his pianism more deeply. Not all of Hofmann’s readings are unconventional, but his rich recorded legacy is diverse, in some ways inconsistent, and challenging to navigate due to a combination of factors relating to technology, his life story and musical culture, among other considerations. It is all too easy to dismiss a performance or an artist outright on the basis of a single listen, but life and art are more complex than this and the legendary Hofmann – not just admired but revered internationally during his long career – requires a more nuanced examination.

In 1887 the 11-year-old Jozio (as he was then called) made what appears to have been the first-ever musical cylinder recording for Thomas Edison. That has been lost, as have a number of other cylinders produced in 1890, but several from 1895 were located and released quite recently. Hofmann’s first few commercial records were produced in 1903, followed by an extensive series of discs in 1912-18, and yet another set in 1922-23, together totalling some three and a half hours – quite a significant amount for that era.

All of these were made using the so-called ‘acoustical’ recording process, whereby the sound of the performance was captured by a cone-shaped horn, resulting in a fainter dynamic and tonal range than would be the case when microphones came into use in the mid-1920s (the ‘electrical’ recording process). Listening to early recordings requires dedicated attention, but over time one’s ears adjust to the restricted sonic parameters and appreciate more details of the playing, just like one’s eyes can adjust to the limited palette of a black-and-white photograph to see crisply defined lines and shaping amid the finer shadings of the image.

Hofmann’s Chopin F minor Ballade is likely the most volcanic on record

Hofmann’s acoustical recordings feature playing that is exceptionally clear and precise, each work dispatched with dazzling evenness of articulation and rhythm, beauty of tone and transparency of texture. Even confined by the limited framework that the technology afforded, Hofmann’s playing is crisp and vivid, and one can hear incredible pedal technique creating both atmospheric effects and refined tonal shadings. His playing is masterly not just on a technical level but musically as well, with beautifully shaped melodic lines, elegant timing and exquisite balance between all voices.

Hofmann set down works only under five minutes in length, a common practice due to the time constraints of each side of 78rpm records – the only exception was Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No 2, spread across two sides of a single disc and clocking in at eight and a half minutes. Most of the pieces are more popular classical numbers – Chopin’s Fantaisie-impromptu and various waltzes, the third of Liszt’s Liebesträume, some Mendelssohn Songs without Words – understandable choices given that recording technology was in its infancy so the public would want to buy discs of these famous pieces for home listening. Hofmann also recorded some exquisite accounts of works less well known today, two favourites of mine being Louis Brassin’s arrangement of Wagner’s ‘Magic Fire Music’ from Die Walküre and Constantin von Sternberg’s Étude in C minor. We regrettably don’t hear Hofmann at the peak of his career in longer, more demanding repertoire. He did make mechanical ‘player piano’ rolls, but these do not reveal his unique tone and nuancing, and private letters indicate that he was not nearly as enthusiastic about them as his public endorsements for the profitable enterprise would suggest.

Hofmann stopped producing commercial recordings once the microphone came into use, even though discs made with this new technology sounded much better. However, in 1935 he did make a series of test recordings for both RCA and HMV, and despite being particularly pleased with the latter set, he never signed a contract to release them, so they remained in private hands for many years (fortunately all are now available – they’re superb). In the decades after his death, a significant number of radio broadcasts and concert appearances privately recorded were located and released, so although Hofmann never officially recorded a work longer than nine minutes, he can now be heard in live traversals of substantial compositions like two complete Beethoven piano sonatas, two Chopin ballades and several concertos, including two each by Chopin, Beethoven and Anton Rubinstein. However, there is further context to these later audio documents that requires consideration.

Joseph made what appears to have been the first-ever musical cylinder recording for Thomas Edison, in 1887

Hofmann knew that home listening was not the same as a one-off concert occasion and therefore played more neutrally and objectively in the recording studio. Having quite a mechanical and precise mind (he was an inventor and held patents for shock absorbers, windshield wipers and various piano mechanisms), he knew how to project his sound in the studio to achieve the desired results for playback. In concert, Hofmann could be much freer and demonstrative, yet many of these impulsive touches sound different on an old recording than they would to listeners in the concert hall.

Jorge Bolet stated that as great as Hofmann’s recordings might be, they do not reveal ‘the sound and gamut of sonorities and tonal qualities, and certainly not the vast range of dynamics’. Countless musicians who heard Vladimir Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein in concert said that neither their sound nor the atmosphere of the events could be adequately captured by modern recording technology, and it is surely the same with Hofmann in these earlier bootlegs. Hearing Hofmann in a recording of a live event is somewhat akin to looking at a monochromatic photograph of expansive scenery: as beautiful as it is, it is a flat representation of a more robust experience.

While we can hear some truly astonishing playing in these live performances, the challenges of Hofmann’s personal life led to bouts of alcoholism that compromised his pianism in later years. Additionally, even on his better days, after half a century on the concert platform Hofmann could at times sound somewhat emotionally detached, occasionally bordering on the downright glib. This is not always the case, and very much depends on the event and the work itself.

Despite these significant caveats, Hofmann’s pianism is eminently worthy of attentive study. He was for decades one of the world’s leading pianists (he was Rachmaninov’s favourite), so even if his playing sounds unconventional to our ears, it is worth asking why and how our current musical culture has moved away from some of the authentic interpretative means of expression that were in vogue when music we still play today was composed. Hofmann’s recordings reveal pianism that is at times utterly incomprehensible to modern ears: creative and colourful, and of ‘boundless imagination’ (as Bolet described it), revealing a non-linear, multi-dimensional way of viewing the score and musical interpretation.

When I shared on social media the 1936 broadcast of Hofmann playing Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, a retired music professor and concert artist in his 80s commented: ‘Thank you for turning my world upside down before 10am.’ The first movement of this performance is among the most important and fascinating recordings of the pianist (and of any musician), with a buoyant rhythmic lilt, soaring melodic line, ravishing pedal effects and richly penetrating singing tone, all of which need to be heard to be believed. Hofmann’s penchant for highlighting secondary voices clarifies harmonic progressions while also creating a duet between treble and bass, and if his spacious timing adjustments sound surprising to modern ears, all of them are logically tied to the structure of the score.

Another revelatory example of Hofmann’s late playing is Rachmaninov’s G minor Prelude, Op 23 No 5, from his 1937 Golden Jubilee Concert at the Metropolitan Opera House. In the middle section, a secondary voice floats above the primary melodic line and accompaniment with such projection and fullness of tone that it seems to be coming from a second piano, an effect that must have sounded truly remarkable in the hall. Rachmaninov wrote his now-legendary Piano Concerto No 3 for Hofmann, whose playing of this Prelude reveals the kind of texturing and voicing that the composer surely had in mind when he composed his masterpiece. For reasons that are still not clear, Hofmann never played the Concerto – which seems inconceivable given the work’s popularity today and is a tragic loss to posterity.

Fortunately we are able to hear Hofmann in several concerted works, among the most important being both Chopin concertos with Barbirolli at the helm, the F minor perhaps the more successful of the two – the first movement in the E minor seems to gloss over some of the emotional content (the same could be said about parts of his three existing performances of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto). A dramatic Emperor Concerto survives from a time when Hofmann was less frequently in fine form but it is a glorious traversal, and he also makes a strong case for his teacher Anton Rubinstein’s Third and Fourth Concertos.

Hofmann's playing reveals the kind of texturing and voicing that Rachmaninov surely had in mind when he composed his masterpiece

Hofmann’s solo outings are equally fascinating and at times unconventional, again often for contextual reasons. He had just learned that he was essentially being forced to resign from the Curtis Institute of Music when he played that 1938 recital with the Waldstein that blew my teenage mind, and he could certainly not be accused of being emotionally uninvolved on that occasion. Indeed, the Chopin F minor Ballade is likely the most volcanic on record – dark, anguished and explosive to the point that it overloads the recording apparatus. His Golden Jubilee recital a few months earlier was professionally recorded for private use and captures spellbinding readings of many works in better sound, among them a titanic Chopin First Ballade and other solos, closing with a hair-raising account of Moszkowski’s Caprice espagnol (his 1916 studio account is also marvellous).

On the basis of these descriptions one might assume that Hofmann’s performances will all be unsettling to modern ears, but they are not. Nor do all of his later performances find him playing less than wonderfully: a 1945 broadcast of the second movement of Chopin’s F minor Concerto is on a par with or even better than the 1936 version, and a 1941 broadcast of Chopin’s once-ubiquitous E flat major Nocturne, Op 9 No 2, and Liszt’s third Liebesträume are of exquisite beauty.

That we have today such ease of access to this abundance of archival material of Hofmann’s musical genius is due to the steadfast devotion of Gregor Benko, co-founder of the International Piano Archives, who for over half a century has followed every possible lead to locate one-of-a-kind copies of broadcast, concert, cylinder and test recordings. Thanks to expert remastering by Ward Marston, the subtleties of Hofmann’s pianism are more appreciable than ever before. With nine volumes available on CD – the first four on the VAI label and the remaining five on Marston’s own label, Marston Records – we can hear priceless sonic documents that earlier generations of collectors and musicians could only dream of. The music world owes Benko and Marston immeasurable gratitude for their pioneering and invaluable work in preserving and disseminating this great pianist’s artistry.

There is a prevailing belief that one should like everything for an artist to be worthy of admiration, but such an attitude severely limits our capacity to learn and evolve. Jorge Bolet said he himself never wanted to play like Hofmann but he still adored his playing. Some present-day listeners may not be as drawn to Hofmann’s style as those from previous generations steeped in a different musical culture, yet we should not simply dismiss such a legendary pianist. Exploring the unique pianism of Josef Hofmann – paradoxically individual and objective, fiery and cool, cerebral and emotional – we can become more aware of what is possible at the piano, and in listening to his unique voice, we might more easily discover our own.

This article originally appeared in the Jan/Feb 2023 issue of International Piano magazine. Never miss an issue – consider subscribing today