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.
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 theTribune. 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 eightA.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!”
The warship sped toward Danzig.
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.
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?
Nothing was going according to plan.
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.
The Treaty of Versailles was signed.
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.
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 theS.S. Savoiein 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!”
Ignace Paderewski, 70 years of age
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 inForeign 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!”
Studio 8-H of Radio City
Studio 8-H of Radio City