70904 for PDF 11/05 - Ivory Classics

as James Huneker once remarked, “a work that unites the characteristics of superb and original
manipulation of the Polonaise form, the martial and the melancholic.”
During his visit to Vienna, Chopin wrote: “I have acquired nothing particularly Viennese;
and I still cannot play waltzes.” Perhaps he could not play waltzes in the traditional Viennese
ballroom manner, but he certainly could compose dance poems in that form. His waltzes were
probably inspired by Johann Strauss I (the father), whose popularity was at a peak when
Chopin came to Vienna. Some of Chopin’s waltzes are stylized dances and could be suited for
the ballroom, others, however, are lyric poems in waltz-time, which some biographers have
described as “dances of the soul.” All of them are characterized by aristocratic elegance. The
Waltz in A flat Major, Opus 42 is one of the most beautiful and brilliant of the Chopin
waltzes. By some writers it is acclaimed to depict the Duchess of Richmond’s ball on the eve
of Waterloo, described in Thackeray’s Vanity Fair. Robert Schumann, in speaking of it,
regards it as a salon piece of the noblest kind, and if played for dancers, states that “half the
ladies should be countesses at least.” Shura Cherkassky plays this work as an encore to his
recital with gusto and panache and a true Romantic sensibility.
12 Hofmann: Kaleidoskop, Op.40, No.4
Josef Casimir Hofmann was born in Cracow, Poland, January 20, 1876. His mother was
a singer. His father, Casimir Hofmann, was professor of harmony and composition at the
Warsaw Conservatory, conductor of the opera, and a composer of operettas. Young Josef studied
the piano with his father. When he was six years old he played in public at a charity concert
in Warsaw. At age nine he gave concerts in Germany, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, and
later he played in Vienna, Paris, and London.
He came to the United States in 1887 and made his first appearance in New York on
November 28 of that year. It was a “private recital for the press” given at Wallack’s Theatre,
“before a representative gathering of literary, musical, and dramatic people to the number of
200, when the new world heard for the first time the piano played in the most masterly manner
by a child only a few months over ten years old” thus Henry Krehbiel in the New York
Tribune of the day after. “The audience,” Krehbiel wrote, “saw a pleasant and robust looking
boy, dressed in dark gray jacket and pair of knickerbockers, and with an enormous sailor
collar to his shirt, reaching halfway down his back. He acknowledged with perfect ease and
self-possession the applause that greeted him, and took his seat at one piano, his father at
another. The first number was the Variations by Saint-Saëns on a Theme by Beethoven, for
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