Why Be a Pianist?

As a boy in London in the 1880s, Harold Bauer heard almost all the great pianists of the day. He saw the ailing Abbe Liszt at one of his last public appearances; he heard Paderewski's London debut. He remembers shaggy Anton Rubinstein, the elegant Hans von Buelow, and the widow Clara Schumann bent so low over the keys that her nose almost touched her hands.

"You must become a pianist," Paderewski told him. "You have such beautiful hair." In time, Harold Bauer, who had started as a violinist, did become a pianist, certain that he had chosen the most glamorous occupation in the world. He was one of the shiniest stars of the Hofmann-Schnabel generation, which broke from the grand, pernicious influence of Liszt with its dazzling displays of pianistic fireworks. Bauer found that the life was not all bows and bravos. In an amiable, rambling autobiography (Harold Bauer: His Book; Norton, $3.75), the 75-year-old pianist tells what it was like.

Seams & Dreams. For one thing, he really hated concert tours: trains and boats almost invariably made him sick. Besides suffering from stage fright, he had a good deal of trouble with his clothes: buttons popped, belts burst, seams split. And for years he was tortured by a recurrent nightmare--that the orchestra would begin while he was still dressing for the concert. In the dream, he never got to the piano in time.

Command performances were agony. Once, playing before Portugal's Queen Amalia, Bauer found the court piano in such bad shape that half the keys stuck. At the Spanish court he had to struggle through a Beethoven sonata while twelve-year-old Alfonso XIII romped about him, and the Infanta Isabella chattered all the way through the piece ("How like Wagner . . . This reminds me of Chopin . . .").

Larger audiences were hardly better. Bauer remembers being unnerved at one U.S. concert by a vendor's cries of "Peanuts! Popcorn!" Once, in Boston, he suddenly felt that no one was listening to him: the audience had spotted Paderewski in the hall. Another time, on his way to the concert, he was accosted by a Salvation Army lassie who wanted him to give it all up. "Don't do it, brother!" she cried. "Don't lead those poor people into sin . . . with the arts of Satan."

Peace Without Practice. Finally, after more than 50 years, Harold Bauer did give it all up. "Peace," he wrote, "is over my soul... I am never going to practice the piano any more . . . Gone [are] the qualms of stage fright . . . the tedium of travel . . the hideous fatigue of submitting to journalistic interviews . . . the resentment against the critics."

But was retirement so attractive either? Bauer tells of phoning a music store where he had once been well known. Who was calling? the clerk asked. "Mr. Harold Bauer." "How is it spelled?" said the clerk. "B . . . O . . . W . . . ?"

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