Józef Hofmann
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Józef Kazimierz Hofmann (born January 20, 1876 in Kraków, Poland; died February 16, 1957 in Los Angeles), great Polish-American pianist and composer.
He was a child prodigy who played a long series of sensationally received concerts throughout Europe and Scandinavia at the age of ten. This phase culminated with a series of concerts in America in late 1887 and early 1888 at which he became an early media sensation. He then retired and studied with Moritz Moszkowski and Russian virtuoso and composer Anton Rubinstein, becoming his only private pupil and later, his leading disciple. Hofmann was also a gifted inventor who invented mechanisms for the piano and automobiles, with numerous patents to his credit.
Hofmann spent most of his later career in the United States, where he directed the Curtis Institute of Music until 1938. His pupils included several of the most talented students of the day, including Jorge Bolet and Shura Cherkassky.
Hofmann made a few commercial recordings beginning in 1903 through the 1930s. He also made some of the earliest recordings of classical music for Thomas Edison. These have been lost, but some cylinders he made in Russia a few years later have recently been discovered. He made two series of reproducing piano rolls and reaped a huge income from their issue, but never trusted rolls as accurate representations of his playing. This distrust also extended to acoustical recordings. In part this was because Hofmann claimed he never played any piece the same way twice. Recordings of broadcasts of several of Hofmann's live performances have survived, and all of these recordings have been published on compact discs.
Hofmann's playing began to decline during the late 1930s, mostly due to alcoholism. He gave his last concert in 1946.
He had very small (but exceptionally strong) hands, and like several other famous pianists, he found the situation more of a nuisance than a handicap. Steinway eventually built him a custom piano with narrower keys.
Rachmaninoff considered Hofmann his superior as a pianist and dedicated his Piano Concerto No. 3 to him. Hofmann never played it. According to his first wife, he did not care for the piece, which he considered lacking in form (see "The Amazing Marriage of Josef Hofmann and Marie Eustis").
Hofmann possessed extraordinary technical skill, poetry, color, and imagination. Volcanic interpretations of pieces like Chopin's Fourth Ballade (performed in the "Historic Casimir Hall Recital" of 1938) show just how much Hofmann's playing had in common with Anton Rubinstein, and how different his interpretations are from any of the pianists who emerged/recorded after the Cold War.
Hofmann made history in 1911 when he played over 256 different works in ten consecutive concerts to astounded Russian audiences. Only a small part of his encyclopedic repertoire has survived on recordings because of his great distrust of the medium. He is now regarded as one of the greatest pianists in the history of pianism.
Hofmann's invention of pneumatic shock absorbers for cars and planes earned him a fortune in the early twentieth century. His other inventions included medical devices, a furnace that burned crude oil, automobile windscreen wipers, a device to record dynamics in reproducing piano rolls that he perfected just as the roll companies went bust, and a house that revolved with the sun. He spent his last years working on improvements in piano recording.[citation needed]
