“Even when I’m sick and depressed, I love life.” – Artur Rubenstein

From “The Human Condition: A User’s Manual,” by Arnold Kunst

20 September

I remember taking my girl friend to San Francisco’s War Memorial Opera House to hear the great Artur Rubenstein, one of a handful of world-class interpreters of the piano music of Chopin and Beethoven. 

This was in 1965, 65 years after his dazzling Berlin debut at age 13. Remarkably, this old man was still at the top of his game! I had paid the princely sum of $9.00 for those two tickets; we sat a thousand miles back, up there in God's own nose-bleed section. We could barely see the 9-foot concert grand piano, never mind the famous man himself. But there was no mistaking the transcendent, crystalline, wildly passionate beauty he coaxed out of that instrument. That old man was the very incarnation of vitality.

As a young man I had, for years, felt curiously drawn not just to the vitality of his music but to the vitality of the man himself. I was particularly impressed at that night’s performance at how he reacted to the thunderous applause of his enraptured audience - between his bows he would straighten up, back ram-rod straight, and hold his hands above his head, palms facing backward, fingers straight and slightly spread, as if to say, "you have these to thank for what just happened!"

Rubensgtein was world-class - what kept this 78-year-old at the top of a very narrow, and fiercely competitive, heap?

I think I found out a few years later when I did some research on Rubenstein and learned that he had nearly committed suicide as a young man. I don’t remember the details, but I very much remember the conclusion I came to at the time, young and naive though I was: somehow the vitality I had heard that night - and saw in the graciousness of that distinctive over-the-head jesture with his hands - had everything to do with his up-close-and-personal confrontation with death he had as a young man in Berlin. He had stood on the precipice of death itself, looked long and hard over the edge - and then stepped back.

His reasons? Who can tell, but I am convinced it included making the likes of Chopin and Beethoven come alive, right down to the last sfortzando, transporting one audience after another to the timeless, spaceless realm of those masters. He had once said, ''At every concert I leave a lot to the moment. I must have the unexpected, the unforeseen. I want to risk, to dare. I want to be surprised by what comes out. I want to enjoy it more than the audience. That way the music can bloom anew.''

Even to this day I count myself lucky that, all those years ago, I was once in the presence of this remarkable man whose own boundless vitality pierced, clearly, to the heart of heaven itself.