When told that Schnabel had been rejected from the army: “What do you expect? No fingers!”
When a fellow pianist was presented with a petition to sign, but only a tiny space was left and he annoyingly asked, “What can I write here?”–Rosenthal replied, “Your repertoire.”
And my favorite: Upon hearing DePachmann play 25/6, he wryly comments, “Now you have the tempo, you can put in the 3rds.”
Supposedly, he was able to play the chromatic 3rds in DJ with BOTH hands–prompting Brahms to come up afterwards and say, “dayum…will you play my Paganini Variations?”
Aftah first seeing Paderewski perform live he comes out of da concert ans sayz “Well, he playz well, but he’s certainly no Paderewski!” or something to dat effect.
From da Alan Walker Liszt bio:
Anton Rubinstein had composed a mazzive yanke doodle variation. So Liszt decided to splitt it into different parts for his students to learn becuase they were going to perform it. Sadly this task was to big for the students(the finest in europe) so Rosenthal just learned it all
fuck if i know…the previous quotes r from schoenberg and its a damn good book indeed, i just done getting it from da library, never read it completely, but its rly interesting
