Prince of Virtuosos: A Life of Walter Rummel, American Pianist

by Charles Timbrell; Scarecrow Press, Lanham, MD, 2005. 215 pgs.

Review by Keith Francis

Charles Timbrell’s biography of Walter Rummel was published six years ago and has been the subject of many favorable reviews, most of which have appeared in specialist publications such as Clavier, Tempo, The Pianist, and International Piano Magazine. Priced at $58.00 and devoted to the life of a pianist whose name is unknown to the vast majority of music lovers, it was clearly written for the relatively small constituency of people who have a serious interest in pianists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and their repertoire, but this should not discourage potential readers. If such names as Godowski, Moszkowski, Busoni, Schnabel, Bauer, and, of course, Rummel, mean little or nothing to you, you may still find much that is of great interest in this very well-written story of an extremely complex individual who encountered Rudolf Steiner as a young man and for whom anthroposophy became a lifelong influence. It is also true that while the many comments on Rummel’s interpretations of such masterpieces as Schubert’s final piano sonata, Schumann’s Humoresque and Debussy’s preludes will be hard to fathom if you are unfamiliar with these works, Timbrell’s book may have the added merit of inspiring you to remedy the situation with a trip to your local record store (if you have one), or some hours spent with your local classical music station (if you have one), or by logging on to a convenient music outlet. I have to put the matter in these terms as solo piano recitals are rare events in most localities.

By general consent among his contemporaries, Walter Rummel (1887–1953) was a great pianist and an accomplished composer. His father, Franz, was a British citizen and a brilliant pianist descended from a long line of distinguished German musicians, and his mother was the daughter of Samuel F. B. Morse, of telegraph fame. Rummel studied first with his father, but when he was fourteen Franz died, and his mother moved to Washington, DC in order to be near her brother. Rummel continued his piano studies in Washington with an eminent pupil of Liszt and Moszkowski, but returned to Berlin in 1904 to study with Leopold Godowsky. He made his Berlin debut in 1908 at the age of twenty-one, playing a sonata of his own composition with his violinist brother, William. A year later he moved to Paris, and began a long friendship with Claude Debussy, whose music became one of the staples of his repertoire.

Debussy liked the way Rummel played his music, and provided the title for Timbrell’s book when he referred to the pianist as “the prince of virtuosos.” As far as the subtitle is concerned, it must be said that to describe Rummel as an American pianist is a considerable oversimplification, since he was born a British citizen in Germany in 1887, became an American citizen in 1908, accepted German citizenship in 1944, hoped to gain French citizenship in 1948, and was regarded by the American State Department as a Nazi collaborator. Timbrell states that Rummel was proud of his American citizenship, but doesn’t hesitate to quote the disparaging references to American culture that appear in some of his letters. There was, in fact, nothing simple in any aspect of Rummel’s life, and the relative brevity of this biography is as much due to shortage of source material as to the author’s admirable taste for economy.

Rummel’s repertoire extended from the baroque to the late romantics and Debussy. Reviewers were almost unanimous in their approval of his performances and he was lavishly praised by some of the most fearsomely influential critics of the time, including Bernard Shaw and Ernest Newman. Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann, and Tchaikovsky were prominent among the composers whose music he performed to great acclaim, but he ignored most of his contemporaries: Stravinsky, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Hindemith were notably absent from his programs.

Rummel moved easily among the literary lions of the early twentieth century. One of his most important friendships was with Ezra Pound, whom he met in the United States and continued to see after his move to Paris, and it was through Pound that he was introduced to W. B. Yeats. Pound and Rummel formed what might be called a mutual inspiration society, and Rummel became deeply involved with Yeats’ “Celtic Twilight.”

Extremely attractive to women, he seems to have been the innocent cause of one suicide, and may have been the less innocent cause of his first wife’s loss of reason when he began an extended affair with Isadora Duncan. He parted company with Duncan after apparently falling in love with one of her pupils, and was married twice more. And yet none of these liaisons and unions carry much conviction either as normal conjugal or as ideally platonic relationships. Rummel was quite capable of forming an ostensibly romantic attachment and then informing the object of his affections that what he had in mind was “brotherly devotion.” Duncan told one story in her autobiography and a different one to her friends, and the only thing we can say with any certainty is that the ambiguities of his personal life were part and parcel of the mass of contradictions evident in the course of his life as a whole.

Rudolf Steiner lectured frequently in Paris from 1905 until 1908, and it is likely that Rummel first encountered him during this period. After several years of involvement in theosophy, Rummel wrote to Steiner in 1913, expressing his gratitude for “an affirmation of my inner feelings,” and met him at a lecture Steiner gave in May of that year. Rummel and his first wife spent six weeks in Dornach in early 1915, watching the construction of the Goetheanum and hearing distant gunfire. His devotion to Steiner may be gauged from the fact that he filled two notebooks with passages copied from such works as An Outline of Occult Science and The Nature and Origin of the Arts. In 1919, he and Isadora Duncan gave a Chopin program at the Goetheanum in the presence of Leopold van der Pals, who was an accomplished composer with a keen interest in eurythmy. Van der Pals confided his opinions to his diary, and it is of some interest that what may be the only report on Rummel’s work by an anthroposophist musician is entirely negative:

I had a very sad impression of him. He carries himself lightly as if he is happy with his new way of life, but one senses an internal dissatisfaction… nearly a conscious self-destruction. In the evening he and Isadora Duncan gave a Chopin program. It was dreadful. They can talk so much about the Soul, but everything she gives to outward appearance, and not even artistically beautiful. Rummel looked depressed and bored. He played badly, without internal organization of the works and with poor execution. Everything made a depressing impression on me.

Rummel wrote program notes for his concerts, sometimes attempting to express his understanding of the spiritual nature of music in relation to the human being. He complained about the elevation of the brain, the intellect, to the status of almighty God, and the degenerative influence of “connoisseurs and individualists” in “insisting on an understanding of music, an ‘intellectualization’ of music….” These connoisseurs “forget that the public, the crowd, is not a composition of many individuals but a body, the medium of an unconscious entity; the soul of the crowd is as real as that of man. It is to her that great artists of all time have sung, danced and spoken….”

Reading this plea for communication with the group soul, we may be forgiven for wondering how much of Steiner’s message about the current state of human evolution Rummel had actually understood. There was, however, much more to Rummel’s experience of anthroposophy, and we may accept Timbrell’s verdict that Steiner was the greatest single influence on his life while maintaining reservations about his assertion that Steiner’s “thinking guided virtually every aspect of Rummel’s thinking from about 1908 on.” It is to be hoped that his conduct during the Second World War and his clumsy misrepresentations thereof were not the product of anthroposophically-oriented thinking, but we can’t help observing that the notes he wrote for a 1941 concert in Nazi-occupied Brussels continue a line of thought already present in the notes quoted above, and somehow manage to combine a Hitlerian view of art with sentiments often heard when anthroposophists gather together.

A new wave of life is unfurling in Europe. No force will be able to thwart its course. The year 1940 was the date of its birth… Art and, above all, Music is destined to arise victoriously from the present strife… The public, weary of the artifices and deceits of modern pseudoart… demand a human and wholesome art. We will witness the… dismemberment of institutions which for the most part sprang from anti-artistic and snobbish centers… we will see without pity the failure of this snobbism that has launched on the musical world a horde of dilettantes, merchants and schemers… All of us who are convinced of the new European dawn must unite to forge a cultural sword that will thrust itself into the jaws of a music that under the mask of modernism and purism is nothing but an anemic ghost of a certain cerebral intellectualism excluding and denying all activity of heart and true spirit.

Timbrell quotes the response of a French commentator; “In other words, long live the ‘directed art’ of Monsieur Hitler and down with Hindemith, Schoenberg, Milhaud and their consorts.”

It is worth noting that in the fifty years that have elapsed since I joined the Anthroposophical Society, attitudes toward modern art have thawed out considerably among anthroposophists. Many of these “heartless” composers are truly appreciated; their works are even choreographed for eurythmy performances, and it is clear that the difficulties presented by their music were not caused by lack of heart or feeling.

Rummel’s stepson from his final marriage believed that the great pianist “had always been politically naïve,” but Rummel had always shown a great capacity for self-promotion, and Timbrell points out that “political naïveté combined with professional opportunism is a dangerous thing” and that in his cooperation with the Nazi regime, Rummel had for a while been “able to play both sides against the middle,” continuing “his active international career for four long years before accepting German citizenship in August 1944.”

The final chapters of Rummel’s life, in which he used a self-serving “Memorandum” as part of his struggle with the American authorities for rehabilitation and was able to make a partial comeback before succumbing to spinal cancer in 1953, do not make cheerful reading. I’m happy to give the closing words of this review to Charles Timbrell, who has given us a balanced and eminently readable account of Rummel’s life and work:

As an artist, Rummel seems to have wanted very much to be apolitical, but unfortunately he lived at a time when that was impossible. In many respects, he failed to adapt to a world that was changed forever by World War I, retreating whenever possible into a life of imagination populated by sprites, fairies and medieval legends, and believing with absolute certainty in reincarnation and the life of the soul. He was a confirmed idealist who lived much of his life in denial—a circumstance that might help to explain, but not to condone, his activities during World War II and some of the statements found in his postwar “Memorandum.”

The CD included with Prince of Virtuosos contains twenty tracks transcribed from recordings made between 1924 and 1948. They give us a good idea of Rummel’s fine technique, even touch, and beautiful phrasing. Only the three chronologically latest tracks, which are placed first on the CD, suggest what Rummel might have sounded like on an off day. These are three of the pianist’s own Bach transcriptions, recorded in 1948, and are marred by excessive tempo changes and an occasional clumsiness not apparent in any of the earlier recordings. Rummel wrote eloquently about the need for a flexible approach to tempo, but when there is a complete lack of a basic pulse, tempo changes are apt to seem meaningless. The unavoidable drawback of the CD is the absence of any largescale works that would have allowed us to experience the command of musical structure for which Rummel was often praised. All twenty-five of Rummel’s highly praised Bach transcriptions are available in excellent modern recordings by Jonathan Plowright on the Hyperion label.

Walter Rummel plays Liszt’s Liebestraum #3 (1942 recording) on www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWX4zJJBKyk and Beethoven's Für Elise at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOQ4Wx8jzsE