Expressing the ‘soul’ of a Russian pianist: Anton Rubinstein’s interpretation of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas as the making of a performer-centred classic.

Performers have enacted the ‘Beethoven Syndrome’ (Bonds: 2020) in ways that disclose overt similarities in the ways through which they conceptualize both the composer’s music, and their own ambitions in performing it. This article looks at the pianist Anton Rubinstein (1829–1894) who became known as ‘Van II’ not for his compositions but rather his performances. The focus the late nineteenth-century demand for autobiographic readings and their blurring of boundaries between fact and fiction (Leistra-Jones: 2021) sets the scene for Rubinstein’s role in the creation of a Russian obsession with the performance of Beethoven’s piano works. Rubinstein’s fame for being a ‘son born of Beethoven’ continued well beyond his death, and set a precedent for other pianists to look to his Beethoven legacy to fashion themselves as ‘revelatory interpreters’ (Stefaniak: 2021) of the composer. The resulting Beethoven-Rubinstein synthesis resulted in a counterpart obsession that peaked in the late-Soviet landscape of the mid-twentieth century. The article turns to the case of Heinrich Neuhaus (1888–1964) to give a sense of how this active myth-making reflected itself in the construction of a performance narrative by a pianist who had never seen or heard Rubinstein but who felt compelled to enact the language, metaphors, and physical trope of the Beethoven-Rubinstein synthesis. It suggests how, in Neuhaus’s case, enacting the Beethoven-Rubinstein synthesis perhaps underpinned aspects of his own pianism (such as the concept of intonirovaniye [a way of intoning sound] as a manifestation of revelatory interpretation) in Beethoven’s Piano Sonata in A flat major Opus 110.