When Dinu Lipatti died at just 33, the world lost a pianist at the height of his powers. Roger Nichols recalls the Romanian\u2019s extraordinary musicianship <\/p>
\u2018<\/span>T<\/span>hose whom the gods love,\u2019 wrote the Ancient Greek playwright Menander, \u2018die young.\u2019 Whether or not his gods passed that habit on to those operating in the Christian era, who knows? <\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n But many musicians at least do seem to reserve a special place in their hearts for composers who died before their 40th birthday<\/a><\/strong> \u2013 Purcell<\/a><\/strong>, Schubert<\/a><\/strong>, Chopin<\/a><\/strong>, Mendelssohn<\/a><\/strong>, Mozart<\/a><\/strong> of course, all dead in their thirties.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> Performers may find it harder to make a lasting mark so young, but I can name two exceptions: Yehudi Menuhin<\/a><\/strong>, for whom an early death might have left his legacy more secure; and Dinu Lipatti, who was born on <\/span>19 March 1917 and died on 2 December 1950.<\/span><\/p>\n Dinu Lipatti <\/span>was born in Bucharest in 1917. Heavenly powers smiled on Lipatti\u2019s boyhood. His father Theodor was a violinist who had studied with Carl Flesch in Bucharest and then with Sarasate in Paris, his mother Anna was an accomplished pianist, and his godfather was violinist and composer George Enescu<\/a><\/strong>.<\/span><\/p>\n At an early age Dinu clapped rhythms and imitated sounds to the delight of all, and even played on the piano a representation of a parental argument. <\/span><\/p>\n He also composed. But his health had always been delicate and his parents waited until he was eight before letting him have piano lessons with Mihail <\/span>Jora. Three years later he entered the Bucharest Royal Academy of Music to study under Florica Musicescu to whom he remained devoted until his death. From here on, progress was swift. In each of the three years 1931-33 he performed a concerto<\/a><\/strong>: the Grieg, the Chopin E minor, the Liszt E flat, all of which he would later record. In 1934 he entered the Vienna International Piano Competition and was placed second \u2013 to the disgust of juror Alfred Cortot who promptly resigned.<\/span><\/p>\n Offers of concerts flooded in, but were mostly refused. Instead Anna harboured the idea that Dinu should go to Paris. She sold their Bucharest house without Theodor\u2019s knowledge and bought a Paris apartment.<\/span><\/p>\n So to Paris they went and Lipatti entered the Ecole Normale de Musique, which Cortot had founded and where he taught. Paul Dukas gave Lipatti composition lessons and had a high opinion of his abilities and, when Dukas died in 1935 and his funeral coincided with a Lipatti recital, the pianist as a tribute opened with Myra Hess<\/a><\/strong>\u2019s transcription of Jesu, Joy<\/i> which was to become a talismanic piece for him. For Cortot, the 18-year-old Lipatti was now no longer a student and he duly enrolled him on the school\u2019s jury for its Diploma of Virtuosity.<\/span><\/p>\n Another teacher at the Ecole Normale who became a close friend was Nadia Boulanger. With his concert work now growing apace, in 1938 he recorded with her a selection of the Brahms Waltzes for piano duet. In July 1939, with war threatening, the family moved back to Bucharest, but Lipatti toured widely during the war and played in a number of German cities without, apparently, incurring blame either then or afterwards. <\/span><\/p>\n Lovers of Ravel<\/a> <\/strong>can only drool inwardly on reading that in a performance of Le Tombeau de Couperin<\/i>\u2004the Toccata was \u2018splendidly rendered by Lipatti\u2019s prodigious technique, and a crystal-clear and incisive playing with fine tonal range and <\/span>full of brio\u2019. N<\/span>ot everyone was thrilled by his interpretations. <\/span><\/p>\n A Stockholm critic in 1943 reviled him as having \u2018nothing of the thinker, no refinement of nuances nor any of <\/span>the mysterious subtleties of musical expression\u2019 <\/span>and, in Chopin\u2019s B minor Sonata, of \u2018hurling himself at the keyboard and playing with the fury of a machine-gun salvo.\u2019 But then said critic was a Vladimir Horowitz fan . More positive were Lipatti\u2019s <\/span>relations with the pianist Edwin Fischer, whose <\/span>playing of Schubert<\/a> <\/strong>reduced him to tears.\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n The heavenly powers, however, had a terrible <\/span>and, as it turned out, fatal blow in store for Lipatti. At the end of 1943, shortly after he moved to Geneva, he ran a fever, but the tests showed nothing abnormal. Concerts had to be postponed or cancelled and money was low. <\/span><\/p>\n Then in April 1944 he was appointed as professor of the \u2018Virtuosity Course\u2019 at the Geneva Conservatoire, a post he held for five years. This gave his life stability, but Swiss musical politics (Lipatti refers in inverted commas to his \u2018dear colleagues\u2019) did their best<\/span> to scupper things until the post was finalised.<\/span><\/p>\n The last six years of Lipatti\u2019s life saw a battle against what was finally diagnosed as Hodgkin <\/span>lymphoma, with his doctors\u2019 warnings against over-exertion on one side, and Lipatti\u2019s duty to his audiences on the other. <\/span><\/p>\n Clearly, the <\/span>anticipated US tour was no longer a possibility, <\/span>but at least Lipatti had the good fortune to make a friend of Arturo Toscanini<\/a><\/strong>. The conductor let it be known that for him Enescu was \u2018Europe\u2019s greatest musician\u2019, and then went on to allow Lipatti the unique privilege of sitting in on his rehearsals; even if the last of these was, in Lipatti\u2019s words, \u2018a stormy one For us today, the most wonderful and exciting products of these years were his recordings, notably those made with producer Walter Legge. But even these were often stressful, his 1947 recording of the Chopin B minor Sonata being stretched over two whole days. <\/span><\/p>\n His last recordings, made in the months before his death in Geneva, are a testament to his unflinching honesty and determination to serve the music he played. Nor, for him, was death the end. His beloved Madeleine, whom he could marry only as late as 1949 when her husband, who had refused a divorce, finally died, recorded his last words: \u2018If we suffer here below, it is to prepare for ourselves a better life.\u2019<\/span><\/p>\n\n
When and where was Dinu Lipatti born?<\/span><\/h2>\n
When did Dinu Lipatti <\/span>start learning the piano?<\/h2>\n
When did Lipatti move to Paris?<\/span><\/h2>\n
What did Lipatti do during the Second World War?<\/span><\/h2>\n
When did Lipatti become ill with Hodgkin <\/span>lymphoma?<\/span><\/h2>\n