Classical Music for Aficionados

It is during these early years of the 1930s that Bolet had some sessions with the legendary pianist Leopold Godowsky, going up to New York City for lessons.   JB’s teacher at Curtis, David Saperton was Godowsky’s son-in-law and had arranged the connection.   (Godowsky resided in the luxurious Ansonia Hotel on the Upper West Side, at 2109 Broadway, between West 73rd and 74th Streets, but moved into an apartment with his daughter Dagmar on Riverside Drive overlooking the Hudson River after his wife Frieda’s death in December 1933.)   Bolet would practise some of Godowsky’s fiendishly difficult music (few other of his contemporaries were up to the task) and then play it to the composer.

‘Jorge’s scores of these pieces bore Godowsky’s markings in red crayon—the daunting “Passacaglia,” based on themes from Schubert’s “Unfinished” symphony; the “Fledermaus” and “Kunstlerleben” symphonic metamorphoses; the “Java Suite”; the Sonata in E minor; pieces from the “Triakontameron.” ’ [Albert McGrigor]

Bolet listed these lessons for 1932-3 in a submission to Grove's Dictionary; but they do not seem to have been systematic lessons.   Gregor Benko has said, 'I remember a party at Sidney Foster’s house when he, Bolet and Abbey Simon reminisced about Leopold Godowsky, who apparently used sarcasm and insults with students..., and it left an indelible impression on these great artists, who had all played for him and suffered abuse.'   Godowsky's biographer, Jeremy Nicholas, states: ‘Occasionally, Saperton and Bolet would go to New York and visit Godowsky, and Bolet would play Godowsky to Godowsky, as it were, and get advice from him. He said that in that sense, yes, he had studied with Godowsky. Of course he also, in the same way, had advice from (and played for) Hofmann as he was head of piano at Curtis. But his main teacher was Saperton, though Bolet told me the greatest purely musical influence was the French musician Marcel Tabuteau, first oboe with the Philadelphia Orchestra – the greatest musical mind I have ever known.’