Leopold Godowsky

Leopold Godowsky was a celebrated Russian-born American virtuoso pianist and composer, renowned for his intricate transcriptions of Chopin's Etudes and works by French harpsichordists. Born on February 13, 1870, into a Jewish family in Žasliai, Vilna Governorate, Russian Empire, near Kaišiadorys in present-day Lithuania, he demonstrated musical prodigy early on. After his father, the medical assistant Mordkhl Leibovich Godowsky, died in a cholera epidemic when Leopold was still an infant, his mother moved to Vilnius, where the manager of a music shop recognized the boy's talent and began giving him violin lessons. Godowsky composed his first works at age seven, made his first public appearance in Vilnius at nine, and soon toured Russia and Germany.

Although he briefly studied in 1884 at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik with Woldemar Bargiel and Ernst Rudorff, he was largely self-taught. He then moved with his mother to the United States, making his American debut in Boston in 1884 and subsequently appearing with Clara Louise Kellogg, Emma Thursby, and Ovide Musin. In 1886 he came under the patronage of Leon Sachse, a Lithuanian-born New York businessman, who took him to Europe in the hope of placing him with Franz Liszt in Weimar, but they arrived too late. In Paris, Godowsky so impressed Camille Saint-Saëns that the composer reportedly even considered adopting him. He remained in Paris until 1890 before returning to New York.

Godowsky established a significant pedagogical career, teaching first at a New York music school and then at conservatories in Philadelphia and Chicago, the latter by invitation of Edward MacDowell. On April 24, 1891, he gave a concert at Carnegie Hall shortly before the venue's official opening, and on April 30 he married Frieda Sachse, the daughter of his patron. He later became an American citizen. During the 1890s he produced his first important piano transcriptions, including arrangements after Chopin and Henselt.

In 1900 he decided to launch a full European career and made a triumphant return to the concert stage with his Berlin debut on December 6 at the Beethoven Hall. The program included Brahms's Second Piano Concerto, seven of his Chopin Etude transcriptions, Weber-Tausig's "Invitation to the Dance," and Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, and his performance of his own challenging transcriptions drew extraordinary acclaim. In the years that followed he toured widely across Europe, including Russia, while his compositional activity expanded. From this period came the massive Sonata in E minor and the Walzermasken cycle, along with many further transcriptions.

From 1909 to 1914, Godowsky led the Master School at the Imperial Academy of Music in Vienna, where he taught notable pianists such as Heinrich Neuhaus, Issay Dobrowen, and Rosina Lhévinne. Between November 1912 and April 1913 he toured America, performing under Leopold Stokowski and making his first recordings for Columbia.

During World War I, Godowsky returned to the United States, settling first at New York's Plaza Hotel, then moving to Los Angeles in 1916, Seattle in 1919, and later back to New York, where he lived at the Ansonia. He continued to tour internationally and remained one of the highest-paid pianists of his day. His later works included the piano cycle Triakontameron and the large-scale Passacaglia. After the war he resumed concertizing in Europe and beyond; a 1923 tour to China and Java introduced him to gamelan music, which inspired his Java Suite.

His performing career ended abruptly after he suffered a stroke in 1930. His final years were difficult, marked by financial losses from the Wall Street crash, the suicide of his younger son Gordon in 1932, and the death of his wife in 1933. He died of stomach cancer in New York on November 21, 1938, and was buried at Temple Israel Cemetery. Among his children, Leopold Godowsky Jr. became known not as a musician but as a co-inventor of Kodachrome color film; his daughter Dagmar became an actress, and his elder daughter Vanita married the pianist David Saperton, who made the first recordings of Godowsky's music.

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