The sound is pretty terrible, but here it is, Josef Hofmann doing the Moonlight and Waldstein. Like so much of Hofmann, these performances are sui generis. We will never know what Hofmann sounded like in late Beethoven, the Hammerklavier or op. 111, both of which were cornerstones of his repertoire. Hofmann clearly anticipated the later developments of Historically Informed Performance, and yet unlike the robotic antisepsis of so many HIP performers, Hofmann allows for the kind of pulsing fluidity that only flows from a combination of 19th century romanticism and natural musical genius. This is a musician who has so internalized music that he knows exactly how much rubato (mid-phrase slowdowns and speedups) a piece can take to make the music sound more natural, not less.
The more I hear him, the more convinced I am that, assuming such a thing can exist, he's the greatest pianist of the recorded era. It's not just the virtuoso technique, which is clearly fraying a bit by the time of this performance, it's that the technique is always married to expression and intellect. There are so many giants who lay claim to 'greatest', whom from the moment they touch the keyboard cannot be mistaken for anybody else: Richter, Sokolov, Arrau, Serkin, Friedmann, Gilels, Gieseking, Grinberg, Gulda, Kocsis, Ogdon, Ciccolini, Rubinstein (if only live...), to even Horowitz... to the list just goes on and on and on....
But there's something in the later Hofmann recordings that is kind of tragic. When you listen to contemporary accounts of Hofmann, they make perfectly clear that Hofmann at his 'peak' was a kind of Apollonian god, unperturbable, imperious, perfection incarnate, inspiring awe in all from professionals to beginning listeners, yet perhaps a little cold. By the time of his most famous recordings, by the time of his famous Golden Jubilee performance at the Met, he was nothing like the descriptions. He was a drunk who'd thoroughly besotted his family life, and thrown out of the Curtis Institute for administrative incompetence and doubtless some embarrassing behavior about which we never shall hear.
Hofmann hated the recording microphone, which he said could never capture the essence of his nuances. I'm sure he's right, but the Hofmann of the WWII years was a very different Hofmann, as explosive as the earlier Hofmann was unflappable. One begins to wonder if the earlier Hofmann was more a craftsman than an artist - certainly Rubinstein said so in his autobiography, where he had some incredibly cruel things to say about his older contemporary. But 'late Hofmann', supposedly an embarrassment to his younger self, was very much an artist with something to communicate. If his technique was not as reliable as it was, it was more reliable than late Schnabel or late Horowitz. Toward the end of his life, recorded sound improved immeasurably, yet Hofmann never set down most of his repertoire, worried the comparison to his former self would result in embarrassment. What a shame. Compare the 1936-38 live recordings to the acoustic recordings. The acoustic recordings are nothing short of awesome experiences. Even through the dull, scratchy sound, the nimbleness that only exists in Hofmann's fingers is unmistakable. Are they deeply reflective works of art? Unlikely at best. But later in life, Hofmann, the child prodigy, the unflappable virtuoso, had finally experienced something of life that made him understand what music was for, and how expression speaks to the human heart more directly than any technical effect.
I would rather have heard what an older Josef Hofmann had to say about late Beethoven or Brahms's Handel Variations or the Well-Tempered Clavier than when he was the flawless young virtuoso, and the impermanence of all these interpretations is a devastating loss. What Hofmann sounded like in so much of his repertoire only exists in the ephemeral memories of old concertgoers who still recalled Hofmann with awe half-a-century after his retirement. One and all, they recall it with a level of awe an instrumentalist engenders once in a generation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVcfTzw9BRo
https://youtu.be/0U9aaU57UVQ
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