Friday, July 06, 2007
Daily Dude I Want to Hit: Artur Rubinstein
DOB: January 28, 1887
DOD: December 20, 1982
Occupation: Piano virtuoso
Hometown: Lodz, Poland
Current residence: A cemetery in Israel
Why I Want to Hit that Hotness: One thing about me that often surprises people is that I've played piano for over twenty years. I've been playing since I was six. Actually, since I was two, but I started taking lessons at six. By eight I'd gotten bored playing facile arrangements of "She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain" and "Camptown Races" out of the Bastien books and decided to secretly learn the Moonlight Sonata behind my teacher's back. When she discovered my clandestine affair with Beethoven, she suggested I get another teacher. I suspect this was partly due to my subterfuge, but was also because she was a terrible pianist. She said the Moonlight Sonata was too advanced for a person my age (the Moonlight Sonata is technically pretty easy), which I interpreted as being too advanced for her. My parents agreed with that interpretation, since next to myself, they were the biggest proponents of the whole "Razzy's a child prodigy" idea that scored me a sweet spot in the gifted program (where we played with Legos and had mock city council all day) and some vicious grade school Spelling Bee battles.
So I got a new teacher, who had not one but two beautiful Steinway grands at her house and was a very accomplished pianist and an excellent teacher. She threw out my Bastien books, forced me to practice scales and arpeggios for hours, and introduced me to the musical love of my life: Frederic Chopin. She indulged my desires to constantly play Chopin nocturnes and preludes, and fostered my deep and abiding love for other romantic composers by working in some Brahms, Liszt, and Schubert. Whenever she suggested a new piece for me to play, I'd listen to her play it first, then we'd consult Rubinstein, which usually made me fall in love with it.
Artur Rubinstein was the greatest pianist of the 20th century. Nobody besides probably Chopin himself can compare to his masterful renditions of that man's great work. He was also a notorious horndog. He fathered bastards all over South America while he was out performing, had hoes in every area code (and country code) and ultimately left his wife of almost fifty years for a hotter piece of ass when he was NINETY. Concerning his memoirs, he said, "I cannot write it. My life is too naughty." He was like a rock star in the 1940s, making over $500 grand a year in 1940s dollars selling recordings of his concerts, and in his down time, he "preferred writers to musicians" and liked to go get beers with my boyfriend Ernest Hemingway.
He also was insanely smart, which I consider to be one of if not THE most attractive quality in a man. He fluently spoke eight languages, had a photographic memory, and once learned the entirety of Franck's Symphonic Variations on a train en route to performing it without the benefit of A FUCKING PIANO, which blows my mind. He also shared Dr. Henry "Indiana" Jones's sentiments about the Third Reich: "Ugh, Nazis...I hate these guys." He refused to play in Germany after World War II to protest the Holocaust deaths of some of his family members, and because the Nazis jacked his entire collection of manuscripts (which were finally returned to his kids in 2004). Fuck you, relative-killing, sheet music stealing Nazis!
Every time I listen to Artur Rubinstein playing Chopin or Brahms, I get chills because he is so amazingly, outstandingly great. I also desperately wish I had a piano. I've been waiting for a day when nothing too timely was going on to give him a place of honor among other Daily Dudes I Want to Hit, an elite corps of such luminaries as porn star Briana Banks, NY1 morning anchor Pat Kiernan, and New Orleans Saints Running Back Reggie (Get in My) Bush. It's a shame he died when I was four, because I would have gladly been that old man's mistress. I bet he could teach me some dope fingering moves. On the piano AND in the bedroom.
Labels: Daily Dude I Want to Hit, hot dudes, nerd alert, Razzification
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