Ruth Slenczynska, pianist child prodigy thought to be Sergei Rachmaninov’s last surviving pupil
She was an infant when her father took one look at her hands and burst into tears of joy: ‘I swear to you, Mamma, that’s a musician’
Ruth Slenczynska, the pianist who has died aged 101, was thought to have been the last surviving pupil of Sergei Rachmaninov who, she claimed, had once proclaimed her “the greatest talent in the world”. As a child prodigy she was ruthlessly exploited by her tyrannical father: she made her debut at the age of four, was wowing Berlin at six, and by 10 was earning more than the President of the United States.
Large audiences – some standing, others seated on the stage – paid premium prices to hear her perform. In 1933 she amazed audiences in New York Town Hall with the “torrential virtuosity” of her first recital there, which was described by a New York Times critic as “an electrifying experience; something nature has produced in one of her most bounteous moods”.
By the end of that year she had made her second European tour, crossing the Atlantic under the ever-watchful eye of her father whose piano arrangement of Strauss’s Blue Danube was intended to be so difficult that only she could play it.
By then Ruth Slenczynska (pronounced Slen-chin-ska, as she clarified in an interview) was being paid $3,000 for a single five-minute radio broadcast. She recalled that the pianist Josef Hofmann “pronounced me the most astonishing prodigy he ever heard”, Queen Astrid of Belgium asked to meet her, and American magazines featured her on their covers. Over the years she played for Presidents Hoover, Kennedy, Carter and Reagan, as well as for Michelle Obama. She even played duets with President Truman. “He said he learnt the piano because it helped him relax,” she told the Financial Times.
Yet her career was sporadic, marked by several retirements and just as many comebacks. “Every decade in my life I gave up the idea of being a musician,” she said. “In my twenties I said I’ll do this till I am 30. Then I became 30 and was still working with music, so I said I would stop when I was 40, and so on.”
The final chapter opened in 2022 when Decca announced that, having recorded ten LPs for the label in the 1950s and 1960s, Ruth Slenczynska was to release My Life in Music, a new solo piano album. Each track recalls a composer or pianist she had known: Samuel Barber, who was a longtime friend; Vladimir Horowitz, at whose memorial service in 1989 she played a Chopin prelude; and, of course, Rachmaninov.
Ruth Slenczynska was born in Sacramento, California, on January 15 1925, the only child of Polish immigrants: Josef Slenczynska, a disappointed, frustrated and arrogant violinist whose career was far from successful, and his wife Dorothy, née Goldstein.
In her memoir Forbidden Childhood (with the critic Louis Biancolli, 1957), Ruth Slenczynska told how when she was just two hours old her father supposedly took one look at her hands and burst into tears of joy. “Look at those sturdy wrists,” he said between sobs. “Notice the way her thumb is separate from the rest of her hand. Look at the tip of her fingers. I swear to you, Mamma, that’s a musician.”
He soon realised that she would not be the violinist he had hoped for. Instead, by the age of four she was practising the piano for nine hours a day. Josef ruled her life, beating her mercilessly if she made mistakes and withholding meals if she answered back.
“The moment I missed a note I got a whack across my cheek,” she wrote. “If the mistake was bad enough, I was almost hurled bodily from the piano.” Her description of his physical and psychological tyranny has been described as “a story of unbelievable cruelty and equally unbelievable achievement”.
On one occasion she asked what would happen if she erred during a concert. “Father very obligingly told me that people went to concerts with bags full of rotten eggs and vegetables, particularly tomatoes, and if you hit a wrong note, these rotten eggs and vegetables, particularly tomatoes, would come flying at you.” The following day she missed a note while practising some Beethoven. “Without a word, Father disappeared through the sliding door, strode into the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, reappeared through the sliding doors and threw a tomato at me. I ducked and the piano got it. Mother was furious because of the mess.”
Through some real estate dealings her father became sufficiently well-to-do to provide her with the best teachers, though one after another they were quickly fired. On one occasion she auditioned for Alexander Siloti but when she made a mistake her father slapped her face and Siloti, appalled at this behaviour, threw them both out. She went through some of the greatest European piano names of the day: Artur Schnabel, Alfred Cortot, Egon Petri, Nadia Boulanger and Hofmann.
Rachmaninov, whose gift of a necklace bearing a miniature blue egg she wore regularly for the rest of her life, was perhaps the most successful. “He was special because he was a creative artist,” she said. “It is because of Mr Rachmaninov that I think about music from the composer’s angle. That means not worrying over details … but focusing on the long line and what this music is telling you. At that point, you are a pianist, but it takes a long time. I always say you are not a real pianist until you are past the age of 60.”
Her concert schedule continued at a dizzying rate, though the proceeds were funnelled into her father’s bank account. At the age of 11 she appeared with a full orchestra in Paris, where she was hailed as the first true child prodigy since Mozart. For another seven years her star shone bright in the musical firmament, with sold-out recitals, concerto performances with leading orchestras and command performances for the crowned heads of Europe.
Yet by her late teens the once-positive reviews were becoming less enthusiastic and, perhaps inevitably, she had a breakdown. At the age of 19 she eloped with George Born, a fellow student at the University of California Berkeley where she was studying psychology and paying her way with a series of odd jobs. The parting words of her Svengali-like father as she fled the house were: “You’ll never play two notes again without me.”
For a time she withdrew from the stage, though by the early 1950s she had regained her status as a fine concert pianist, appearing during that decade more than 360 times with Arthur Fiedler and the Boston Pops. She made her Wigmore Hall recital debut in 1954, returning three years later and again in 1961, the same year as she published her second book, Music at Your Fingertips: Aspects of Pianoforte Technique.
Her troubles, however, were far from over. After a gruelling concert tour of South Africa in 1963 was quickly followed by intensive recording sessions in Vienna and performances around South America, she had another breakdown. She sought refuge at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where in 1964 she was appointed artist-in-residence. She now lived on her own terms, teaching, writing articles and only occasionally giving live performances. Her own pedagogical style was warm and caring, in direct contrast to that of her father.
A diminutive figure whose manner was once described as “that of a cloistered nun on an outing”, she retired in 1987 and moved to New York City where, until the Decca release in 2022, she was largely forgotten by all but the cognoscenti of the piano world. Occasionally a label would re-release a couple of her old recordings, such as Ivory Classics in the early 2000s, but otherwise she now played the piano purely for pleasure.
Ruth Slenczynska’s marriage to Born, who turned out to be a younger version of her tyrannical father, was dissolved in 1954. In 1967 she married James Kerr, a professor of political science at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. He died in 2001 and she had no children.
Ruth Slenczynska, born January 15 1925, died April 22 2026
[Source: Daily Telegraph]
