I had computer issues on Thursday morning, and by the time they were resolved, news had broken that Michael Tilson Thomas died. Naturally, such a huge loss to the classical music world would become the focus of my attention. But by the time I was finally able to address it, it was already well into the afternoon – and then on Friday and Saturday I have to promote my radio shows – so I’ve been unable to acknowledge the death of pianist Ruth Slenczynska.
Slenczynska, who passed on Wednesday at the age of 101, was believed to have been the last living pupil of Sergei Rachmaninoff.
Sadly, her story is an all-too-familiar one. Driven hard by a domineering father – an ambitious violinist who sustained a serious, career-ending injury on the battlefield during World War I and used his daughter a proxy to fulfill his shattered dreams – Slenczynska was ruthlessly molded into a celebrated child prodigy.
Her harrowing training involved enforced practice of up to 9 hours a day. She was kept from any society, any distraction. She was denied food, berated, and even beaten. (“The moment I missed a note, I got a crack across the cheek,” she writes in her autobiography.) When she was forced to play a recital while suffering from undiagnosed appendicitis and failed to live up to her father’s expectations, he disowned her. She wasn’t even 16 years-old. But she’d already been playing in public for ten years.
Slenczynska made her debut in Berlin at the age of 6. She performed with orchestra for the first time in Paris at the age of 7. Now at 15, she walked away from it all, attending Berkeley (where she was a psychology major) and hoping to live a normal life. She married at 19, but divorced nine years later. Still a young woman, she began to teach piano, which drew her back into the concert world.
She was artist in residence at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, a full-time position, from 1964 to 1987. In 1957, she published her memoir, “Forbidden Childhood,” which surely helped exorcise some demons. In 1968, she wrote “Music at Your Fingertips: Aspects of Pianoforte Technique.”
Her complete recordings for American Decca, set down between 1956 and 1963, were reissued as a box set by Deutsche Grammophon in 2020. Several albums were also released on Ivory Classics. In 2022, she made her final record, “Ruth Slenczynska: My Life in Music,” at the age of 97.
For interviews, she would sometimes recount her first meeting with Rachmaninoff, which took place at his Paris apartment when she was 9. In 2024, she told The Washington Post, “This very tall man opened the door and looked down at me. He pointed at me with his long finger and said, ‘THAT plays the piano?’”
If that’s not Rachmaninoff, I don’t know what is.
Even without the Rachmaninoff connection, her pedigree is breathtaking. Among her other teachers were Artur Schnabel, Egon Petri, Alfred Cortot, and Josef Hoffman.
Here’s a nice write-up by Australian Broadcasting Corporation, in which she talks about, among a great deal else, her meeting with Harry Truman. Truman, who also trained as a pianist, played a Mozart duet with her at the White House. By coincidence, I just wrote about Truman’s record collection the other day, with a link to a catalogue of the recordings he owned. In scrolling through the list, I noted there were several by Slenczynska in his library, including some of her Chopin and Liszt performances.
https://www.abc.net.au/listen/programs/legends/ruth-slenczynska/106602856
Slenczynska was born in Sacramento, CA, in 1925. In her retirement, she kept an apartment in Manhattan, but spent her last few years in Hershey, PA. After a rocky start, she seemed to pull herself together to live a fairly normal, even rewarding existence. Good for her. May she rest in peace.
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Slenczynska talks and plays Rachmaninoff in 1963
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75XnR9iGoIo
Slenczynska in a Pathé newsreel, at the age of 5
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPZiuPw-LLs
Slenczynska at 99
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lR1McqDIeLM
