in June of the following year he returned to Peterhof where he died four months

later.
For the most part Rubinstein had forged his way through life with barely a
backward glance. Fais ce que tu dois, advienne ce qui pourra is the advice he
gave his daughter, Anna, when she was about to take her examinations, but it
could also have served as his own mantra. Do what you must and come what
may, had served him throughout his life, in all his personal endeavors and had
given him the condence to overcome problems however great they were. This
extreme bullishness tends to obscure the fact that this complex and in many
ways contradictory man had a vulnerable side. The self-doubts that plagued
him in later years became manifest at rst in humorous asides, as, for instance,
when he remarked wryly in 1880: This year humanity can breathe easilyit
will not be cheered by any new compositions of mine!? Seven years later he
told the German composer, Carl Reinecke, that my compositions only please
because of me, and, in the nal analysis, that is not a sufciently well-founded
reason to carry on writing. Enormous industry had eventually led Rubinstein
to the belief that he had written himself out, and when his publisher, Barthold
Senff, brought out a catalogue of his complete works as part of the 1889 jubilee
celebrations, far from being pleased, he felt only utter disenchantment. Yet again
in 1892 he declared to his sister, Soya, that he planned to give up composing
but once more was drawn back to it. A lifetime of perpetual toil had become a
habit he found impossible to give up.
***
One glance at the extensive bibliographies on Rubinstein provided by Catherine
Drinker Bowen and Larry Sitsky reveals an alarming array of source materials
for the would-be biographer to assimilate. The majority is contained in latenineteenth and early-twentieth-century newspapers, periodicals, and other
publications that are not always easy for researchers to nd and are of variable
quality and usefulness. Some are simply too specic for a general biography
such as aspects of keyboard interpretation, pedaling, and so on; others make up
a large corpus of what could be called memoirist literature. Although some of
this material is of value, it is too often anecdotal in character and lacks the benet of rsthand information. Rubinstein, for example, atly refused to provide
Eugen Zabel, the journalist and editor of the Nationalzeitung with any details
for his biography, Ein Knstlerleben, published by Senff in 1892, and the author
was forced to approach Tchaikovsky (in vain, as it happens) in an effort to elicit
information about Rubinsteins early years at the Conservatory.7 In the present
work this author has tried to allow Rubinstein to speak for himself, adding commentaries, where necessary, for the sake of narrative structure and clarity. He
has also tried to be guided by the published documentary material only, avoiding, as far as possible, anecdotal descriptions. At times this has resulted in rather
arid listings of concert itineraries and programs, but since this was the nature
of Rubinsteins career as a virtuoso, excluding these details would have somehow robbed him of stature. The concert programs, and particularly those of the
Introduction xxiii