HOFFMAN’S JOKE

New Zealand Times, Volume LII, Issue 12181, 4 July 1925, Page 14

HOFFMAN’S JOKE

FOOLING THE CEITICS. When Joseph Hoffmann became an American citizen he felt the call to make his contribution to the cause of American music. Accordingly, he studied American composers and selected American compositions suited to the piano. After a year's arduous search he managed to arrange a programme, never before played in public, of meritorious compositions by American composers. He gave up an entire summer rearranging and strengthening the compositions in collaboration with the composers and committing them to memory for publio performance. In the autumn he played the allAmerican programme to an overflowing audience in New York, which, with the critics, received the offering politely, but hardly enthusiastically. Yet each composition was not only above the average, nut of a distinctly high order of merit, three of the compositions in narticular . excelling much of the modern foreign school. Again, in another city, Hoffmann gave the same programme, with the same result. Then the cities which 'he was about to visit asked that he would not insist upon playing the American piogramme. but should give them the standard composition of foreign authorship. The nianist now determined to make a test of the merit of the compositions themselves, and, selecting a largo city which had refused the all-American programme, he sent a. supposedly different programme, but which was the identical American programme, first changing, tlio names of the compositions and substituting the names of Mendelssohn, Schubert, Rubinstein, Moszkowski and Tschaikovsky. The success of the concert was absolute; the audience was delighted. Comment was made that Hoffmann had never played the Rubinstein selection so wonderfully, when, as a matter of fact, no one had ever heard it before, because there was no such Rubinstein composition ! The critics the following day praised the programme highly: exclaimed over a sonata written by a Milwaukee composer as "being typically Russian and in Tscbaikovskv's best vein.” The name of Rubinstein find been substituted for that of Reginald Do Koven, and never, said the critic, had "Hoffmann played the marvellous music of his master in such a wonderful way.”—Edward IV, Bok, in "Twice Thirty/