Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Culture

Ignaz Friedman: Great Jewish Pianist

The Polish Jewish pianist Ignaz Friedman may not be a household name, but his majestic artistry, honored by a brilliantly researched new biography by Allan Evans, “Ignaz Friedman: Romantic Master Pianist,” just published by Indiana University Press, makes him of urgent interest to anyone who loves piano music.

A Naxos CD reissue series, establishes Friedman as an interpreter of sovereign moods with the improvisatory freedom of an action painter.

“Poland evoked poverty and antisemitism in Friedman’s mind,” Evans tells us, but he fortunately found a philosemitic teacher in Vienna, the Polish Catholic Theodor Leschetizky, who famously said that “three indispensables” were needed for a virtuoso, to be Slavic, Jewish and a child prodigy. A Viennese nobleman offered to pay for Friedman’s studies if the youngster converted to Catholicism, to which Friedman’s mother replied: “My son is not for sale.”

This staunch independence continued throughout his lifetime, in heroic performances of Chopin and in adopting his teacher Leschetizky’s esthetic criteria. In 1924, when a Jewish child prodigy played for Friedman, his reaction was: “As a Jewish boy, he should have played better.” As fascism conquered Europe, Friedman pleaded with a fellow Polish Jew, star pianist Josef Hofmann, long established in America, for help, and Hofmann abjectly did not lift a finger. Instead, Friedman eventually fled to Australia, where, as a chain smoker since age ten (!) he developed health problems and died in 1948.

Although not religiously observant, he asked a student to recite the Kaddish for him. Whether in bewitching versions of Mendelssohn’s “Song without Words” or dazzlingly free and virtuosic Chopin and Hummel, Friedman is a pianist to be permanently treasured.

Listen here to Ignaz Friedman discuss Chopin on Australian radio.

Watch a brief, silent home movie of Friedman toddling along Fifth Avenue in Manhattan below.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

2X match on all Passover gifts!

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines.
You must comply with the following:

  • Credit the Forward
  • Retain our pixel
  • Preserve our canonical link in Google search
  • Add a noindex tag in Google search

See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.