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She soon learned that she was wrong. Rachmaninoff, who was in the prime of her enormous career, was so impressed with her that he offered to teach Slenczynska in her Paris apartment. Nine decades later, she is believed to be his only living student.
As her 99th birthday approached last month, Slenczynska thought a lot about those lessons with Rachmaninoff, as well as her remarkable career, which began when she was 4 years old and her legs were too small to reach the piano pedals, so that they lifted them. .
After almost 95 years in front of the keys, he decided it was time to retire.
“I’m a very old lady,” Slenczynska said. “I decided you don’t need to do as much when you’re 99.”
Her final project was important to her and a fitting coda to her music career.
In 2022, at age 97, he recorded his first album in almost 60 years for Decca Classicsa classical music record label.
“My life in music” an album on which Slenczynska plays pieces by Barber, Bach and her favorite childhood teacher, Rachmaninoff, ended a lifetime of seeking solace through music, she said. Her childhood was a punishment.
“In the bad times, it was music that got me through,” said Slenczynska, who now lives with one of her former piano students near Hershey, Pennsylvania. “As a kid, music was always my escape.”
Now retired, Slenczynska said she is happy to enjoy the quiet as she reflects on nearly a century of performing. He Classic FM radio website He presented his story on his 99th birthday last month.
Slenczynska was born in Sacramento, but her family moved to Australia to be near her father’s brother when she was nine months old. She said she was a year and a half when she first sat at the piano with her father, Joseph Slenczynska, a Polish immigrant and violinist.
“My father started showing me piano notes when my mother was in the hospital giving birth to her second baby,” Slenczynska said. “He was restless and he had nothing else to do, so he gave me a little lesson.”
By age 3, his father had implemented a rigorous practice routine. Slenczynska recalled him being domineering and abusive.
“I wanted more than I could get out of everyone, including me,” he said. “What would you call a person who hits you for every little mistake you made? “It was miserable.”
As she grew up, Slenczynska said her father made her practice piano nine hours a day while her two younger sisters played outside. Her family moved to Paris when she was 4 years old so that she would have access to the best teachers as she progressed in her piano studies.
“I wanted to join (my sisters), but if I didn’t want to practice, they would chase me with a stick,” she said. “But I found comfort and beauty in music. It was a way to get away (from my father). “I could think about how beautiful the music was and I didn’t feel so bad.”
Slenczynska’s difficult early years are recounted in her 1957 memoirs, “Forbidden Childhood.”
He was 6 years old when he performed in concert in Berlin in 1931, and he was 7 years old when he performed with a full orchestra in Paris. Her programs classified her as one of the greatest child prodigies since Mozart.
“Were you afraid to act? Of course,” she said. “I still am. But it’s something you get used to. I would just get absorbed in the music.”
She soon became her family’s source of income, she said, with concert tours filling her schedule and a private tutor to keep her on track with her schoolwork in Paris.
Having filled in for Rachmaninoff in Los Angeles when she was nine, she and her father returned home and received an invitation to visit Rachmaninoff at the Paris residential hotel where he practiced during the week, she said.
“He lived in Switzerland, but his wife wasn’t very happy listening to him practice 17 hours a day,” Slenczynska said. “So he would come to Paris to practice from Monday to Friday.”
He found out he was going to play for Rachmaninoff one day when his father interrupted his practice to tell him he would be playing for the legendary pianist the following week. He remembered that it was Wednesday.
“I was as scared as I could be,” she said. “I said, ‘I can’t play for him,’ but my dad said, ‘Well, you’re going to do it,’ and we went the next week to see him.”
As they approached Rachmaninoff’s Paris apartment, Slenczynska said she heard someone practicing the piano very slowly and thought, ‘My God, this student is not very good.'”
“Then we rang the doorbell and the music suddenly stopped and I realized it was him,” she said. “This very tall man opened the door and looked at me. He pointed his long finger at me and said: ‘that plays the piano?'”
She said she couldn’t stop shaking when he called her and her father inside.
“He wanted me to stop shaking, so he took a piece of paper out of his pocket and drew me a picture of his boat,” Slenczynska recalls. “I started laughing imagining myself on this boat, and then he knew it was okay for me to play.”
Rachmaninov knew what it was like to be a child prodigy: his aristocratic mother had given him her first piano lesson at 4 years old. his famous Piano Concerto No. 2 It was written when I was in my twenties.
That day, in his apartment, Rachmaninoff asked Slenczynska to play him one of his favorite pieces in a different key.
“The piece was in E flat major and he asked me to play it in G major,” he said. “That meant I had to transpose. So very slowly I did it. Then he asked me if she had played any of his music and I said no. I thought he only wrote great concertos.”
Rachmaninov took out a pen and wrote: “Prelude in D major, op. 23, no. 4” on a piece of paper and handed it to him, he said.
“He said, ‘Buy this music and play it for me next Wednesday,’” she said. “That’s how I got my first lesson.”
For the next two summers, she was Rachmaninoff’s student and enjoyed the tea and Russian pastries her niece served her after her lessons, Slenczynska said. Her famous teacher gave her a Fabergé egg necklace, which she still wears in her honor.
Slenczynska said Rachmaninoff taught her to think about how the music relates to the composer and the importance of adding story and emotion to each piece.
“He was more than a teacher: he was a kind person, like a grandfather,” she said.
The great piano master, who died in 1943, mentored and taught only a few students in your life, including Gina Bachauerwho died in 1976.
“I am now his only living student,” Slenczynska said of Rachmaninoff. “That’s something I never expected, but then again, life never turns out the way you expect.”
When Slenczynska was 15, she said she fled her father’s abuse and struck out on her own. She gave up acting and studied music at the University of California, and in 1944 she met and married another student there, she said. They finally divorced.
In 1954, Slenczynska resumed her concert career and accepted a position as artist in residence at Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville, where she taught piano until 1987.
He has performed for five U.S. presidents, including Ronald Reagan, Jimmy Carter, John F. Kennedy, Herbert Hoover and Harry S. Truman, who was an amateur pianist, he said.
“President Truman called me to the White House and asked me to play a duet with him,” he recalled. “I really should have taken a photo.”
While teaching in Illinois, Slenczynska married James Kerr, a political science professor, in 1967. “He was the love of my life,” she said.
After Kerr’s death in 2001, Slenczynska moved to New York City to teach students and judge piano competitions, she said. She remained there until August 2020 during the pandemic, when one of her former students, Pennsylvania pianist and music teacher Shelly Moorman-Stahlman, convinced Slenczynska to move in with her and her husband.
“The pandemic was not a good time for seniors to go out and we lived in a small community where she could continue her walks safely,” Moorman-Stahlman said, adding that Slenczynska does not have children.
“Ruth is an extraordinary woman; she has a unique ability to always look forward,” he added. “We have a lot of fun together and she is still incredibly alert and moving very well. “She still insists on going upstairs.”
Although she has retired from acting, Slenczynska said she enjoys listening to others play the piano and occasionally offers advice to promising students.
“I’m a very lucky woman and my hands are as young and pain-free as they were when I was 30,” she said. “It’s because of the music. “It will always be an important part of who I am.”