War Prodigy

The war all but destroyed Andre Wasowski's nation, but it sent him on a concert tour which made him the most widely acclaimed young pianist in Europe. Last week Rome joined Vienna and Moscow in calling the gaunt, 25-year-old Polish pianist the greatest player of Chopin in modern times.

In 1939 Wasowski was known only in Lwow, where he took lessons from his piano-teaching mother and played solos with the Lwow Philharmonic Society. When the Russians entered Poland they heard his fiercely impassioned interpretations of Chopin, packed him off to play in Russia. In Kharkov he performed nine times in three days ("It got too much for my nerves but I must say, it improved me technically"). After 186 Russian concerts, he returned to Lwow and got there just a few days before the Germans.

Nazis forbade Polish music, so Wasowski played clandestinely in basements for handfuls of Poles who risked their lives to hear Chopin's familiar polonaises and nocturnes. Says Wasowski: "I think it was then I found Chopin's soul." Once at Warsaw he watched from his window a mass execution of 23 Poles. "I saw them placed against walls--eyes bound. They calmly sang the Polish national hymn. Madness seized me. I rushed to the rickety piano which was placed in the back room, and I accompanied them. I suppose they can't have heard me, because the Germans apparently didn't."

The Nazis wanted him to tour Germany, playing "anything but Chopin." When he refused, they put him into a work battalion digging trenches. One night he ran away ("Thank God I have long legs"), was smuggled into Austria to join the Polish colony in Vienna. He played Chopin for music-loving Austrians in Salzburg's Mozarteum, Vienna's Musikvereins-Saal. After a private recital in Rome an impresario arranged Andre's first public concert. It was a sellout.

What most impresses critics is the way Wasowski soft-pedals Chopin's sentimental lyricism, to stress the vitality and militancy of the music. Says Andre: "In my conviction, Chopin is not a sentimentalist. On the contrary when I am at the piano I feel his power and anguished revolutionary might." After a series of concerts in Rome, Wasowski will play in Amsterdam. To any American he meets, he says: "How can I get to the United States?"

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