Beethoven’s Egmont Overture and Schumann’s Carnaval.

Then he set off, his

route taking him through Basel, Coblentz, Frankfurt-am-Main, Düsseldorf,
Barmen, Krefelt, Elberfelt, Cologne, The Hague, and Rotterdam. From there he
again wrote to Edith Raden to thank her for her “kind letter,” which he had
received a few days earlier in Cologne.13 The demands placed on him by eager
concert organizers had led him to make a number of appearances in small Ger-
man towns, such as Barmen and Krefelt, where he was astonished to hear local
townspeople saying, for example, “Yesterday we performed Handel’s Messiah,”
or “at the next concert we are giving Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with a big
chorus of two hundred singers.” “Will we ever live to hear people in Tula, Tam-
bov, or Orenburg talking about performing Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar ?” he la-
mented to Raden. “Try to ensure that the Russian Music Society sees in this its
main task or else it will lose its purpose and à la langue will be worthy of ridi-
cule.”

Paris and London

From 19 March to 29 April 1868 Rubinstein gave eight concerts in Paris.
His ¤rst Paris concert took place at the Salle Herz:

Rubinstein: Piano Concerto No. 4

Prelude and fugue
Sarabande, Passepied, Courante
and Gavotte from Op. 38
Nocturne
Caprice
Barcarolle
Etude in C “On false notes”
Mozart: Rondo in A minor
Mendelssohn: Scherzo a capriccio in F
minor
Beethoven-Rubinstein: March from The Ruins of Athens

In his third Paris concert at the Salle Herz on 3 April he performed his Piano
Concerto No. 3 under the baton of Camille Saint-Saëns. It had been ten years
since the two men had ¤rst met, and the young Frenchman was beginning to
score his ¤rst successes as a composer. He greatly admired Rubinstein’s playing
and found it in no way inferior to Liszt’s, even though the two pianists were
quite different. If Liszt was an eagle, then Rubinstein was a lion, and Saint-Saëns
vividly recalled the way the latter stroked the keyboard with his huge sheathed
claw.14 “And when he joined forces with the orchestra itself what an amazing
role the instrument played under his ¤ngers through this sea of sonority! Only
lightning passing through a storm cloud can give any idea of it. . . . And how he
could make the piano sing. By what sorcery did these velvety sounds have a
lingering duration, which they do not have and could not have under the ¤n-
gers of others.”15 A token of the high esteem in which Rubinstein held Saint-
Saëns can be seen in the rather ®attering request for a new concerto with which

Europe and America Concert Tour 127