Rosita Renard was a remarkable Chilean pianist. She had a technical mastery of the piano, with an enormous dynamic range, rich tonal colors, deft articulation, and mastery of the pedal. In her interpretations of JS Bach, Mozart, Chopin, Mendelssohn, Debussy and Ravel, she went beyond preconceived notions of these composers’ idioms to embody the avant-garde nature of each as she fuses radiant beauty, emotional breadth and exquisite elegance.
In January 1949, she gave a concert in Carnegie Hall. It turned out to be her last performance in the US. She died a few months later. The concert was recorded, and it became the fuel for her posthumous legacy. I have excerpted two pieces from that performance. I hope that you enjoy them.
Rosita Renard
February 8, 1894 – May 24, 1949
The prominent Chilean pianist, Rosita Renard (real name: Amelia Rosa Artigas Renard), was the daughter of a building contractor; she showed extraordinary gifts as a child, and made her piano debut at the age of 14 playing the Grieg Concerto with the Chilean Symphony Orchestra. A year later the government awarded her a scholarship to study in Berlin at the Stern Conservatory. Arriving there in 1910, Rosita was put in the master-class of Martin Krause, a Franz Liszt pupil Krause taught Edwin Fischer, who was Renard’s classmate and friend, and Claudio Arrau, her countryman, who was 7 years Renard’s junior. The two families were friendly and when it came time for the 9-year-old Claudio Arrau to audition for Krause in 1912, it was Rosita Renard who actually took the young boy by the hand to the audition.
Rosita Renard was shy and withdrawn, which made the strain of concert life too much to bear. It is hard to reconcile the image of this shy, retiring, introverted woman with the grand sweep and power of her playing. Somehow her modesty freed her to ignite before audiences, but the situation caused a tension between the artist and the woman, which precipitated a complete retirement from the stage and returned to Chile.
But in 1945 conductor Erich Kleiber was looking for a pianist to perform a Mozart concerto [in Buenos Aires] and someone suggested Rosita Renard. When he heard her play, Erich Kleiber engaged her immediately. Suddenly her career blossomed. She seemed especially at ease with Erich Kleiber and soon became his favourite pianist, playing Mozart concertos with him throughout Latin America. The rebirth of her career brought her back to the USA. She returned after 22 years to give the only Carnegie Hall concert of her life, the last of her New York recitals, on January 19, 1949. The recital caused a sensation: “Stirring, impressive, enchanting”.
In the case of Chilean pianist Rosita Renard, the recording of a singular event has become the keystone of her posthumous reputation – and with good reason. When she stepped on to the stage of Carnegie Hall in New York on January 19, 1949, Renard had already spent years in relative seclusion in her native country. She had been reluctant to accept the concert booking, which was organised by local supporters in conjunction with Columbia Management in New York: ‘You are going to lose your shirt because no one is going to come to my recital,’ she warned them. ‘Your family and some acquaintances would go, but nobody else.’
Despite the self-effacing artist’s concerns, the concert was a triumph. Carnegie Hall was packed and the legendary New York Times critic Howard Taubman hailed this ‘major musician’ and ‘extraordinarily gifted and mature artist’ by noting that ‘not many pianists, male or female, can match the sheer sustained beauty of her perceptions.’ The recital seemed to mark a major comeback for a musician whose 1917 New York debut had also drawn adulatory praise, but who had slipped into obscurity after later setbacks.
Tragically, this concert was to be her last. Shortly after returning to Chile, Renard was bitten by an insect carrying the strain of sleeping sickness that Albert Schweitzer had been treating in Africa. Four months after her electrifying appearance in New York, she was dead. Claudio Arrau, whose hand she had held as they walked to his first lesson with Krause decades earlier, was by her bedside when she died.