Juilliard Receives Prodigy’s Scores Stolen by the Nazis
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More than 60 years after the piano prodigy Arthur Rubenstein came to New York to escape World War II, his musical library has made its way to the city.
The Rubenstein family is donating the set of 71 manuscripts and musical scores, stolen by the Nazis during the war, to the Juilliard School.
The Berlin State Library, where the scores were housed for decades, returned them to the family last year, the first instance the institution has given back Jewish property stolen during World War II.
The works, which included musical scores dedicated to Rubenstein and signed by the composers, were stolen out of his apartment in Paris in 1939 after he and his family fled Europe before the Nazi invasion.
Rubenstein was born in Poland in 1887, and was recognized as a piano prodigy by age 7. He toured Europe playing concerts until he was forced to flee to America during the war, and he eventually became an American citizen. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1976.
After his apartment was raided during the war, the manuscripts made their way to Russia. In the 1950s, some were returned to Germany, although the Berlin library and international musicologists were able to identify them as belonging to Rubenstein only three years ago, more than a decade after his death. They were then handed over to the family. The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, which has the task of returning lost artwork and other property to victims of World War II, has noted that it has been much more difficult to determine the owners of stolen books and papers than of works of art.
An unknown quantity of Rubenstein’s property still remains in Russia, which has refused to return cultural property the country acquired during World War II.
Juilliard students celebrated the arrival of the manuscripts in New York last night with a small concert that included some of the pianist’s favorite pieces by Chopin and Brahms.
Three of his four children attended — Eva, Paul, and Alina Rubenstein — along with one of the musicologists who helped identify the works as his, Willem DeVries.
The documents will now be available for study as a part of the special collections at the performing arts school.
