Ignacy Paderewski visited California for the first time during his third concert tour in the United States.  By then he was a superstar, an idol to all ladies from the age of four to one hundred-and-four, and a subject of absolute envy to every man in America.  With his dignified, but unassuming bearing and looks of an Archangel walking on earth, he already succeeded in bringing the East Coast and central United States to a collective state of bewitchment, labeled simply as Paddy-mania.  In 1896 the time had finally come to charm the rest of the country. 

   America became for him a land from a fairy tale – he adored her, and she loved him back unreservedly.  Thousands of people flocked to his concerts.  The best-dressed ladies of New York ordered their stockings embroidered with music notes from his famous Minuet in G.  On railroad stations, along the routes he took in his private luxury wagon, curious crowds of admirers convened to cheer their star.  Children often received “Paderewski” candies or little toys in the form of a piano with a miniature Paderewski figurine at the keyboard.  The most popular hand washing soap was named “Paderewski”, and the compulsory men's haircut, particularly in artistic circles, was of course, none other than a’ la Paderewski.

   After a “royal” reception in the great cities of the eastern part of the country, comparable in their class to European metropolises, he hurried in 1896 with his piano concerts to still sparsely inhabited state of California, whose entire population equaled merely one third of NewYork City.  San Francisco, the largest town in western America was at that time no more than half the population of Warsaw in his native Poland.

   It is impossible to guess what Paderewski knew about California when he arrived in San Diego in early February 1896.  Most likely he did not know of Hołynski’s already obsolete book, I Was at the Birth of California, that spoke about a utopian country, in which a professor of philosophy serves soup in a restaurant and a shoeblack is an avid philosopher; all are equal, and everybody makes enormous earnings.  However, fantastic stories published in press articles and spread through gossip that talked of a land in western America where a subsiding gold rush fever was just being replaced by an oil rush craze, and where all dreams of fortune were transformed into reality in the blink of an eye, must have certainly reached him.

   What a stunning experience it must have been for the Great Pianist when he had to walk nearly a mile from a little railroad station to the Fisher Opera House along a dirt road, passing on his way only one dilapidated structure, housing a doubtful in nature little gambling house!  What performing hall, what audience, what reception could this world class artist expect, coming to play a serious classical piano concert on an ordinary Thursday evening in an impoverished rural town, lost somewhere on the American-Mexican borderland?  Many years later, in his Memoirs he would say that in 1896 San Diego was “hardly a village”.

  Yet, as in every other place he went, the fairy tale like quality of Paderewski’s America manifested itself in its grand beauty in provincial San Diego.  Fisher Opera House turned out to be one of the best and most modern concert halls in California whose 1,400 seats were filled that night by a genuinely elegant and musically inclined audience.  Most of the concert listeners were the guests of the brand new, fashionable, and luxurious Hotel del Coronado because the ticket price, set between $30 and $100 in today’s money, was definitely out of reach for the majority of the town’s population.

   As if contradicting the logical order of reality, there was something quite surrealistic in the juxtaposition of the noble Paderewski and his sophisticated art with the image of San Diego and the whole state of California at the turn of the century.  On one hand, it was a land of the most dynamic development in the world, undergoing both painful and rapid transformation from a chaotic and robbing economy to the economyof a highly organized society that was quickly becoming aware of the great values this region had to offer.  On the other hand, it was still an untidy world of small towns, large farms, a poor network of second-rate roads, common illiteracy, primitive sanitary conditions, abuse of whisky, and wide-spread mugging.  It was still a time when young Californians often indulged themselves with horse racing along towns’ dusty streets and free-hand shooting at houses, street lamps, and passing by carriages.  Having in mind that background, it seems quite difficult to imagine crowds rushing by the thousands to Paderewski’s concerts.  The tickets were quite expensive yet sold like hot bagels, but what was even more peculiar some would appear in a second hand sale for several times the original price (equivalent to hundreds of today’s dollars) and still found willing buyers very quickly.

   One of  Paderewski’s few recitals at which the audience had not overflowed the concert hall, was his first performance in Los Angeles, the day after San Diego.  It may be assumed that the reason for this situation lay in financial conditions set by the artist, which the local press observed somewhat vituperatively as a“lack of healthy reasoning” on his part.  However, with this first performance in Los Angeles, then a city of 75,000, he captured instantly and forever a profound fondness for his art from all music lovers and critics of the town.  From then on, for over four decades the local press announced him as “great”, “world famous”, “shining withhis own light“, “dazzling”, and an “unmatched” artist.   Some called him the “Polish lion”, a “deathless hero”, a “magus casting an odd spell on the audience” while others attributed his name with “something magnetic” or having “irresistible influence that would draw forth the throngs wherever the soul of his art is brought forth to the light”. Many debated his “mesmeric” personality or described him as a „universally liked person”, “the most revered artist in the world”,“the idol of the musical world”, and the “dean of pianists”.  However, the true measure of a person’s greatness manifests when he or she begins to function in the common consciousness on the principle of an icon, as a value in itself, above and beyond the content of their work.  Paderewski had become an icon right after his first concerts in California and remained as such forever.  In the high circulation papers of San Francisco and Los Angeles and in each local newspaper in the state of California, his whereabouts became an irrevocable theme. Over the years the Los Angeles Times solely published nearly 250 articles about Paderewski, and more than 1,500 times his name or likeness appeared in advertising announcements, comparisons, jokes, and other forms of mention.  All his public remarks were hotly commented and prying eyes would closely observe and analyze every minute of his life to the point of complete absurdity.

   Here then, when in 1904 Paderewski was on his way to spend Christmas at Helena Modjeska’s estate of “Arden” near Anaheim, some sulky correspondent reported in the holiday issue of his paper from the railroad station Los Angeles:

The morning train on the Santa Fe, south bound, suffered a very agonizing delay yesterday morning, waiting several minutes in the rain for the arrival of certain animate and inanimate objects on the tardy Owl train from San Francisco.

It was one of the most aggravating cases on record.  The conductor swore as the rain trickled drearily down the back of his neck, the flagman balked at the slightest of his orders, the fireman turned on the oil until the superfluous waste poured in a black stream of sooty smoke from the grimy stack.  It wasall so inconsequential.  There the big San Diego train stood, eating up its own time for the absurdity of two grand pianos, eight trunks, a disheveled woman, a private secretary, three servants, a large green parrot, a package of crackers and cheese – and one little, wild-hairedman with meek eyes and an impossible nameovitch – Paderewskiski, they said, but the baggage master finally spelled it out.

The great pianist is to spend the Christmas holidays with Count Bozenta and his distinguished wife, Helena Modjeska, at “Arden”, the beautiful country home of the famous Polish couple.  Paderewski has been known personally to Mme. Modjeska and the philosophic Count from his earliest youth, and these veterans of public life regarded him almost as a foster child.

Interested local people, learning that the Owl train was late, begged the Santa Fe officials to hold their train until its arrival.  After a short argument a kindly train dispatcher, whose lonely “trick” made him master of the situation, gave consent. 

Accordingly the train waited, and presently the Paderewski retinue came up.  The pianist himself walked easily in front, but Paderewski’s Polish wife was in great excitement for fear they would be left, and the maid who held the parrot’s cage was quite “trembly”.  Behind this one came another, bearing the parrot’s crackers and cheese, and she – alas! –was the unconscious key to the whole ridiculous situation. The poor girl miscalculated the height of the car step, and down came crackers and cheese, maid and all, just as the fireman grabbed his bell cord to give a premonitory warning of the start.  The secretary dashed to the rescue. His desperate clutch at the paper parcel was forceful enough to tear it fairly asunder, and “Princess Sodas” and delicate cream from the northern diaries rolled promiscuously on the station platform. Then both maid and secretary fell to their knees in a hurried endeavor to scrape up the precious fragments of edibility.  Polly began to curse in Polish. Count Bozenta gesticulated wildly in his impatience and begged a bystander to hold his beautiful presentation bouquet while he himself lit a cigarette to calm his nerves.  Paderewski smiled and clambered aboard with a far-away look in his eyes.

With the chief attraction safely stowed, the conductor paid no more attention to the burrowing underlings, and the first slow revolution ofthe drivers left the pair hard at their salvage.  The parrot, howling in the vestibule, watched his dainties roll from the view.  A porter, coming up on the run, shoved secretary and maid up the steps at the last moment, and the coveted crackers and cheese were left to the hovering birds of the station yard.

Paderewski wears his hair a little shorter, his clothes in a little saner fashion, and speaks much better English – but he is the same Paderewski.

  Paderewski’s first concert tour in California lasted merely 25 days, from February 6 to March 2, 1896, during which he appeared in six cities and performed 14 concerts.  It was a titanic program that only a person with invincible physical condition, exceptional mental immunity, and infinite devotion to his act, could undertake and execute perfectly.  Paderewski arrived in California after he had already given 49 concerts during a three-month and nearly seven thousand miles long tour.  From San Antonio, Texas, where he gave his evening concert on February third, he left the next morning for a day and a half long journey to the Arcade station in Los Angeles, arriving there on the night of February 5.  He slept in his wagon on the station’s sidetrack, and in the morning continued to San Diego for his evening concert.  Onthe next two evenings Paderewski played in Los Angeles; the following day he spent 12 hours on the train to San Francisco, sleeping only a few hours overnight.  Then, after a hectic day of preparations, practicing, and taking care of various business arrangements, he gave again an entrancing performance, complemented with endless encores to content the audience.  Such a fast paced and arduous concert rhythm had no place anywhere in the world except America, and lasted for more than fifteen years, whenever he would return to perform there.  In later years, particularly after his return to the stage, following the several years long break for his political engagements, the intensity of his concert tours diminished a bit, but their eminence grew even more.

   In the fall of 1913 Ignacy Paderewski arrived in America for his ninth concert tour in the country.  The titanic workload of the past twenty years finally brought about the moment when his strong and resistant body declined further cooperation.  In the middle of January 1914 Paderewski was forced to suspend for some time his scheduled performances because his right arm became extremel ypainful as a result of severe neuritis.  An acquainted doctor recommended a trip to Paso Robles, a little town in San Louis Obispo County, situated exactly halfway between San Francisco and Los Angeles.  It took no more than six hours to travel to Paso Robles from either city, which in those times meant more or less as long as a crack of a whip.  Incidentally, according to the Amtrak train schedule, to travel the same route in 2008 takes five and a half hours, what today seems to be almost half of eternity.

   The particular attractions of Paso Robles were natural, rich in sulfur, hot springs and mud baths, believed to have extraordinary therapeutic and regenerative properties.  Apparently, there must have been quite a dose of genuine truth in such belief because after less than three weeks of dipping himself in bubbling mud, daily massages, and drinking mineral water, Paderewski regained manual dexterity of his right hand to the degree that allowed him to resume the broken concert tour.  An essential role in his quick recovery was played certainly by the sudden change from the hectic life of a busy performer to the idyllic quietness of a rural setting.  The town consisted of only two streets, several hundred permanent residents, and vast surroundings of uninhabited land.  The splendid climate and long walks in the dazzling scenery of rolling hills, studded with branchy oak trees (in Spanish Paso Robles means Passage of the Oaks), must have impressed Paderewskiso much that he decided to invest in the land there.  Two days before his departure from Paso Robles, on February 4, 1914, cured of his malady, Paderewski purchased over 1500 acres of land west of the town, to which, five weeks later, he added 900 acres of the adjacent land,and established his Rancho San Ignacio.  During the next two years he bought three additional parcels nearby and created the 450-acre Rancho Santa Helena in honor of his wife.  Being a well organized and methodical man, he obtained professional soil assessment for his ranches, and based on that decided to grow there both large vineyards  and orchards with almond, plum, and other fruit trees.  The best quality crop came from the grapes of the zinfandel variety.  Paderewski was not the first grower of these vines in Paso Robles, but unquestionably he became their most famous cultivator among the great pianists.  After Prohibition, wine made from zinfandel grapes grown on Rancho San Ignacio received several prestigious awards, becoming an important factor in the recognition of the Paso Robles locality as afirst-rate viticulture region.  The famous pianist and landowner, under the influence of smooth-talking local real estate agents, then decided to become an oil tycoon.  In 1917 he purchased over 2600 acres of land south of Paso Robles, near Santa Margarita.  Unfortunately, his extensive efforts to reach crude oil pools came to a bad end, even though from all surrounding parcels it was flowing in abundance. Because of that reason, perhaps, he related in his Memoirs witha dose of acrimonious sneer: “Yes, I loved Paso Robles before and afterI bought it. It proved to be another gold mine, …, a mine that you pour gold into but never take any out!”   Over the years Paderewski actually pumped into his ranches more than three million of today’s dollars, which was much more than the amount they netted when sold after his death.

   Ignace Paderewski never built a house on his ranch. During his multiple visits to Paso Robles, he always stayed in a beautiful Victorian hotel that unfortunately burned down in December 1940, several days before his planned arrival for his Christmas rest and inspection of the ranch.  Although he never set his foot in Paso Robles again, Paderewski remains alive in memory of the local people and Californians in general to this day.  In the rebuilt Paso Robles Inn, one of the banquet rooms is named after him.  Once in a while a “Paderewski Blend” appears in a limited and very special issue of red zinfandel wine, released by one of nearly 200 wineries that exist in the vicinity today.  For a number of years until 2002, the Paderewski Festival in Paso Robles enjoyed great popularity.  The earthquake that destroyed the town’s concert auditorium interrupted the Festival, butit was successfully re-activated in September of 2007.  In another event, during the annual Paderewski Lectures 2007, at the University of Southern California a life-size bronze statue was erected and unveiled to commemorate him as a recipient of an honorary doctorate bestowed in1923 by the University’s School of International Relations. 

  During the 44 years of his affiliation with California, Paderewski gave over eighty public concerts, an unaccountable number of private recitals in friendly residences, and, coming from his deeply humane and altruistic needs, multiple performances arranged impromptu to the delight of listeners.   During those forty-four years California was transformed from a bucolic, scarcely populated land, largely untouched by hallmarks of civilization, into the bustling combination of industry, commerce, movie production, science, education, and leisure; all set in a magnificent environment of natural beauty.  The provincial town of Los Angeles grew twenty times to become a true metropolis with1.5-million residents and the world capital of cinematography that in1896 did not even exist yet.  San Diego developed into a gorgeous mid-size city with 200 thousand residents.  Berkeley finally began to resemble more ancient Athens than a typical Wild West town, and along the streets of San Francisco sped tens of thousand of cars, where literally only one had existed when Paderewski arrived there for his first concert.  During one of his visits to Paso Robles in the 1920’s, Paderewski was arrested near Camarillo for reckless driving with an outrageous speed of 40 miles per hour; a road speed that thirty yearse arlier wasn’t even a subject of deliberation.

   Forty years before Paderewski’s first performance in California, Aleksander Holynski, Polish globetrotter and reporter, wrote about this land that:“…a farmer can’t complain about this soil, upon which an artist looks with indifference if not distastefully...” and that “…nature made California useful, and the role of a man is to make her enjoyable”.  It is unquestionable that Paderewski has contributed significantly to the fulfillment of Holynski’s postulate by giving, with his artistic ingenuity and charismatic personality, the ultimate enjoyment to thousands of Californians.   With his typical dignity, he also overturned the thesis about the artist’s distaste for soil.

  Paderewski radiated happiness and made the life of Californians pleasurable.  He was truly a good spirit of this land.  Therefore there was nothing unusual in the public outpouring of love and tears that occurred in 1939 when he performed his farewell concert for eight-thousand audience at the Los Angeles Shrine Auditorium, and then for almost the same large crowd of his enthusiastic admirers at the SanFrancisco Civic Exposition Auditorium.  The imperfections of the old man’s craftsmanship didn’t mean anything; with the diminishing sound of the last cords of his piano, one of the listeners jumped on the podium to kiss the pianist’s hands in a spontaneous act of admiration and thankfulness, and a critic from the San Francisco Chronicle wrote the next day:

“Tall, in a frock coat dressed figure with uncertain footstep but with colossal dignity, is far more than the most famous pianist of the world.  He is much more than the artist with the right to wear the Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire, he is the recipient of more medals and awards than one can imagine and a greater number of honorary doctorates than he can count himself.  He is even more than a man who made several fortunes only to give them away for the benefit of others.  But first of all, he is the one who having all compliments, financial rewards, and respect of the whole world at his feet, has not hesitated to push it aside, refusing profits and safety he could obtain easily, to dedicate himself entirely and exclusively to the humanitarian cause.

World has many reasons to recognize such rare today humanism, especially when success of the cause for which Paderewski fought is now in jeopardy.  In this situation what remained, was to pay him a small honor by coming yesterday to listen to him play”.
  
   When Paderewski passed away in 1941, the Los Angeles Times wrote: “Passing of deathless hero is a profound personal loss for many in Southern California”.  

   Yes, it was a great loss for Californians and for the entire world.