I had known only sonata,java,Passacaglia, and transcriptions of chopin(etudes and waltz) and wohin?. I was able to know some new Godowsky. Beautiful melody, left hand,harmony...he had incredible and unique sense of music as much as Chopin, Rachmaninov, Debussy, Alkan. Now he is not popular like them but maybe opportunity to listen to his music is increasing. This is because music lovers all over the world won't let him alone.
The Passacaglia is so monstrously difficult, Horowitz actually declared it "unplayable". Even now, many concert pianists will not play it, despite it being being one of the greatest Baroque style piano pieces even written.
Lois Walsh Actually, he studied with Ernst Rudorff in Berlin. Later, he became Saint-Saëns' protégé. Here's a fun fact: Godowsky's son was the co-inventor of Kodachrome film.
Ernst Rudorff teached Godowsky almost nothing, and the tutoring period was very short, some three months. Of this period Rudorff was absent for some time, as he was traveling in Italy. When Godowsky went to Rudorff's class, he was already able to play Mendelssohn's Rondo Capriccioso and Chopin's first Scherzo. His magnum opus, the fiendishly complex and difficult 53 studies on Chopin's etudes Godowsky created alone without anybody's help, as a fruit of his own experiments. Until compelling proof is presented, the fact remains that Godowsky acquired his unique transcendental technique in an autodidactic way. No small feat, considering that Godowsky lived in the era of Moriz Rosenthal, Josef Hofmann, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Ignaz Friedman. Remarkably Godowsky's playing caused even Busoni (himself also an autodidact) to express sentiments of jealousy.
