關於愛，我是個小學生。

William Kapell was born in New York City on September 20, 1922, and grew up in the eastside neighborhood of Yorkville, Manhattan, where his parents owned a Lexington Avenue bookstore. His father was of Spanish-Russian ancestry and his mother of Polish descent. Dorothea Anderson La Follette (the wife of Chester La Follette) met Kapell at the Third Street Music School and became his teacher giving him lessons several times a week at her studio on West 64th Street. Kapell later studied with pianist Olga Samaroff, former wife of conductor Leopold Stokowski, at the Juilliard School.

Kapell won his first competition at the age of ten and received as a prize a turkey dinner with the pianist José Iturbi. In 1941, he won the Philadelphia Orchestra's youth competition as well as the prestigious Naumburg Award. The following year, the Walter W. Naumburg Foundation sponsored the 19-year-old pianist's New York début, a recital which won him the Town Hall Award for the year's outstanding concert by a musician under 30. He was immediately signed to an exclusive recording contract with RCA Victor.

Kapell achieved fame while in his early twenties, in part as a result of his performances of Aram Khachaturian's Piano Concerto in D-flat. His 1946 world premiere recording of the piece with Serge Koussevitzky and the Boston Symphony Orchestra was a sell-out hit. Eventually, he became so associated with the work that he was referred to in some circles as "Khachaturian Kapell." Besides his exciting pianism and stupendous technical gifts, Kapell's good looks and mop of unruly black hair helped make him a hit with the public.

By the late 1940s, Kapell had toured the United States, Canada, Europe and Australia to immense acclaim and was widely considered the most brilliant and audacious of his generation of young American pianists. On May 18, 1948, he married Rebecca Anna Lou Melson, with whom he had two children. She was a fine pianist herself, having been a student of Sergei Tarnowsky, the teacher of Vladimir Horowitz.

Early on, there was a tendency to typecast Kapell as a performer of flashy repertoire. While his technique was exceptional, he was a deep and versatile musician, and was memorably impatient with what he considered shallow or sloppy music making. His own repertoire was very diverse, encompassing works from J. S. Bach to Aaron Copland, who so admired Kapell's performances of his Piano Sonata that he was writing a new work for him at the time of the pianist's death. Kapell practiced up to eight hours a day, keeping track of his sessions with a notebook and clock. He also set aside time from his busy concert schedule to work with the musicians he most admired, including Artur Schnabel, Pablo Casals, and Rudolf Serkin. Kapell also approached Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz (whose East 94th Street townhouse was diagonally across the street from the Kapells' apartment) for lessons, but they demurred. Horowitz later commented that there was nothing he could have taught Kapell.

Death and aftermath
Kapell played the final concert of his Australian tour in Geelong, Victoria, on October 22, 1953, a recital which included a performance of Chopin's "Funeral March" Sonata. Days after the concert, he set off on his return flight to the United States, telling reporters at Mascot Airport he would never return to Australia because of the harsh comments from some Australian critics. He was aboard BCPA Flight 304 when on the morning of October 29, 1953, the plane, descending to land in fog, struck the treetops and crashed on Kings Mountain, south of the San Francisco airport. Everyone on board died. His friend, broadcaster Alistair Cooke, covered Kapell's death in his Letter from America on October 30, 1953.

Famed musician Isaac Stern set up the William Kapell Memorial Fund to bring notable musicians to the USA for wider experience. The Australian violinist Ernest Llewellyn, a long-time friend of Stern's, was the inaugural recipient in 1955.

The fascination with Kapell's playing has continued in the decades since his death. Pianists including Eugene Istomin, Gary Graffman, Leon Fleisher and Van Cliburn, and many others have acknowledged Kapell's influence. Fleisher stated that Kapell was "the greatest pianistic talent that this country has ever produced". Kapell's widow, Anna Lou Dehavenon (1926–2012), undertook a career as an expert on homelessness in New York in part as a result, she said, of her own experience of suddenly becoming a single mother with no income. For the rest of her life she worked to keep her late husband's recordings before the public.

Kapell's estate sued BCPA, Qantas (which had taken over BCPA in 1954), and BOAC (which was alleged to have sold Kapell the ticket). In 1964, more than ten years after the crash, Kapell's widow and two children were awarded US$924,396 in damages. The award was overturned on appeal in 1965.

Kapell International Piano Competition and Festival
In 1986, the University of Maryland's piano competition was renamed the William Kapell International Piano Competition in Kapell's honor. It became quadrennial in 1998 and is currently held at the university's Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center.

~ Wiki

here's a footnote in youtube:

This sonata (Chopin Sonata 2 in B-flat Minor, Op.35) was recorded from a broadcast by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on October 22, 1953.  The recital, in Geelong, was Mr. Kapell's last.  Recorded on acetate, the sonata was not transferred to tape until many years later.  Extensive restoration has not eliminated all the defects of the acetate recording; however, it has made it possible to perceive the musical qualities of this historic performance.  Mr. Kapell was killed in a plane crash on October 29, 1953, returning from this extended tour in Australia.

The following article by Claudia Cassidy appeared in the Chicago Tribune on March 21, 1954

Sometimes one question answers another, much as you wish it were not true.  For months now, those to whom William Kapell's playing meant something so deeply personal they cannot contemplate its loss have been writing to ask if we can look forward to its like again.  And a man who tells me I wrote this asks me to repeat it: “The gods are good to the public.  They make endless variations on a similar theme, and they furnish brilliant replacements.  But they understand artists.  When it comes to the real thing, they never make more than one of a kind.”

Perhaps I did write that.  In essence I know it is true.  I know it is true that we will not hear a Kapell again.  He was one of a kind, special.  But because of him, as of every artist who leaves an imprint on those who listen, music will be richer, who bereft.  In what amounted to about 10 years of public performance he crowded the treasures of a lifetime.  Many of us – I had not even suspected how many – loved his playing best of all.  We who listen deeply are always seeking, and in him we found what we sought.

He was 30 when last played here, not quite a year ago.  Remembering that last music, the Brahms, the Chopin, The Prokofieff, the Schubert, what do you think of this: “Conceive to yourself the treasures of poetry and passion that this young genius poured into them, the melodic grace of them, the humor and fantasy, the unleashed furies, the somber dreams!  He is alone on his tightrope; below is the gaping crowd awaiting the false step.  The imminence of the night that is about to descend on him increases the fury of creation in him.  And it increases love.  He is a man possessed with love.”  Romain Rolland wrote that of Beethoven at 30, just before deafness struck him down.

No, there are never two of a kind, but there are endless variations on a similar theme.  Those who knew Beethoven as pianist spoke of his “poetic fury.”  We heard that in Kapell’s Chopin, in the rapturous flood of the Sonata in B Minor, the monumental outpouring of the B-Flat Minor.

Perhaps that is why the pianists who move us most deeply so often look sad.  Kapell from the start hurried to the piano, turned his head a little away from the audience for his own listening and was at home the instant his fingers touched the keys.  A great performance drained him, yet encircled him beyond telling.  I once asked him how it felt to play such music, and he said, “It made me feel useful.”

So I find myself remembering the hooded sadness of Rachmaninoff's face over the spacious sweep of his playing.  I think of the searching melancholy that was Paderewski's pale face in this chosen dusk, the Paderewski who at 70 still played with the white fire of lightning.  I remember the rue of Schnabel, who once told me, “Only a few people like me – but fortunately the few are numerous.”

No, it is not a gay life, this world of the supreme artist who is of necessity unique.  It is lonely and perilous, exposed in a way the man in the mob can never comprehend.  Every such artist must at times wonder if it is worth the struggle, but in his heart he knows he has no choice.  I doubt if he would change if he could, once he glimpses his mountaintop through the mist of that struggle and knows what it holds in air and view.

So I look at the letters that never stop coming, and all I can offer is the hope of another variation on a similar theme, a brilliant replacement not too far in the distance, coming our way.  I repeat, as I must, that when it comes to the real thing, the gods never make more than one of a kind.  That is just to the artist.  That is good to the public – well, I may have thought so once.  Now I am not so sure.

讓我們一起來聽聽這位偉大天才優美的 李斯特匈牙利狂想曲第十一號 吧~