[3] Then the next year Kazimierz Mikołaj Hofmann married on June 17, 1886, Matylda Franciszka Pindelska - the mother of his children, (daughter of Wincenty and Eleonora née Wyszkowska, b. in 1851 in Kraków) in the Holy Cross Basilica in Warszawa.

As a composer, Hofmann published over one hundred works, many of those under the pseudonym Michel Dvorsky, including two piano concertos and ballet music.

He was instrumental in recruiting illustrious musicians such as Efrem Zimbalist, Fritz Reiner, Marcella Sembrich, Isabella Vengerova, Moriz Rosenthal, Wilhelm Backhaus, Benno Moiseiwitsch, Abram Chasins, David Saperton, Wanda Landowska, and Leopold Auer to the Curtis faculty.

He spent his last decade in Los Angeles in relative obscurity, working on inventions and keeping a steady correspondence with associates.

Other inventions included a windscreen wiper,[11] a furnace that burned crude oil, a house that revolved with the sun, a device to record dynamics (U.S. patent number 1614984[12]) in reproducing piano rolls that he perfected just as the roll companies went out of business, and piano action improvements adopted by the Steinway Company (U.S. patent number 2263088[13]).

[17] The Josef Hofmann Piano Competition, co-sponsored by the American Council for Polish Culture and the University of South Carolina Aiken, was established in his honor in 1994.

[18] Anton Rubinstein heard the seven-year-old Hofmann play Beethoven's C minor Piano Concerto in Warsaw and declared him to be an unprecedented talent.

[21] In 1887, an American tour was arranged, with three months of performances that included fifty recitals, seventeen of which were at the Metropolitan Opera House.

In a three-day period Hofmann heard in Berlin's new Bechstein Hall recitals by Hans von Bülow, Johannes Brahms and Rubinstein, and commented on their radically different playing.

[23] After his departure from the Curtis Institute in 1938, a combination of his drinking, marital problems and a loss of interest in performing caused a rapid deterioration in his artistic abilities.

[27]) His concert instruments had subtle action changes for faster repetition, two pedals rather than three (he liked the older Steinway trap work geometry), faultless regulation, and were accompanied on tours by his own recital chair, built with a short folding back and a 1½" slope from rear to front.

After playing Hofmann's special concert instrument in the Steinway New York basement, Gunnar Johansen reported that the piano had the biggest sonority of any he had ever tried.

[28] By his own admission, Sergei Rachmaninoff, in his 40s, prepared for a career as a concert pianist by practicing over 15 hours a day with the goal of attaining the level of Hofmann's technique.

[28] He often stated that Rubinstein and Moriz Rosenthal were the only pianists who had influenced his art, and admired singers Mattia Battistini and Marcella Sembrich.

[6] After hearing a performance of Chopin's B minor Sonata by Hofmann, Rachmaninoff cut that piece from his own repertoire saying "not since Anton Rubinstein have I heard such titanic playing".

Much like Rubinstein's seven historic recitals of 1885, he gave 21 consecutive concerts in St. Petersburg without repeating a single piece, playing 255 different works from memory during that marathon cycle in 1912–1913.

[29] In the diary his wife kept during his 1909 Russian tour, she mentions his raising his eyebrows when he saw Brahms' Handel Variations on a program—a piece he had not played or even looked at for two and a half years.

[29] Although a poor sight reader, he was said to possess the ability of Franz Liszt and Camille Saint-Saëns to hear a composition once and play it back correctly without seeing the printed notes.

[31] In the 1940s he recorded for the Bell Telephone Hour radio programs of which some rare footage remains, including Rachmaninoff's Prelude in C-sharp minor, Op.

Gregor Benko has remarked that Hofmann should not have appeared on many of the Bell Telephone Hour broadcasts since, by this time, his pianistic control had deteriorated considerably though the tonal palette was still immense and the phrasing provocative (see [31] and [6]).

Hofmann recorded acoustic discs from 1912 to 1923 for Columbia and Brunswick, but felt the representation of his chaste and prismatic tonal palette was not captured.

RCA Victor privately recorded the 50th anniversary concert of Hofmann's New York debut at the Metropolitan Opera House on November 28, 1937.

These concert recordings exhibit an older Hofmann (age 60–62) in public just prior to the sharp decline in his pianistic command, and include sensational readings of Chopin's G minor Ballade, Andante Spianato and Grand Polonaise, A-flat Waltz (Op.

[35] Sviatoslav Richter, after listening to a Hofmann RCA test pressing of the Scherzo from Beethoven's Sonata in E-flat, Op.