Paderewski generously agreed to the panic-stricken request of the Sejm that he try to form a new cabinet. Then he quietly left Warsaw, and after five years of voluntary exile returned to his beloved home on the shining Swiss lake.
An announcement the world had been hoping to hear came from Paderewski on July 14--Bastille Day--1922. As he boarded the _S.S. Savoie_ in New York for a trip back to Europe, he announced that in the fall of that year he would return to the United States to resume his concert career. He had not played in public for five years, not since the night he played in the Metropolitan Opera House at a special concert in honor of the French hero, Marshal Joffre. But now he was ready to move back to Carnegie Hall and the other concert platforms of the world. Or at least he would be ready, he felt, after four more months of the kind of hard work he had been doing behind closed doors for over two years.
Although certain of his friends advised against the step, the fact of the matter was that Paderewski had no choice. He had to return to the stage because it was the only way he knew how to make a living. He had to work for a living because he had no money. He, who had been the richest artist appearing before the public, was now all but penniless. Nearly all of his great fortune had been given away to the war-hungry people of Europe.
The announcement created a sensation. Paderewski was returning to the stage! Newspaper editorials around the world--and even his close friends and staunchest admirers--asked the same question: would his second concert career be a triumph or a failure? Yet the answer should have been clear to anyone who gave a moment's thought to Paderewski's life and work. Clearly he would never have made the decision to return to the scenes of his former greatness if he had not been sure of his own powers and of his ability to use them again as fully as before.
But never before had Paderewski spent more painstaking hours on his beloved music than he did in the months just before his second Carnegie Hall debut. The great French violinist, Jacques Thibaud, who crossed the Atlantic with him, said that Paderewski even sacrificed his favorite pastime of bridge in favor of extra hours of practicing.