Showing posts with label Artur Schnabel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Artur Schnabel. Show all posts

Tuesday, 17 December 2013

Who was the greatest piano teacher of the 19th century?

The candidates for this prize must include Chopin, Liszt, Leschetizky, the lesser known Ludwig Deppe, and Rubinstein (Anton).
Form a teacher does one seek a cogent method, or the passing on of a bright flame, burning and hard to contain?
About Chopin we have many comments from pupils, collected in a wonderful book by Eigeldinger, which I came across quite by chance in the town where it was published when I was giving a recital in Neuchatel in 1989. Chopin book. Chopin's teaching methods were geared toward refined, musical, singing, supple playing. With his high prices and aristocratic manner, Chopin was the teacher of choice for the female Parisian aristocrat, as witness the dedicatees of the majority of his piano music (eg Madame la Baronne de Rothschild for Waltz Op 64). But he did not leave a strong team of publically performing disciples to carry the flame.
Liszt did attract many ambitious male pupils, including Sauer, Siloti, Rosenthal, da Motta; and with Liszt one has a stronger sense of a lineage of playing (via for example Siloti to Rachmaninoff, or d'Albert to Dohnanyi to Ervin Nyiregyházi) but descriptions of his classes, while inspiring, are not the sort of thing you can put in a bottle and replicate.
Likewise Leschetizky  and Anton Rubinstein - fine pianists both, but in an inspirational rather than a methodical style. Rubsinstein's star pupil Josef Hofmann asked him how he should play a certain note and got the reply 'play it with your nose for all I care - so long as it sounds right!" According to Artur Schnabel there was no such thing as  a Leschetizky method, but this did not stop some of Leschetizky's pupils attempted to cash in on his cachet! eg Leschetizky Method (?!)
As of today I am awarding first prize to Ludwig Deppe, whose Deppe Method is EXCELLENT. It makes sense, and unifies disparate elements of the playing process, such as the needs for elegant movement, effortlessness, concentration on musical tone. Granted it was written over a hundred years ago; but the instrument of the piano has not changed, and his advice can be taken with a pinch of salt here and there. Having read probably 150 books on piano playing, I think his is the best.

Thursday, 21 January 2010

Inspiration.

This Monday I had the pleasure of enjoying a drink with my daughter Poppy on a red double decker bus, which has been converted into a vegan restaurant, situated on Brewer Street, Soho. This is very handy for my partner Jo-chieh to buy Japanese noodles at the store down the road.
Meanwhile at the British Library that day I came across some very interesting comments about inspiration by Plato:
"The muse inspires men herself, and then by means of these inspired persons the inspiration spreads to others... For not by art do they utter these things, but by divine influence... the poets are merely the interpreters of the gods."
Beethoven echoes this when he says: "A Rhythm of the spirit is needed to grasp the essence of music... What we attain from art comes from God... Music grants us inspiration of celestial sciences, and that part of it which the mind grasps through the senses is the embodiment of mental cognition".
Relating this to pianists, Schnabel writes: "Creativity is inspiration filtered by artistic conscience". Rachmaninoff too favoured an element of discrimination in his music making, as opposed to the musician delivering him or herself entirely to the wildness of the moment.
Should pianists be totally wild and inspired (like Nyireghazy), or cool and controlled (like Michelangeli), or wild in a calculating way (like Horowitz)? Or simply divine like Dinu Lipatti? Here's what mysterious Sofronitsky had to say (www.sofronitsky.com) :
" the more emotionally you play, the better, but this emotionality should be hidden, hidden as in a shell. When I come on stage now, I have «seven shells» under my tuxedo, and despite this I feel naked. So, I need fourteen shells. I have to wish to play so well, live so fully, as to die and still feel as if I have not played."