Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  Those who do can’t necessarily teach

  George Bernard Shaw famously wrote in his play Man and Superman: ‘He who can, does; he who cannot, teaches.’ This ‘Maxim for Revolutionists’ was meant to take the wind out of the sails of teachers, and there might be some who fit this description, although instantly I can think of those who can do both well and those who do neither well.

  To invert GBS’s barbed quip, there are definitely those who can do but who can’t teach. Gordon Green – someone for whom teaching was a passion – felt that only those who had struggled to play the piano, who didn’t find tearing through the complete Chopin études before breakfast a doddle, would be able to understand and help students. When Horowitz was asked by Gary Graffman how to play octaves, his advice was merely to practise them slowly. Either his secret was to remain secret or – more likely – Horowitz had no idea how his particular fingers, wrists and arms worked in the way they did. It was a freak of nature.

  Those teachers who work mainly with pre-college students are much less famous than conservatory professors, yet they are much more important. If someone can’t play by the time they’re sixteen it’s unlikely they will suddenly learn how to do so. Things can be improved vastly in the later teens and early twenties (and there are notable exceptions such as the late-starters Harold Bauer and Sviatoslav Richter), but good foundations are essential for good buildings, and it’s those teachers hidden away in studios working long, dedicated hours who deserve much more recognition than they get. This is the time and the place when technique is being formed in subconscious reflexes, when habits good or bad are being established, when we learn how to read a score in all of its subtle detail.

  In those formative years it is essential for a teacher to be strict, but as the years progress, and after the technique is well established, the teacher (like a parent) needs gradually to step back, to allow the personality and individuality of the student to flourish. By the time the pianist reaches college age it is vital that the teacher values the uniqueness of the student and allows for lots of freedom. One of the curses of the competition mentality is that it forces talented young players to present fully groomed interpretations early on. There is insufficient time for experimentation, for exploring dead ends, for making mistakes, for trying daring or outrageous options. In short, the student has to sound like a (usually boring) CD as soon as possible. Gordon Green used to say to me when I was around fifteen, ‘My dear boy, forget about competitions’, so convinced was he that their deadlines limited the development of the imagination. He added: ‘I don’t really care how you play now. It’s how you will play in ten years that interests me.’ He took the long view. I think he would have made a good farmer.

  One of the easiest ways to tell if a conservatory teacher is good is if each one of his students sounds different. Leschetizky was a case in point. His pupils included pianists as diverse in style as Artur Schnabel, Paderewski and Ignaz Friedman (and Gordon Green’s teacher Frank Merrick). In fact, good teachers should probably not even like everything each of their students does. The more talented the pupil, the longer the leash of freedom should be. At early pre-college level I am suspicious if there is a large divergence in the quality of students in a studio; necessary technical and musical knowledge is not being transmitted. At conservatory level I am suspicious if the quality of students in a studio is too uniform; it can suggest that grooming is taking place. A teacher at this advanced level should be a guide and a mentor … and, gradually, eventually, a colleague.

  Masterclasses

  In later life Franz Liszt spent a lot of time teaching, not so much one-to-one lessons but public sessions with students gathered around him from all over the world. The ‘masterclass’ is a form virtually invented by Liszt and it survives in good health up to the present day. I give them myself regularly in cities all over the world.

  Not all the students who travelled to play for Liszt were equally talented and on one occasion a certain young man failed to impress him. We don’t know exactly what was said, whether it was harshly critical or merely discouraging, but the man left the class and went off and killed himself. Liszt’s other students didn’t tell the Master about this as they knew it would cause him deep distress (he was by nature a kind and immensely generous man) but this event has stuck in my mind over the years as an example of the power our words can have on others, particularly when uttered in front of other people.

  Teaching a musical instrument is a very personal, almost intimate process. Over the years many students have formed relationships with their teachers that have gone beyond the musical. On occasion this has been sordid, sometimes criminal, and at other times it has led to a stable marriage, but even in the most innocent circumstances what is being handed on from teacher to pupil is explosive. To lead someone to be more expressive in a piece seething with passion and emotion is to handle fire. Individual lessons have their own kind of danger and all of us who have private students are alert to this. Indeed music colleges now have many safeguards in place, including mandatory windows in their studios.

  In a public class the vulnerability is of a different kind. To tell someone they lack musicality or emotional commitment, or to show up their inadequacies in front of colleagues is to hold a knife to skin. I’ve witnessed many examples of this over the years. One famous pianist was teaching a good but workmanlike student. At one point the teacher pushed the student aside, performed the passage just played by the student with scintillating bravura, stood up, looked at the audience to see the reaction, smiled and said, ‘Now you try it.’ The student was visibly humiliated and – more to the point – no more aware than before how to make the passage better. This was simply an example of someone in a position of power showing off. It was a form of abuse and most of us in the room felt uncomfortable.

  We are parents to our students. We should have in mind only their welfare, both musical and personal – the two are joined at the hip. But then: ‘The teacher’s job is to make him- or herself dispensable.’ A wise comment from a teacher who knew when (gently) to push the budding pianist-pupil out of the nest.

  Why don’t (music) students attend concerts?

  Many universities and conservatories run recital series for visiting artists. Especially in America they often have a large budget and a distinguished history of presenting performers, sometimes even whole orchestras. It’s a wonderful way to show that the arts matter to such institutions and that specially invited guests need not be restricted to academics coming to give a lecture.

  I’ve done many recitals in these settings over the years but, surprisingly (shockingly), students often fail to attend. Even when free tickets are offered, when concerts take place after school hours, when students are music majors, the audience nearly always consists only of parents and grandparents. This is surely a serious abuse of academic life. Here are young people – one hopes too young to be jaded and too young to be wearied by the responsibilities of work and family – who simply haven’t any interest. I really think it should be a requirement, at least for music students, to attend these concerts … even if just one a year? I must add that I’ve come across young musicians burning with enthusiasm, combing every noticeboard for student tickets, listening to everything they can find … but they’re the exception to a disheartening rule.

  I’m not advocating some tyrannical, rigid attitude towards higher education where there’s no room to have fun in the way each person chooses, or to goof off, or to veg out, or to party a little bit too much. But education is a privilege, and even in living memory a majority was simply unable to afford to attend university. My own father was forced to work as soon as he left school and was able finally to get his longed-for arts degree only thirty years later from the Open University. Going to concerts was a luxury of which many could only dream, or for which they had to save up. I can’t see how someone studying singing should expect a high grade if she found an episode of The Sopranos more alluring than a recital on campus by a grea
t, living soprano.

  College years are short, precious and expensive. The least we can expect is that those undergoing them should want to be educated.

  What does the most talented young pianist need most?

  There are hundreds of thousands of piano students all over the world. It is something of a wonder that so many young people are willing to spend so many millions of hours pressing down those 88 black and white keys. The best of them will usually move on to study at music colleges, academies, conservatories and universities. They arrive with hopes and objectives: to immerse themselves in music, to play better, to prepare for a future career, to gain performance experience, even sometimes to become rich and famous. Many will leave disappointed, and still more will leave with jobs different from what they expected at the start of their education. But what about those very few who are destined for major solo careers? Nothing is ever guaranteed, but after you have heard some musicians play only a few bars you know they have something special, which will at least give them a stab at success.

  What advice would I give to the few, the most talented pianists entering music college? I would say, ‘Learn concertos.’ Almost every career starts and is established with concerto appearances. Even if a solo debut creates an initial stir the building up of a reputation will come with orchestras and conductors. It’s partly the decline of the piano recital. I’m told that there are fewer recital series taking place as every year passes. But it’s also that the opportunity to play in large halls and within earshot of important career-controlling managers will usually happen with an orchestra sitting on one’s left. No unknown young pianist will get to play recitals in large halls but many have had the chance to stand in at the last minute for an indisposed artist in a concerto. Such an opportunity (at the Ravinia Festival in Chicago in 1999) launched the sky rocket that is Lang Lang. And, ironically, the career of the pianist he flew in to replace, André Watts, had burst into brilliance in a similar way in 1963 when he stood in for an ailing Glenn Gould in New York.

  Because conservatory exams and auditions normally require solo repertoire students tend to crack open the scores of piano- and-orchestra works only when they have a date in the diary for which they are preparing, whether it’s a concerto competition or a public performance. But by the time a career is beginning, and the contracts are being signed, and the travel agent is busy booking flights, it’s almost too late – unless you learn phenomenally quickly, or drive yourself to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

  Even after a concerto has been learned, it will often end up being rehearsed with too little time, with a cantankerous conductor, performed under great pressure, on an unknown, unresponsive piano, frequently with jet lag. While you’re still at college, and have the time, you should prepare at least a handful of the most familiar concertos … and a few unfamiliar ones too. I’ve been asked over the years to play Saint-Saëns’s Fifth at least as much as Beethoven’s Fifth. My own baptism of fire, aged twenty-two, was to have to play them both in the same week and both for the first time, on one rehearsal at the Barbican Centre with the London Symphony Orchestra. I certainly felt older if not wiser the following week. And there were at least another five concertos on my piano awaiting urgent study.

  Learn concertos before you have to, and learn them well. They will become part of your life as you play them with different orchestras and conductors throughout your career. And as you stand in the wings with the orchestra tuning and the lights dimming and the applause beginning they will await you at the keyboard like old, intimate friends.

  Trying to practise away from the piano and trying to try to pray

  In 2007 I wrote a book entitled The Bible as Prayer: A Handbook for Lectio Divina. It was certainly not written from a standpoint of expertise, nor really from experience, although I have spent countless hundreds of hours trying to pray, and I know that to attempt to pray is to pray. No, its purpose was to encourage me to keep trying to try to pray.

  I’m not a naturally religious person: my default button is doubt; my factory setting is scepticism. But I am a Christian by conviction with roots deep in Judaism (which should be a given for any follower of Christ) and branches reaching out as widely as possible to the wisdom of other faiths and none. My own copy of my own book is in mint condition. I know its spine needs cracking as mine needs strengthening.

  What is for sure is that I need to keep practising the piano. After a few days away from my instrument joints get stiff and reflexes lose their spring. But is it actually necessary physically to press down keys in order to get useful work done? Practising away from the piano is one of those wise habits I’ve always known about and believed in but almost never put into practice.

  So difficult can it be when travelling to find an instrument that being able to practise effectively in an armchair in my hotel would be wonderful. No taxis to take to locked-up, badly lit backstages, or to overheated homes with moulting Persian Blues and over-attentive hostesses. I could simply open my score of Beethoven’s Fourth and get started, with a cup of Darjeeling Second Flush steaming at my side.

  Although trying to pray is itself prayer, I don’t think that trying to practise is actually practising; to improve our piano playing is possible and there are tangible, concrete ways to achieve this. But despite numerous physical considerations when playing a musical instrument – and at times we are more like footballers than philosophers – in the end it’s the brain that holds everything together. Thousands of hours in hundreds of music colleges are wasted by students mindlessly thrashing through repertoire.

  The brain should always connect to the fingers at the keyboard, but the fingers themselves can sometimes choke the brain. Some pieces need space and silence to be fully deciphered, and sometimes we are less able to think about the music we are playing while we are actually playing it. Pacing, phrasing and the bigger architectural picture require a certain distance for their subtleties to be unlocked. We must touch a canvas to paint on it (all right, there are exceptions but you know what I mean) but unless we step back from it during the creative process we shall never grasp its full perspective.

  My great-grand-teacher Leschetizky made the same point in an interview, ‘In the matter of practice, I never urge a student to work so many hours a day. One may be enough. The musician is like a painter, who frequently spends his time in looking at the work he has done, and in thinking what he will make of it, without so much as touching the easel.’

  So I write this in the spirit of my book on prayer: I want to work away from the piano, I know it’s good and wise, I’ve done very little to put it into practice … so far. And I am allergic to cats.

  PEOPLE AND PIECES

  How much do we need to know about a composer?

  If you didn’t know that Beethoven was deaf, or that Rachmaninov was Russian, or that Liszt was a man of deep but sometimes conflicting religious beliefs, would it mean you couldn’t play their music as well? Actually I do think that ignorance about Liszt’s life and personality makes playing his music less likely to be convincing and idiomatic. But Chopin? I think it’s less important to know that Chopin was Polish than to know the music of Hummel. Even if Chopin’s native land lingered in his consciousness (although not in his conscience – he never made the slightest attempt to return home after his move to Paris at the age of twenty), it does not inform us how to play his two concertos with anything like the same level of acuity as knowing the Hummel concertos (and their metronome markings). I think our appreciation of Bartók’s music would be impoverished if we did not know a little of the Hungarian roots of so many of the folk melodies and rhythmic patterns he uses, but if we thought Rachmaninov came from Moscow, Texas, rather than Moscow, Russia, I’m not sure it would make a crucial difference – even if the composer himself might have scowled with extra severity at such a thought.

  How terribly British is our Elgar … yet his music owes far more to German influences (Brahms, Wagner, Richard Strauss) than anything growing in Queen Victoria
’s soil. But then again, each year on the Last Night of the BBC Proms, we hear ‘Land of Hope and Glory’ in the Royal Albert Hall – a grand memorial by the widowed monarch to her beloved husband, Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Their deeply loving and intimate relationship was conducted entirely in German for its duration. Perhaps knowing that does help us to play our Elgar better.

  Elgar the Roman Catholic

  When Elgar was fifteen years old, a girl called Thérèse Martin was born in northern France. By the time Elgar died she had already been canonised as St Thérèse of Lisieux, Patron of the Missions and of France, with her statue in countless churches all over the world – the fastest-growing cult in the history of Catholicism. All of this on account of one book, her autobiography, which has the simplest message of spiritual childhood and its resulting trust in the Fatherly care of God. That a girl, hidden away in a convent and dying aged only twenty-four, could have made such a revolutionary impact on popes, theologians and millions of other people is a clear indication to me of a deep and unquenched thirst in nineteenth-century Catholicism: a thirst for a warm, personal, simple approach to God. Although Thérèse was born and died within Elgar’s lifetime, for him, it seems, her message came too late.