Part 32

EMIL SAUER

One of the most inestimable advantages I have ever had was my good fortune in having a musical mother. It is to her that I owe my whole career as an artist. If it had not been for her loving care and her patient persistence I might have been engaged in some entirely different pursuit. As a child I was very indifferent to music. I abhorred practice, and, in fact, showed no signs of pronounced talent until my twelfth year. But she kept faithfully pegging away at me and insisted that because my grandfather had been a noted artist and because she was devoted to music it must be in my blood.

My mother was a pupil of Deppe, of whom Miss Amy Fay has written in her book "Music Study in Germany." Deppe was a remarkable pedagogue and had excellent ideas upon the foundation of a rational system of touch. He sought the most natural position of the hand and always aimed to work along the line of least resistance. My mother instilled Deppe's ideas into me together with a very comprehensive training in the standard etudes and classics within my youthful technical grasp. For those years I could not have had a better teacher. Lucky is the child, who like Gounod, Reisenauer and others, has had the invaluable instruction that a patient, self-sacrificing mother can give. The mother is the most unselfish of all teachers, and is painstaking to a fault.

SLOW SYSTEMATIC PRACTICE

She insisted upon slow systematic regular practice. She knew the importance of regularity, and one of the first things I ever learned was that if I missed one or two days' practice, I could not hope to make it up by practicing overtime on the following days. Practice days missed or skipped are gone forever. One must make a fresh start and the loss is sometimes not recovered for several days.

I was also made to realize the necessity of freshness at the practice period. The pupil who wants to make his practice lead to results must feel well while practicing. Practicing while tired, either mentally or physically, is wasted practice.

Pupils must learn to concentrate, and if they have not the ability to do this naturally they should have a master who will teach them how. It is not easy to fix the mind upon one thing and at the same time drive every other thought away. With some young pupils this takes much practice. Some never acquire it--it is not in them. Concentration is the vertebræ of musical success. The student who cannot concentrate had better abandon musical study. In fact, the young person who cannot concentrate is not likely to be a conspicuous success in any line of activity. The study of music cultivates the pupil's powers of concentration perhaps more than any other study. The notes to be played must be recognized instantaneously and correctly performed. In music the mind has no time to wander. This is one of the reasons why music is so valuable even for those who do not ever contemplate a professional career.

One hour of concentrated practice with the mind fresh and the body rested is better than four hours of dissipated practice with the mind stale and the body tired. With a fatigued intellect the fingers simply dawdle over the keys and nothing is accomplished. I find in my own daily practice that it is best for me to practice two hours in the morning and then two hours later in the day. When I am finished with two hours of hard study I am exhausted from close concentration. I have also noted that any time over this period is wasted. I am too fatigued for the practice to be of any benefit to me.

THE NECESSITY FOR A GOOD GENERAL EDUCATION

Parents make a great mistake in not insuring the general education of the child who is destined to become a concert performer. I can imagine nothing more stultifying or more likely to result in artistic disaster than the course that some parents take in neglecting the child's school work with an idea that if he is to become a professional musician he need only devote himself to music. This one-sided cultivation should be reserved for idiots who can do nothing else. The child-wonder is often the victim of some mental disturbance.

I remember once seeing a remarkable child mathematician in Hungary. He was only twelve years of age and yet the most complicated mathematical problems were solved in a few seconds without recourse to paper. The child had water on the brain and lived but a few years. His usefulness to the world of mathematics was limited solely to show purposes. It is precisely the same with the so-called musical precocities. They are rarely successful in after life, and unless trained by some very wise and careful teacher, they soon become objects for pity.

The child who is designed to become a concert pianist should have the broadest possible culture. He must live in the world of art and letters and become a naturalized citizen. The wider the range of his information, experience and sympathies, the larger will be the audience he will reach when he comes to talk to them from the concert platform. It is the same as with a public speaker. No one wants to hear a speaker who has led a narrow, crabbed intellectual existence, but the man who has seen and known the world, who has become acquainted with the great masterpieces of art and the wonderful achievements of science, has little difficulty in securing an audience providing he has mastered the means of expressing his ideas.

CLEAN PLAYING VS. SLOVENLY PLAYING

In the matter of technical preparation there is, perhaps, too little attention being given to-day to the necessity for clean playing. Of course, each individual requires a different treatment. The pupil who has a tendency to play with stiffness and rigidity may be given studies which will develop a more fluent style. For these pupils' studies, like those of Heller, are desirable in the cases of students with only moderate technical ability, while the splendid "etudes" of Chopin are excellent remedies for advanced pupils with tendencies toward hard, rigid playing. The difficulty one ordinarily meets, however, is ragged, slovenly playing rather than stiff, rigid playing. To remedy this slovenliness, there is nothing like the well-known works of Czerny, Cramer or Clementi.

I have frequently told pupils in my "Meisterschule" in Vienna, before I abandoned teaching for my work as a concert pianist, that they must learn to draw before they learn to paint. They will persist in trying to apply colors before they learn the art of making correct designs. This leads to dismal failure in almost every case. Technic first--then interpretation. The great concert-going public has no use for a player with a dirty, slovenly technic no matter how much he strives to make morbidly sentimental interpretations that are expected to reach the lovers of sensation. For such players a conscientious and exacting study of Czerny, Cramer, Clementi and others of similar design is good musical soap and water. It washes them into respectability and technical decency. The pianist with a bungling, slovenly technic, who at the same time attempts to perform the great masterpieces, reminds me of those persons who attempt to disguise the necessity for soap and water with nauseating perfume.

HEALTH A VITAL FACTOR

Few people realize what a vital factor health is to the concert pianist. The student should never fail to think of this. Many young Americans who go abroad to study break down upon the very vehicle upon which they must depend in their ride to success through the indiscretions of overwork or wrong living. The concert pianist really lives a life of privation. I always make it a point to restrict myself to certain hygienic rules on the day before a concert. I have a certain diet and a certain amount of exercise and sleep, without which I cannot play successfully.

In America one is overcome with the kindness of well-meaning people who insist upon late suppers, receptions, etc. It is hard to refuse kindness of this description, but I have always felt that my debt to my audiences was a matter of prime importance, and while on tour I refrain from social pleasures of all kinds. My mind and my body must be right or failure will surely result.

I have often had people say to me after the performance of some particularly brilliant number "Ah! You must have taken a bottle of champagne to give a performance like that." Nothing could be further from the truth. A half a bottle of beer would ruin a recital for me. The habit of taking alcoholic drinks with the idea that they lead to a more fiery performance is a dangerous custom that has been the ruin of more than one pianist. The performer who would be at his best must live a very careful, almost abstemious life. Any unnatural excess is sure to mar his playing and lead to his downfall with the public. I have seen this done over and over again, and have watched alcohol tear down in a few years what had taken decades of hard practice and earnest study to build up.

JUDICIOUS USE OF TECHNICAL EXERCISES

The field of music is so enormous that I have often thought that the teacher should be very careful not to overdo the matter of giving technical exercises. Technical exercises are, at best, short cuts. They are necessary for the student. He should have a variety of them, and not be kept incessantly pounding away at one or two exercises. As Nicholas Rubinstein once said to me, "Scales should never be dry. If you are not interested in them work with them until you become interested in them." They should be played with accents and in different rhythms. If they are given in the shapeless manner in which some teachers obliged their unfortunate pupils to practice them they are worthless. I do not believe in working out technical exercises at a table or with a dumb piano. The brain must always work with the fingers, and without the sound of the piano the imagination must be enormously stretched to get anything more than the most senseless, toneless, soulless touch.

Technic with many is unmistakably a gift. I say this after having given the matter much careful thought. It is like the gift of speech. Some people are fluent talkers, precisely as some people can do more in two hours' technical work at the keyboard than others could accomplish with four. Of course, much can be accomplished with persistent practice, and a latent gift may be awakened, but it is certainly not given to all to become able technicalists. Again some become very proficient from the technical standpoint, but are barren, soulless, uninspired and vapid when it comes to the artistic and musicianly interpretation of a piece.

There comes a time to every advanced pianist when such exercises as the scales, arpeggios, the studies of Czerny and Cramer are unnecessary. I have not practiced them for some years, but pray do not think that I attempt to go without exercises. These exercises I make by selecting difficult parts of famous pieces and practicing them over and over. I find the concertos of Hummel particularly valuable in this connection, and there are parts of some of the Beethoven concertos that make splendid musical exercises that I can practice without the fatal diminution of interest which makes a technical exercise valueless.

STUDY ABROAD

In the matter of foreign study I think that I may speak without bias, as I am engaged in teaching and am not likely to resume for some years. I am absolutely convinced that there are many teachers in America who are as good as the best in Europe. Nevertheless, I would advise the young American to secure the best instruction possible in his native land, and then to go abroad for a further course. It will serve to broaden him in many ways.

I believe in patriotism, and I admire the man who sticks to his fatherland. But, in art there is no such thing as patriotism. As the conservatory of Paris provides, through the "Prix de Rome," for a three years' residence in Italy and other countries for the most promising pupil, so the young American music students should avail themselves of the advantages of Old World civilization, art, and music. There is much to be learned from the hustle and vigorous wholesome growth of your own country that would be of decided advantage to the German students who could afford a term of residence here. It is narrowing to think that one should avoid the Old World art centers from the standpoint of American patriotism.

VERSATILITY

Few people recognize the multifarious requirements of the concert pianist. He must adjust himself to all sorts of halls, pianos and living conditions. The difference between one piano and another is often very remarkable. It sometimes obliges the artist to readjust his technical methods very materially. Again, the difference in halls is noteworthy. In a great hall, like the Albert Hall of London, one can only strive for very broad effects. It is not possible for one to attempt the delicate shadings which the smaller halls demand. Much is lost in the great hall, and it is often unjust to determine the pianist's ability by his exclusively bravura performances in very large auditoriums.