Variations on Theme XVI: Teachers and Pupils
The beginning of the new school year is approaching. The good occasion recalled those who earned the glory of others, but remained in the shadows themselves: teachers.
Names such as Christian Gottlob Neefe, Friedrich Wieck, Nadia Boulangerová, Simon Sechter, Johann Joseph Fux or Padre Martini are practically unknown, apart from a narrow circle of music historians.
But thanks to them, personalities arose, on the contrary, almost everyone knows the names.
Bach and Bach again
Johann Sebastian Bach outshined his entire era with his genius, he became a standard whose greatness no one even came close to. But how did he achieve his art at a time when composing was mainly a craft?
They didn’t have to send young Johann far away: the entire Bach family, including uncles, great-grandfathers, cousins and siblings, was musical. One can imagine that there was music in the household, notes were copied, songs were sung, played and music was easy to follow. When Johann Sebastian’s father died, the boy was about ten years old and his eldest brother took care of him Johann Christian Bach, under whose tutelage he learned to play the harpsichord well. He completed his further musical education in Lüneburg, where he was taught for two years by one of the best organists Georg Böhm. It can be said that I found myself in the right place at the right time. At that time, a new organ was being installed here, and Bach was aware of everything around it – later he himself would be asked to look at the construction and availability of instruments. The organists who had the opportunity to hear were the best, and the school library offered the opportunity to invite the scores of masters of various origins.
He did not live to see the achievements of Beethoven’s pupil
Christian Gottlob Neefe was born in Chemnitz, Saxony. He became a pupil of the composer Johanna Adama Hiller, under whose guidance he wrote his first comic operas. In 1776 he joined the theater company of the theater in Dresden and inherited the position of music director from his teacher Hiller. He later became court organist in Bonn. And here he meets little Ludwig van Beethoven, the son of a court singer. He began to teach him the piano and watched his first composition. He quickly recognized Beethoven’s extraordinary talent and secured him a position as assistant court organist. So while his teacher was on the road with a touring opera company, Beethoven was gaining experience in public performance at a very early age.
Neefe taught Behovena the piano and the basics of composition and Bach with the works of JSa, CPE Bach and Mozart. In the music magazine “Magazin der Musik” Neefe prophetically wrote about the young Beethoven in March 1787: “This young genius deserves help to enable him to travel. If he had continued as he had begun, he would certainly have become the second Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.” And Beethoven did not forget his teacher: already from Vienna in the fall of 1793 he wrote to him: “If I ever become a great man, you too will have a share in my success.”
Unfortunately, Neefe did not live to see this triumph again, dying in 1798 too young to learn of the remarkable career his young man had opened as a pupil in Vienna.
Strict father
When it’s Robert Schumann definitively deciding to hang up his rights and become a concert pianist, he chose the best teacher available at the time. Friedrich Wieck was a progressive educator whose best “marketing tool” was his daughter Clara, whom he raised alone. Under her father’s tutelage, she grew into one of the best pianists of her time and also composed. The meeting with the Wiecks influenced Schumann for the rest of his life: although he did not become a pianist (he destroyed his hand due to poor practice), despite his father’s protests, which eventually reached the court, he married his beloved Clara and created a prominent couple in the world of music (and until Schumann’s death Clara was the more famous of the two). Although later in her memories and letters, Clara rather apologized and felt sorry for her father for what he taught her, history is not so kind to him. Friedrich Wieck, who could go down in the history of music as a great pedagogue, unfortunately acquired the label of an insanely usurping father and father-in-law…
Antonin Dvorak
For another case of a teacher turned father-in-law, we don’t have to look far. Josef Suk in 1891-92 he was a pupil of Antonín Dvořák at the Prague Conservatory and he also invited his teacher to stay at his summer residence in Vysoké. There, the young man had the opportunity to see Dvořák’s eldest daughter, Otilia, who eventually became his wife. The luck didn’t last long. First, the revered Master Dvořák died unexpectedly (1904), followed by Otilie, who succumbed to heart failure at the age of twenty-seven. The sensitive Suk never quite recovered from these shocks. The depth of his grief is best demonstrated by the funeral symphony Asrael, a kind of musical torment for Dvořák and Otilka, where he quotes the central theme of Dvořák’s Requiem.
Antonio Salieri
Salieri was definitely not an unhappy grumbler, as depicted in Forman’s film Amadeus, but on the contrary a very pleasant companion and a generous person who gave many of his pupils free of charge. The prestigious list of his students includes Beethoven, whom he taught for two years, as well as Franz Schubert, Giacomo Meyerbeer and the young Franz Liszt. Salieri himself, an Italian from the vicinity of Verona who landed in Vienna, is the author of a truly large number of remarkable compositions. But he had the “misfortune” of being a contemporary of perhaps the greatest phenomenon in musical history – Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.
Padre Martini
The great traditions of Italian music meet in the personality of Antonio Salieri. His first teacher was his older brother Francesco Antonio, who was a pupil of Giuseppe Tartini. Another of his teachers was a local organist, a pupil of the excellent musician “padre” Martini. Giovanni Battista Martini came from Bologna, a renowned cultural and student center. At the age of nineteen, he got the position of bandleader in the Basilica of St. Františka, but at the same time he continued to study philosophy, mathematics and medicine. He was an avid collector of music literature: he amassed a collection of approximately 17,000 volumes!
Martini taught composition in the traditions of the old Roman school of composition. His fame brought many leading European musicians to Bologna, either for advice or for longer studies. Among other things, Leopold Mozart also consulted with him, the continuing son of Wolfgang Amadeus. Such composers as Johann Christian Bach, André Ernest Modeste Grétry, Niccolò Jommelli, Josef Mysliveček studied with him.
Not much of Martini’s own work has been preserved, and if so, in manuscripts. However, its pedagogical importance is unsurpassed.
Nadia Boulanger
In the title picture, a moved Leonard Bernstein kisses the hand of his teacher, from whose hands he has just received the Order of the Legion of Honor. Nadia Boulangerová, pupil of Gabriel Fauré and sister of the extremely talented composer Lili Boulangerová, decided that unlike her very talented sister, her strong point would be teaching. The list of those who came to study with her in Paris is extraordinary: from the modernists George Antheil and Elliott Carter to the minimalist Philip Glass; from nuevo tango pioneer Ástor Piazzolla to jazzy Donald Byrdy. In addition, she was the first woman to conduct many major American and European orchestras.
“The most influential teacher since the time of Socrates” – this is how one of the leading contemporary composers describes Nadia Boulangerová. As unlikely as it seems, this inconspicuous looking lady of Romanian, Russian and French descent, who was born in 1887 and lived to be 92, really ended up shaping the sound of the modern world.
The list of her musical students can be compared to the hall of fame of the 20th century. Leonard Bernstein. Aaron Copland. Quincy Jones. Astor Piazzolla. Philip Glass. John Eliot Gardiner. Daniel Barenboim. Elliot Carter. All these musical greats, so different and yet groundbreaking in their own way, studied with Boulanger. She gave them a rigorous foundation of academic music analysis, but at the same time you can find each of them their own distinctive language: perhaps that is the definition of a great teacher.
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