Endeavour to play easy pieces well and beautifully; that is better than playing difficult pieces badly. When you play, don't worry about who may be listening to you.
If anyone should place before you a composition to play at sight, read it over before you play it.
How often have you found yourself repeating advice like this to your pupils? We may live in a world that seems to be changing more rapidly than ever before, but some things remain the same, and among them are the guiding principles of learning to play an instrument.
The precepts quoted above are taken from Robert Schumann's ‘Advice to Young Musicians: Musical Rules for Home and in Life’, originally intended as a preface to his 1848 piano anthology Album for the Young, but published separately two years later in the Neue Zeitschrift für Music, a music magazine founded in 1834 by Schumann, his teacher and future father-in-law Friedrich Wieck, and his close friend and fellow composer-pianist Ludwig Schuncke.
Despite the enduring popularity of the delightful pieces he composed for children to play, we do not tend to think of Schumann as a pedagogue; shy and dreamy by nature, he certainly was not temperamentally suited to teaching. A violin student at the Leipzig Conservatoire, where Schumann was professor of piano, composition and score reading, recalled an occasion when he was asked to take part in a performance of Schubert's B flat violin trio, which one of Schumann's students was playing: ‘The lesson was given with hardly a word from Schumann; although, as I well remember, there was abundant occasion.’
When Schumann put pen to paper, however, his mind was sharply focused, and every word of his advice to young musicians is as relevant today as it was when he wrote it. Until recently the most readily available English translation of Schumann's 77 maxims was an 1860 version by Henry Hugo Pierson, but they have now been repackaged for a 21st-century generation by the cellist Steven Isserlis.
Using Pierson's translation as his starting point (and acknowledging the assistance of his sister Rachel and her family in plugging gaps in his understanding of German), he has brought the slightly archaic language up to date, categorised Schumann's short aphorisms into subjects, and expanded the composer's ideas, drawing on his own experience as a performer and teacher to interpret them for modern students and for a wider audience – musicians in general and also listeners, as well as the keyboard-playing young composers to whom Schumann was directing his advice.
Not that much reinterpretation was necessary. ‘Schumann's poetic words of wisdom have as much to teach us now as they did when they were first written, over 150 years ago,’ says Isserlis. ‘Their high-flown language and ideals might at first glance appear to be unsuited to the internet age, but they are not – although they may perhaps benefit from a little explanation and adaptation.’
The cellist's enthusiasm for the music of Robert Schumann, especially the late works which he feels have been unfairly neglected, is well documented. ‘Schumann's music is curiously alive today,’ he wrote in a Guardian article in 2010, the bicentenary of the composer's birth. ‘One cannot pigeonhole him … he is too experimental, too close to the edge of the known sound-world. Harmonically, rhythmically, emotionally he is way ahead of his time – outside of time, in fact, looking simultaneously into the past and the future. In short, he is a genius, unlike any other, one who can lead us into worlds undreamed of by anyone else.’
As such a passionate devotee of Schumann's music, Isserlis has been familiar with the ‘Advice to Young Musicians’ for as long as he can remember, but was prompted to produce this new edition by conversations with members of the Asian Youth Orchestra with whom he toured a few years ago. ‘They were so hungry for knowledge,’ he recalls. ‘They asked me what would be my principal piece of advice; thinking about how to respond, I found myself looking again at Schumann, and reflecting on the relevance of everything he wrote.’
Some of Schumann's precepts are to do with performance and interpretation – ‘dragging and rushing are both major faults’; ‘consider it an abomination to alter works of good composers, to omit parts of them, or to insert new-fashioned ornaments’; ‘if your music comes from your heart and soul, and if you feel it inside yourself, it will affect others in the same way’. Many are concerned with the need to understand music from the inside – to be familiar with the fundamental principles of harmony and counterpoint as soon as possible; to be able to imagine how a piece will sound from reading a score, and to sing at sight. Composers should be aware of the characters of different instruments, not just what notes they play.
Sterling Elliott with Steven Isserlis, masterclass, Julliard School, New York (Image credit Michael Divito)
Others – perhaps the most useful in reinforcing what instrumental and vocal teachers write every week in their pupils’ notebooks as they send them away to work on their own – are to do with practising. There is a reminder that diligent repetition of scales and finger exercises will not achieve anything in isolation; Isserlis describes his own exercise routine as ‘cleaning my cellistic teeth’ – a relatively quick preparation for the real, creative work of a practice session. Where one of the German phrases is open to interpretation – did Schumann mean ‘don't play half a piece’ or ‘don't play half-heartedly’? – he cuts to the chase and decides that particular maxim can be summed up as an instruction to ‘concentrate!’
Isserlis also elaborates on Schumann's reminder that a performer cannot consider that they ‘know’ a piece of chamber or orchestral music unless they know the whole score, and are familiar with everyone else's parts as well as their own. He reinforces the importance of exploring genres and disciplines other than one's own – work with singers, go to the opera, learn about folk music. And he wholeheartedly endorses the view that having interests outside music is essential for any performer, as is an understanding of the cultural context of their repertoire.
Isserlis himself has no private pupils, and works with advanced students and young professionals at the renowned International Musicians’ Seminar at Prussia Cove, Cornwall, of which he is artistic director, rather than with young people who are at the earlier stages of the learning process. However, he gives masterclasses around the world and has written the texts for three musical stories for children – Little Red Violin, Goldiepegs and the Three Cellos, and Cindercella – with music by Oscar-winning composer Anne Dudley. MT readers will probably be familiar with his two books for children about the lives of great composers: Why Beethoven Threw the Stew and its sequel, Why Handel Waggled his Wig. He has also given many concerts for children, presenting a regular series at the 92nd Street Y in New York for several years. He is passionate about the importance of good teaching, and vividly recalls many of the experiences that shaped him as a developing musician.
Formative experiences
His own first teacher, Julia Pringle, lived near his junior school in south west London, and he went to her for lessons every day from an early age. But his love of music was also nurtured by his family – his Russian Jewish grandfather, Julius Isserlis, was a pianist and composer, his father a keen amateur musician, his mother a piano teacher and his older sisters Annette and Rachel played the viola and violin respectively, both going on to become professional performers. ‘I took up the cello because my parents wanted to complete their piano quintet!’ he says.
He did not attend a specialist music school, which he feels was a good thing, contributing to making him a rounded personality whose extra-musical enthusiasms range from the films of the Marx Brothers and Christopher Guest to the novels of Wilkie Collins, R C Hamilton and Patrick Hamilton, the children's novel The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley and food. But with daily cello lessons after school and at weekends he had the best of both worlds.
From the age of 10 his teacher was Jane Cowan, who he says was the main formative influence on his musical life. Although born in Hampshire in 1915, Cowan was brought up in Edinburgh, where she studied the cello at the Waddell School of Music and encountered the legendary musicologist Donald Francis Tovey. When she was still a student Tovey set up an opportunity for her to perform a Beethoven sonata accompanied by a pianist friend of his – who turned out to be Pablo Casals. Cowan took several summer courses with Emanuel Feuerman and learned much from him, but she drew her primary inspiration from Casals and his circle, which included the Hungarian violinist sisters Jelly d’Arányi and Adila Fachiri, great-nieces of the violinist Joseph Joachim, who had been a great friend and colleague of Brahms.
Cowan did have a distinguished reputation as a performer, but became better known as a teacher. By the time the young Isserlis encountered her she was working as co-director with John Gwilt of what he describes as ‘the rather grandly-titled International Cello Centre, actually a small ground-floor flat in Ladbroke Grove, Notting Hill’.
Asked to define what was so special about Jane Cowan's teaching, Isserlis explains that she made the study of technique very organic: ‘She never separated technique from the music and music was never separated from the rest of culture. Her pupils studied music history and theory with her, sang together (mostly English madrigals) and even read Goethe and Racine in order to get a feel for German and French. There was a weekly cello choir for which Jane made marvellous arrangements, and of course we were encouraged to play a lot of chamber music, which meant my sisters got involved too – Jane did have a way of “taking over” whole families.
‘For Jane, in music as in life in general, the words ‘it doesn't matter’ didn't seem to exist. That resulted in fervent convictions that would leave a lifelong impression on her students. Her attitude to intonation, for instance, was typically uncompromising. For her, there was keyboard intonation, and then there was expressive intonation – and woe betide the string-player who opted for the former. A leading-note – the seventh of the scale, just below the tonic – HAD to be played close to the tonic (ie sharper than it would be on a piano). “When I hear a flat leading-note, my instinct is to kill!” she would say, eyes blazing. You can imagine what effect that would have had on a 10-year-old – to this day, I tend to play leading-notes almost a quarter-tone high!’
Another of Cowan's crusades was against steel strings, which she believed ‘led to an unnatural emphasis on projection and a constant, unrelenting intensity that went against all she believed in. Again, you can imagine how deeply these feelings permeated the minds and hearts of the many young people who were under her influence. It is only in the past few years that I have been able to play a few pieces on steel – when I find it musically appropriate – without feeling overwhelming guilt!
‘Jane was as passionate about early music as she was about music of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries,’ Isserlis has recalled in a blog post paying tribute to his teacher. ‘Many of the best-known players of original instruments of around my age came under her influence as students; in fact, it's probably fair to say that she was partially responsible for the whole revival of interest in “authentic” performance – although this is ironic, as she was suspicious of the movement as a whole. She had passionate musical loves, and passionate hatreds too: Corelli and Couperin were IN (woe betide us if she felt that we didn't know enough about Couperin!); Vivaldi and Telemann were OUT (an attitude I've only managed to escape in the last few years).’
While he is conscious that short, one-off masterclasses are of limited value to students – and one of his guiding principles is not to criticise the teachers to whom they will be returning – Isserlis sees them as a chance to put across some fresh ideas (or familiar ideas in a fresh voice) to be pondered when the young players are next working by themselves. ‘They also give me the chance to pass on the values which I inherited from the many great musicians with whom I studied – who were also in turn conscious of the importance of handing on the knowledge they'd acquired from their teachers.’
He sees parallels in approach between Jane Cowan and the three great Hungarian musicians with whom he worked at Prussia Cove: Sándor Végh, György Kurtág and Ferenc Rados. ‘In every lesson I took or observed with any of them, there was an over-riding goal: to help the student realise the composer's vision. It hardly needs saying that none of them were interested in career for its own sake – in treating music like a competitive sport. These sages followed their musical ideals, and tried to help others do the same; what is the point in being a musician if one is not an idealist?’
Steven Isserlis blogs extensively about performing and teaching on his website (http://stevenisserlis.com).Robert Schumann's Advice to Young Musicians revisited by Steven Isserlis has recently been published in paperback by Faber & Faber (ISBN 978-0-571-35568-6, £9.99).
