Cellists: Master Class

“The best thing a musician can possibly do after he has acquired a great deal of experience,” says Cellist Gregor Piatigorsky, “is to pass it on to younger musicians. So many people are now gone—Kreisler, Toscanini, Rachmaninoff—who never had students. This is a great loss.” It is also a sad fact that few celebrated performers have much interest in teaching—and fewer still have any talent for it (Rachmaninoff, for example, was a dour, retiring man, hardly cut out to be the Mr. Chips of the keyboard). Fortunately for a few lucky cellists, however, Piatigorsky, 61, has both the interest and the talent. By virtue of his superior musicianship, his good humor and infectious love for his art, he is one of the greatest cello teachers ever.

He approaches teaching with the conviction that the worst enemy of art is boredom. “The child starts out with a dull teacher. Plunk, plunk. What should be a beautiful experience becomes drudgery. Terrible. We must keep them in flames.” Piatigorsky keeps the fire aglow. Every week or so, about a dozen talented students in his master’s class come to his big house in West Los Angeles and form a semicircle in his living room. Piatigorsky slumps his big frame (6 ft. 3½ in.) into an easy chair, and one by one the students play a solo. Now the old cellist closes his mournful eyes in repose, now he nods his head enthusiastically, now lurches forward to demonstrate a point on his cello. He saws the air with an imaginary bow, sings in his rumbling borsch-accented voice: “Dom dom pah pah dom.” Scowling, smiling, grimacing, clenching his fists and waving his arms, he peppers his students with encouragement.

> To one playing ponderously: “It’s very important not to play very importantly. If you begin to play a fairly easy, gay and amusing piece with great importance, then the piece becomes less important than the player. If the piece is simple and gay, then the cellist must be simple and gay.”

> To a student who dropped a note: “Ours is a single-note instrument, so we have to play well one note at a time; every note must be good. You must imagine that you are in an auction, and every single note has to be so good that you can sell it without any argument. Every note must have quality, as if all by itself it is some kind of melody.”

> To a student wearing a vague expression: “There is a certain absent look in you when you play. You can imagine that it is not important how you look, but I can assure you that it is. I remember once in Kansas City we were rehearsing and an insurance agent interrupted us. He wanted to insure our fingers, but one of the musicians said: ‘Why do you talk only about the finger? Why aren’t you concerned about the nose? Do you think any of us can give a recital without a nose?’ In other words, the total appearance is of great importance.”

> To a student with a self-effacing manner: “Forget about modesty; be a showoff. There has never been written a modest symphony, a humble rhapsody. You must be able to say with great feeling, ‘I hate you’ or ‘I love you.’ Once you are able to say that, you will find you can play the cello.”

Midway through the six-hour session, the class adjourns to the dining room for sandwiches and coffee and Piatigorsky’s reminiscences from nearly 50 years of concertizing. When a pupil complains about preperformance jitters, he confides that he himself has found no easy remedy: “I try looking in the mirror and saying ‘You’re the greatest cellist in the world.’ ” But alas, he adds sadly, “I don’t believe me.” Or he will tell of the evening he dined with Amateur Fiddler Albert Einstein.

The scientist asked Piatigorsky how he liked his violin playing. The cellist hesitated. It was probably the first time that Teacher Piatigorsky was at a loss for ready analysis of someone’s playing. But only momentarily. “Eh,” he finally spluttered, “relatively well.”