Dear Friends,
Greetings from Charlottesville, VA, where we are sightseeing for a few days before going to visit family in central PA. It's nice to have the chance to see a different part of the country, and also travel just for fun, without the added pressure of playing a concert, presenting at a conference, or teaching at a festival.
This week I’ve been thinking about Mozart. We all know him as a composer, but what kind of teacher was he?
I’ve been pondering this question in the context of a composition student Mozart had in Paris in the summer of 1778. At first I was jealous of any student who had the opportunity to study composition with Mozart! Just imagine, studying with the genius himself!
But then I saw how he talked about this student. In a letter to his father that summer, Mozart complained, “She has no ideas, and none seem likely to come. I have tried her in every possible way.”
Later in that same summer, he wrote: “She will never be a composer. All labor is vain with her, for she is not only vastly stupid, but also vastly lazy.”
These two examples tell me that maybe Mozart was not the best teacher, except for the most gifted, diligent students. When you think about it, it makes sense: it must have been hard to be, well, Mozart, but to have to teach mere mortals.
This past February, a teaching notebook documenting lessons between Mozart and his student Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînes was unearthed in the Bibliothèque nationale de France by François-Pierre Goy.
The notebook contains seven pieces that Mozart and his student collaborated on, including his corrections to her variations, and at least one piece that he wrote the beginning of and asked her to finish. (The pieces were premiered earlier this month; you can listen to them here.)
Marie-Louise-Philippine de Bonnières de Guînes was the daughter of the Duke of Guînes, who hired Mozart to teach her composition for two hours a day over that summer of 1778. The duke was a flutist, and his daughter played the harp. The duke hoped that Mozart could help his daughter learn to compose pieces for flute and harp that the two of them could play together.
Teaching requires its own special skill set. You need to be patient, and work at the student’s pace. You need to learn to recognize where a student is struggling and home in on what specifically needs your help. You need to be able to explain things multiple ways. And above all, teaching requires a special kind of empathy: the kind that allows you to imagine how the student might be understanding things.
From those letters it sure seems like Mozart may well have lacked these skills. His transcendent talent must have made it nearly impossible to tolerate the experience of teaching. He described in one of his letters to his father how he had asked Mademoiselle de Guînes to come up with an original melody, and that she had thought for fifteen minutes, but couldn’t come up with anything. Mozart seemed to find this especially vexing.
Most of the famous composers we know today through their compositions, including Bach, Beethoven, Liszt, Schumann, Schubert, and Chopin, were teachers. They taught composition and/or piano lessons. And not all of them were terrible teachers; some were legendary.
Liszt, for example, was known throughout the world as an extremely generous, yet exacting, teacher. Chopin was widely known as a patient, meticulous teacher (as long as you worked hard), and apparently felt so embarrassed asking his students for money that he had them leave their lesson fee on the mantlepiece after their lesson, while he looked away.
With all of this in mind, here’s what I would invite you to keep in mind this week, whether you have a teacher or not. When we are in the practice room, we are, in essence, teaching ourselves. Ultimately, we need to learn to be our own best teacher. If we want to improve, we can’t just play the music over and over. We need to develop the skill of listening objectively and learn to give ourselves accurate feedback. We need to be patient with ourselves, to recognize where we are struggling, and to problem-solve for ourselves.
So this week when you are practicing, even if you are practicing Mozart, don’t be like Mozart the teacher. Be like Liszt or Chopin: patient, exacting, and kind.
👋 Happy practicing,
Kate
PS For more about Liszt's teaching, check out Music-Study in Germany, a contemporaneous account of studying with Liszt and other famous teachers by Amy Fay. And to learn about Chopin's teaching, the book Chopin: Pianist and Teacher, as Seen by his Pupils, by Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger.