An article from Keyboard Companion - Ann Schein talks about studying the music of Chopin with Munz and Rubinstein

Keyboard Companion

Winter 2006

Volume 17, Number 4

Ann Schein talks about studying the music of Chopin with Munz and Rubinstein

The music of Chopin – my legacy from Mieczyslaw Munz and Arthur Rubinstein

By Ann Schein

I was truly fortunate in my parents’ wise choice of teachers from the time I started to play the piano at the age of three. At four, my parents took me to play for the distinguished American pianist, conductor, and critic, Glenn Dillard Gunn and his wife. Both had studied in the European master classes of Arthur Friedheim, (Franz Liszt’s pupil and personal secretary), and Ferrucio Busoni. In 1945 Dr. Gunn became the chief music critic for the Times-Herald, then the leading newspaper in Washington D.C., and my family also moved to Washington that year.

Mrs. Gunn, affectionately called “B.B. Gunn” by her family and friends, took on the major work of teaching me for the next ten years. With the Gunns, I had entered a truly hallowed atmosphere. Their cultural leadership, erudite conversation, their friendships with the leading artists of the day, in addition to their championing of the newest American composers, such as Edward MacDowell, John Alden Carpenter, and Howard Hanson, surrounded my lessons.

They knew how to nurture a performer and to expand the artistic vista of a young child. From the age of seven, I performed a full=length recital in their studio each year for an intimate and enthusiastic audience.

My first Chopin study

The first Chopin Mrs. Gunn gave me was an edition of the Chopin Preludes edited by Carl Mikuli, a pupil of Chopin. My first volume of the Etudes was “revised and fingered by Arthur Friedheim.” I have a treasured record of being given fourteen Preludes and five Etudes in addition to the Three Nouvelles Etudes, the “Nocturne in C Minor, Op. 48, No. 1,” and several Mazurkas of Chopin between the ages of seven and eleven.

By the time I was thirteen (1953), both Mrs. Gunn and her husband were elderly and had begun to fail in health. That year, I spent my second summer at the Interlochen Music Camp in Michigan where I became the youngest winner of the Concerto Competition in the Camp’s history, playing the first movement of the MacDowell Concerto in D Minor. When I won that honor, my parents made an important decision. Looking toward greater challenge for my musical development, they arranged for me to play for three different teachers before the school year began, and I was accepted into Peabody Conservatory and Mieczyslaw Munz’s class that fall.

My study with Mieczyslaw Munz

Two mornings a week for the next five years, my mother, Betty, unfailingly and cheerfully drove me to Baltimore for two-hour lessons of extraordinary instruction and artistic guidance from Munz. When my lessons began, he stated that he had no “teaching system” and no special “method.” But it became immediately apparent that he had in his mind a strict regimen for increasing finer strength and building greater technical solidity. He immediately gave me etudes of Moszkowsky, Busoni, Czerny, Pischna, Rachmaninoff, and twelve etudes of Chopin, chosen from both opuses. In addition, I was assigned a broad range of repertoire of Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Liszt, Schubert, and Prokofiev. Over the next few years, other Chopin works added were the Concerto in F Minor, the “Polonaise-Fantasie,” the Fourth Ballade, both Sonatas, all four Scherzos, the Preludes, and assorted Mazurkas, Nocturnes, and Waltzes. There major Chopin works became, as they do for all serious pianist, the musical nerve center of my repertoire.

Munz was born in Krakow, Poland in 1900. He was a great artist and a deeply poetic, subtle musician. He had been a flawless pianist, a breathtaking virtuoso in his younger years. At his Berlin debut with orchestra, he performed three concerti, including the Brahms Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major. In spite of his performing experience, he was basically a shy man – an artist of impeccable taste with a soul of pure gold. His selflessness when working with gifted students was unparalleled. His fingerings were magical and fashioned for each student, maximizing comfort in difficult passages. The goal was always musical, not technical. In almost all of his students’ scores, there were red pencil markings with infinitesimal indications for correct dynamics and phrasing, and an occasional “overplay here,” to indicate the need for special feeling in a certain section. Economy of motion in both hands and arms was his goal. He spoke little, but he could feel each student’s unique physical makeup, and adjusted the wrists and arms during the lessons according to the work and composer being studied. His artistry and human sensitivity could be felt and absorbed with few words, and this gave me a wonderful example to follow as a teacher. Munz was part of the great 19^th century generation of pianists, and that was in his aura.

Studying the Chopin Etudes

The twelve Chopin Etudes that I studied were chosen for both musical and technical advancement. I never thought of them as exercises. Their extreme difficulty was never mentioned. Instead, Munz wrote in my music in the margins of the page, exercises, rhythms, doublings of difficult finger patterns, and notes to repeat twice in a kind of Morse code pattern. Since he seldom demonstrated by playing, his imagination and extraordinary ability to free each student in both his/her body and musical inspiration was inexhaustible. His careful working with students as they practiced slowly covering all of the exercises during each lesson was a study in selfless patience. He taught me how to move my arms, wrists and fingers in different positions and to stay completely loose. He showed me different physical, almost choreographed angels and attacks for each Etude. I was not allowed to try a performance for at least four weeks. I was accomplishing significant goals by having this grueling work schedule and discipline ground into my system under his supervision. I was building greater stamina in absorbing details of harmony and phrasing at a slow, measured pace with minimum energy expended, and most importantly, I was traversing the musical content of each Etude again and again, which could extend to an hour-and-a-half four each. I was, as the great golfer Sam Snead once put it, “putting brains in the muscles.”

After several weeks of work, Munz’s pleasure was total when he would suddenly say, ”Now try it!” and my impatient hands fairly flew over the keys and the difficulties. In 1955k I performed the twelve Chopin Etudes at the Philips Gallery in Washington, D.C. in a recital that opened with Mozart’s Sonata in C Major, K. 331, followed by the “Humoreske” of Schumann. The critic wrote that it was hard to contain his excitement.

Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto

Munz’s daring was breathtaking. That same year he also gave me the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto. He said that it was “to further develop my hands and my strength. You will never play it,” he added, utterly sincerely. I believed him totally as I struggled for a year through the notes. Every difficult passage was helped by his inventive fingerings and endless exercises and rhythms.

Some months later, Munz suddenly said, “How would you like to play this concerto with the Peabody Orchestra?” Without thinking twice, I said “Great!” In January of 1956, I performed it for the first time, ending tin a rush of speed a half page ahead of the orchestra!

When I was 21, in what turned out to be the most physically demanding week of my life, I recorded the Rachmaninoff Third Concerto and the Chopin F Minor Concerto in the glorious Grosse Saal of the Musikverein in Vienna with the Vienna Staadtsoper Orchestra with Sir Eugene Goosens conducting. With a daily schedule of six hours of rehearsal and recording, my strength held out, thanks to the incredible preparation and training I had received from my beloved Munz. During that session, Munz, who had been there the entire week, only had one bemused comment to offer. “One day you will enjoy playing this more slowly,” he said with a smile. His “hands-off” policy in suggesting an interpretation was truly incredible. The closest he ever came to talking about Chopin’s music and it’s deeper message was to dance a little mazurka near the piano, and to say about the great “Polonaise-Fantasie” or slow movement of the F Minor Concerto, “You will find the beauty of this piece yourself.” I was unaware at the time of how he was nurturing the independence and developing musical profile of a young artist.

Study with Arthur Rubinstein

In the spring of 1961, Arthur Rubinstein heard my recording of the Rachmaninoff. He invited me to come to his Park Avenue apartment in New York City with my mother and Mr. Munz to play for him. Munz chose the Chopin “Mazurka in A-flat Major” from opus 59 for this important audition. It seemed to please Rubinstein. He then asked to hear more of my repertoire and invited me to come to Paris where he spent his summers. In this way I entered yet another exalted world, that of the greatest Chopin player of the 20^th Century and one of the greatest pianist of the age.

At my first lesson in his elegant home in Paris, he delivered a startling declaration. “Look here,” he said, “I am not a teacher, and I prefer to have you consider yourself a colleague and we will exchange ideas.” After the first lesson during which I played the “Humoreske” of Schumann (and he seemed happy with it), he asked me to play Chopin the next time. I brought the Third Scherzo and was in for another jolting declaration. “Ah, I see that you play these two composers too similarly. This we can work on. Schumann’s music has a more ‘child-like’ and naïve quality about it. Chopin is far more worldly and sophisticated.”

He then asked for the F Minor Concerto. He expressed great enthusiasm for the spirit, tempo, and rhythm of the last movement. And then he asked once more for the slow movement. There began the unfolding of new layers of understanding as I was asked to slow down the tempo of all embellishments of the melody line in the sublime movement. He asked for a better singing quality of each note, even in areas that seemed to be the stuff of spun filigree. Munz had encouraged a far more ethereal weight and had moved the tempo of each decorative passage into a faster pace and a more breathless effect. I felt the vocal logic of Rubinstein’s guidance and began to enjoy listening more deeply to these singing lines. The increased beauty and spaciousness of Chopin’s bel canto writing connected emotionally operatic, dramatic, and personal. I was sobered, but Rubinstein was never intimidating. He always inspired me to try again.

Following the Concerto, he asked for the Fourth Ballade, a piece that I had played more often than any other Chopin solo work. This time, Rubinstein rose from the chair where he always sat, approximately six feet away from me, quietly smoking a fine Cuban cigar. Suddenly he stood next to me. “Start again,” he said. I did, and when I looked up, I saw that his face had taken on a dramatic ambiance, and he began to move around. He was literally acting out the drama and unfolding the structure of the Ballade in front of me. He pulled the whole work out of my insides. It was one of the most unforgettable moments of my life. When I finished he was smiling and puffing heartily on his cigar. “I knew you had it in you!” he said. I was left to absorb the experience of living the music, thoroughly transported by Rubinstein’s gigantic personality and artistic presence.

During the second summer I spent with him in Paris, he wanted to go through all of the Chopin Preludes. It was here that I was to encounter the greatest revelations into Chopin’s very soul as each Prelude unfolded with Rubinstein’s inspired descriptions of the shifting moods. I was guided to lift the first short Prelude to a more ecstatic climactic measure, the second to greater depression and crawling morbidity, the third to more Italian sunshine, the fourth to utter monotony, the fifth to a whirlwind dance, and on and on in a stream of descriptions I had never heard from the far more introverted Munz. I especially loved Rubinstein’s revelation of the purely Italian inspiration in numbers 11, 13, 18, and 21. This was an entirely new concept for me, and to this day I revel in their Mediterranean warmth, picturing Chopin’s joy in his first sight of that sea and his own descriptions of the exotic beauty on the island of Majorca.

I consider the enormous influence of these two great Polish artists – Munz and Rubinstein – the greatest gift of my musical life. They took me into another world. I live there today, still following along the path where they led me toward and ever deepening understanding of music itself. In his own unique way, each man opened the gateway to the universal music of his countryman, Frederic Chopin.

In 1980 I embarked on a Chopin series of six concerts in New York City, beginning with all three Sonatas and ending with the 24 Etudes. Arthur Rubinstein helped me prepare much of the repertoire, strengthening structure and encouraging greater directness and simplicity. He gave me courage, and he gave me his blessing.

Passing on the priceless legacy of Munz and Rubinstein to my own students is one of the great joys in my musical life today. In this way, a vital tradition is being shared with today’s young artists, and the future beckons!

Footnotes

1 Mr. Rubinstein was very proud of his American citizenship and wanted his first name spelled in the “American” way with an h – Arthur, not Artur.

2 Op. 10, No. 1, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12 and Op. 25, No. 6, 9, and 12. I had studied Op. 25, No. 1, 2, and 3 previously with Mrs. Gunn.