Well-meaning Advisers
The student should form the habit of determining things for himself. He will soon find that he will be surrounded with many well-meaning advisers who, if they have their own way, may serve to confuse him. Some virtuosos regard their well-meaning admirers and entertainers as the worst penalties of the virtuoso life. Whether they are or are not must, of course, depend upon the artist's character. If he accepts their compliments and courtesies as an expression of the measure of pleasure they derived from his playing, he has tacitly allowed for that share in their pleasure which is due to their power of appreciation, and he can therefore only rejoice in having provided something worthy of it. The manner of their expression, the observations they make, the very wording of their compliments will reveal, quickly enough, whether he has a case of real appreciation before him, or a mere morbid mania to hobnob with celebrities, or at least with people who by nature of their professional work are often compelled against their own desires to hold a more or less exposed position in the public eye. If he deals with the latter and still allows their compliments to go further than the physical ear, he must be a man of a character so weak as to make it doubtful that he will ever produce anything worthy of sincere and earnest appreciation. More young students are misled by blatant flattery than anything else. They become convinced that their efforts are comparable with those of the greatest artist, and the desire for improvement diminishes in direct ratio to the rate in which their opinion of their own efforts increases. The student should continually examine his own work with the same acuteness that he would be expected to show were he teaching another.
Questions in Style, Interpretation, Expression
and Technic of Pianoforte Playing
SERIES X
josef hofmann
