Deppe always begins the scale in the middle of the piano, and plays up three octaves with the right, and down three octaves with the left hand. He says that all the difficulty is in going up, and that coming back is perfectly easy, as all you have to do is to let the fingers run! He always makes me play each hand separately at first, and very slowly, and then both hands together in contrary direction, gradually quickening the tempo. After that in thirds, sixths, octaves, etc.
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BERLIN, December 25, 1873.
As you may imagine, this is anything but a "Merry Christmas" for me, for I am simply the most completely bouleversée mortal in this world! Here I was a month ago preparing to give a concert of my own. Then I have the good or bad luck to make Herr Deppe's acquaintance, and to find out how I "ought" to have been studying for the last four years. I give up Kullak and my concert plan, thinking I'll study with Deppe and come out under his auspices. After two lessons with him, comes your letter with the news of this awful national panic in it.—Could anything be worse for a person who has really conscientiously tried to attain her object? I'm like the professor who gave some lectures to prove a certain theory, and when he got to the fourteenth, he decided it was false, and devoted the remaining ones to pulling it all down!
However, after practicing the scale on Deppe's principles, I find that they open the road to an ease, rapidity, sureness and elegance of execution which, with my stiff hand, I've not been able to see even in the dim distance before! One of his grand hobbies is tone, and he never lets me play a note without listening to it in the closest manner, and making it sound what he calls "bewüsst (conscious)."—No more mechanical "straying of the hands over the keys (as the novelists always say of their heroines) thinking of all sorts of things the while," but instead, a close pinning down of the whole attention to hear whether one finger predominates over the other, and to note the effect produced. I was perfectly amazed to see how many little ugly habits I had to correct of which I had not been the least aware. It seems as though my ears had been opened for the first time! Such concentration is very exhausting, and after two or three hours' practice I feel as if I should drop off the chair.
I forgot to say before, that Deppe enjoins sitting very low—that is—not higher than a common chair. He says one may have "the soul of an angel," and yet if you sit high, the tone will not sound poetic. Moreover, in a low seat the fingers have to work a great deal more, because you can't assist them by bringing the weight of your arm to bear. "Your elbow must be lead and your wrist a feather." Of course the seat must be modified to suit the person. I prefer a low seat myself, and have even had my piano-chair cut off two inches.
Before definitely deciding to give up Kullak and come to him, Deppe insisted that I should hear one of his scholars play. Fannie Warburg is in England on a visit, so I could not hear her, but he has another young lady pupil of whom he is very proud, named Fräulein Steiniger. This young lady had been originally a pupil of Kullak's, and I had heard her play once in his conservatory. She was a girl of a good deal of talent, but not a genius. Deppe said that when she came to him she had all my defects, only worse. She has been studying with him in the most tremendous manner for fifteen months, and he wanted me to see what he had made of her in that time. She was going to play in a concert in Lübeck, and he was to rehearse her pieces with her on Saturday for the last time. He begged me to come then, and accordingly I went.
I was very much struck by her playing, which was remarkable, not so much for sentiment or poetry, of which she had little, but for the mastery she had over the instrument, and for the perfection with which she did everything. There was a clarity and limpidity about her trills and runs which surprised and delighted. Her left hand was as able as the right, and had a way of taking up a variation like nothing at all and running along with it through the most complicated passages, which almost made you laugh with pleasure! There was a wonderful vitality, elasticity and snap to her chords which impressed me very much, and a unity of effect about her whole performance of any composition which I don't remember to have heard from the pupils of other masters. The position of the hand was exquisite, and all difficulties seemed to melt away like snow or to be surmounted with the greatest ease. I saw at a glance that Deppe is a magnificent teacher, and I believe that he has originated a school of his own.
Fräulein Steiniger played a charming Quintette by Hummel, a beautiful Suite by Raff, a Prelude and Fugue by Bach, and two Studies, and all, as it seemed to me, exactly as they ought to be played. After she had finished, we had a long talk about Kullak. She said she staid with him year after year, doing her very best, and never arriving at anything. At last, as he did nothing for her, she resolved to strike out for herself, and went to Deppe, who was at that time conducting Stern's orchestral concerts, and asked him if he would not allow her to play in one of them. Deppe received her with his characteristic kindness and cordiality, but told her that before he could promise he must first hear her in private, and he set a time for the purpose.
She had prepared Beethoven's great E flat Concerto, which everybody plays here. It is as difficult for Deppe to listen to that concerto as it is for Liszt to hear Chopin's B flat minor Scherzo. "We poor conductors!" he will exclaim, "will the artists always keep bringing us Beethoven's E flat Concerto? Why not, for once, the B flat, or a Mozart concerto? Then we should say 'Ja, mit Vergnügen (Yes, with pleasure).' Aber Jeder will grossartig spielen heutzutage (But everybody wants to play on a grand scale now-a-days). The mighty rushing torrent is the fashion, but who can do the wimpling, dimpling streamlet? Nobody has any fingers for the kleine Passagen (little fine passages). Sie haben, Alle, keine Finger (None of them have any fingers)." He then winds up by saying he is the only man in Germany who knows how to give them "fingers." "Ich weiss worauf es ankommt (I know what it depends on)!"