"If your wrists are weak, go and roll the grass in the garden."
"If you want to develop strength and sensitiveness in the tips of your fingers, use them in every-day life. For instance, when you go out for a walk, hold your umbrella with the tips instead of in the palm of your hand."
"Practise your technical exercises on a cushion or upon a table sometimes. You do not always need the piano to strengthen your muscles."
And so on, intermingling advice with illustration, until the lesson becomes as entertaining as instructive.
When all goes well, a lesson with Leschetizky is a really wonderful experience. His point of view is so interesting, the depth of his comprehension so profound, his power of clear exposition so great, the parallels he draws between art and life so unexpected, that his listener is held under a spell of wondering enthusiasm throughout. Both his ear and his memory are very remarkable. He is able to retain accurately in his mind every detail in a piece of music on hearing it for the first time; and not only to play it through immediately afterwards, but to discuss points in it, making a suggestion here, an alteration there, exactly as if the music were before his eyes. He plays a great deal during the lesson in a fragmentary way, but rarely anything straight through. His piano is on the left of the pupil, the two instruments standing side by side, their keyboards level.
He sits very still and very straight, never stooping over the keys, or swaying about. His hands, often partially resting on the notes, are almost flat, the wrists low, the fingers doing all the work, his whole figure taut with the tension of concentrated thought.
His playing is as difficult to describe as himself, for it is the translation of his nature into sound. Then, as at no other time, his varied temperament discloses itself, its contrasts finding in music their best interpretation. These sonorous chords weighed out by so masterful a hand; this steady beat of measured emphasis; the lilt and swing of the rhythm; the fine-pointed staccato; the piquant charm with which the dainty notes come dancing off the keys; the melancholy tenderness of the soft caressing tone, stealing in unawares—these tell the story, more faithfully than any other language, of his nature, not only as a musician, but as a man.