By the end of the first lesson, poor Ignace’s enthusiasm had been cruelly dampened. The teacher to whom he had been assigned was a surly type. He listened to the boy play for a few minutes and then said flatly, “You’ll never be a pianist. You haven’t got the hands for it!” He added helpfully, “I understand you write music. You’d better stick to that!”
It was a blow, but Ignace realized that one man was not the whole faculty. Immediately after the lesson, he went to Director Kontski and asked for another teacher. Unfortunately, the second teacher was exactly the opposite of the first. The first man cared only for ready-made technique and had failed to recognize the boy’s natural talent. The second man, with whom Ignace studied for two years, was so poetic and romantic in his approach to music that he paid no attention to the hardcore technical problems of piano playing. Although he had vast admiration for his young pupil, he could not give him what he most needed.
After several discouraging weeks at the Conservatory, Ignace was ready to agree that he was not really cut out to be a pianist. Perhaps he should start thinking seriously about some other instrument. Since he had always liked the sound of the flute, he decided to try it out. The flute teacher decided otherwise. “You’ll never be a flute player, boy! You haven’t got the lips for it!”
The teacher of oboe and clarinet was a much more agreeable man, but he finally had to admit that Ignace’s future did not lie with either instrument. So did the teacher of bassoon and French horn. In time, however, the young musician found his instrumental niche. “Now, my dear boy,” the professor of brass instruments told him one day, “you are always trying to play piano. But why? You have no future at all with the piano! Your future is here, playing the trombone!” He flung an arm enthusiastically around Ignace’s shoulder. “Don’t you know that you are a great natural trombone player?”
He spent hours at the piano.
The teachers who were most enthusiastic about the new student, however, were the men who taught him theory and harmony and composition. “Never mind which instrument you play best,” they told him. “Learn to play all of them because it will be useful to you as a composer. And it is as a composer that you will become famous. As a pianist, never!”
But as he sat night after night in the dimly-lit warehouse, as he worked hour after hour trying to make his fingers produce the kind of sound he wanted to lure out of the piano, he knew that nothing had changed. He would be a pianist no matter who said what. He would be a pianist if it took him a dozen more years to find the right teacher!
Hard work and discouragement did not by any means prevent Ignace from thoroughly enjoying life in Warsaw. For the first time in his life he had a chance to hear real music, properly performed. Edward Kerntopf saw to that. He took the boy to a succession of concerts and operas, and even took him visiting in the homes of Warsaw’s leading musicians. Nothing could shake his faith in Ignace’s future as a pianist, even though the boy had so far shown progress in nothing but trombone playing.
During his first few days in Warsaw, Edward had taken him to see all the city’s beloved monuments to the past. Ignace returned to them again and again, dreaming as he had dreamed from his childhood of the day when his country would be reborn. He liked to walk by the great yellow Zamek, once the royal palace of the kings of Poland. In the palace square stood the noble bronze figure of King Sigismond III, who held a cross in one hand and a sword in the other. Like every other Polish boy, Ignace knew the prophecy that had grown up around the statue: “When Sigismond shakes his sword,” the old folks said, “then Poland will be free again!” How many times Ignace went to the square to stare, fascinated, at the statue. Yet the king held his bronze sword rigid and immobile, and it seemed unlikely that he would ever be able to shake it in the name of freedom.