Josef Lhévinne graduated from the Imperial Conservatory in Moscow in 1892 at the top of his class that included a certain Rachmaninoff. He could have had a brilliant career as a concert pianist but instead chose to concentrate on the pedagogical aspect of music after having emigrated from Russia, first to Berlin and then onto New York.
In 1924, while at the Juilliard School he wrote a slim book: Basic Principles in Pianoforte Playing. This book isn’t well known outside a small group of professional pianists and reads like a Soviet manifesto, for say the improvement of potato yield on a communal farm, with a lot of “axioms” and other homilies.
I have been attempting to learn how to play the piano as an adult (in my forties) who had an unmusical childhood, mostly to learn something new, and to see if there lurks a deeply hidden musical talent. Piano playing for an adult is a daunting task. The old brain has to learn so many new tricks: notes, musical notations, rhythm and time. All the while reading the treble clef, bass clef, keeping time and somehow transmitting the notes to clumsy fingers. Lhévinne's book addresses the pianist who’s overcome the hurdles described above and indeed says:
“The folly of paying a teacher a considerable fee for instruction that should have been at the very beginning, is too obvious to comment upon. Surely a practical people like the Americans will rectify this.”
Americans are also compared unfavorably with other nationalities when it comes to having “rhythm”:
“Because the Bohemians, the Hungarians, the Spanish, the Polish and the Russians seem to possess [sic] it instinctively is not so much a matter of heredity as that they have heard rhythmic music from babyhood […]”
Ignoring the frequent clichés that abound here, after all it was written by a Russian in English in 1924, it’s a wonderful little book (all 48 pages of it) that addresses the fundamentals of piano playing. From positioning the hands—only move the metacarpal joints—to the piano playing posture of Lhevinne’s great hero: Anton Rubinstein. There’s useful commentary on how to produce mellifluous tones by the way the keys are “grasped” not struck.
And finally there is advice for someone like me attempting to learn the piano:
“However, if you are tonally deaf to lovely sound qualities there is very little hope for you.”
Enough said!