It has not started raining yet, so self considers this a very good sign. It means she will have time to finish digging hole for last plant she purchased from Redwood City Nursery, a viburnum davidii.
And, self is eating a slice of triple-chocolate mousse from bakery on Laurel Street in San Carlos: Vivaldi’s or Chocolate Mousse, as the new owners have taken to calling it. Self saw the cutest array of Halloween cookies and thought of purchasing a box to send to son, for him to share with his “rezzies”, as he calls his freshmen charges. Perhaps she’ll do that next week.
Self started perusing some old e-mail and came across one from her aunt, a response to a question from self. The e-mail said that Dearest Mum’s piano teacher at Curtis was one Madame Vengerova. So, self decides to google “Madame Vengerova + piano” and comes up with a whole host of entries on movie called Madame Sousatzka, starring Shirley MacLaine.
Hmmm, self is quite sure Dearest Mum was visiting at the time this movie opened, in a small art-house cinema just around the corner from self’s apartment in Menlo Park. And Dearest Mum said nothing, nothing about wanting to see it. Curious.
Here is what The New York Times had to say about the movie:
The film critics will be discussing ”Madame Sousatzka” in cinematic terms. Speaking musically, though, this is an honest attempt to bring into perspective the travails of a prodigy, his growing up, his relationship with his teacher and, as he develops, with the music industry. Piano teachers go about it in various ways. Some are tyrants. Adolph Henselt, considered in the 1850’s to be a peer of Liszt as a pianist, ended up as a teacher in Leningrad. His idea of teaching was to go around swatting flies and yelling ”Falsch! Falsch!” (”False! False!”) whenever his pupils hit a wrong note. He made them so nervous they hit many wrong notes, which delighted him. There was a saying in the profession: ”Henselt kills.” Liszt’s great pupil, Karl Tausig, was also tyrannical, with never a good word to say. His way of teaching was to sit down and say, ”Play it like this.” Since he was Karl Tausig, conceivably the most perfect technician who ever lived, nobody could play it like this. In Amy Fay’s unforgettable words – she was an American girl who studied with him in the late 1860’s – ”it was like trying to copy a streak of lighting at the end of a wetted match.”
Whether or not the producers of ”Madame Sousatzka” realize it, the piano teacher in the film is modeled after Isabella Vengerova (1877-1956). She was the empress of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and through her hands passed such figures as Samuel Barber, Lukas Foss, Leonard Bernstein and Gary Graffman. She was demanding and despotic. Things had to be done exactly her way. When she went into a tantrum, she could make her pupils feel like crawling caterpillars. But she gave them technique and musicianship, and she lived by a set of vanished ideals in which music and only music was the focus of her and her pupils’ lives.
Oooh, somewhere in the back of her mind, self recalls that Dearest Mum told her that Madame Vengerova was royally pissed when Dear Departed Dad began hanging around her star pupil. In fact, Madame V told Dearest Mum in no uncertain terms that she could not hope to have a real career if she married Dear Departed Dad. Which proved to be just the ticket, for shortly thereafter Dearest Mum married Dear Departed Dad, departed New York (for at least 20 years) and raised five children, just like that, in the Philippines.
Self was the second.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers, stay tuned.
Kanlaon 