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Entertainment > Music > Me, the Piano, Dear Sophie and Amazing Brother
 

Me, the Piano, Dear Sophie and Amazing Brother

Ed is proud to brag about my pianistic abilities and often tells people I am “6th from Beethoven.” I have asked him not to say that because it implies that I am a consummate professional and I am not. In any case, I decided to research what I knew of Sophie’s training. And it would appear I am not 6th, but 5th from Beethoven. Here’s the trail:

Me: for 36 years, a pupil of Sophie Feuermann (1908-2007)
(Not enough time, considering I was 40 when I started with her and had been teaching myself badly, forcing solutions and damaging my hands. We started with a year of playing while she held on to my forearms throughout.)

Sophie Feuermann, pupil of Artur Schnabel (1882-1951)
(She said of Schnabel that she didn’t care for him much but had to study with him because he was a “friend of the family”.)

Artur Schnabel, pupil of Theodor Leschetizky (1830-1915)
Theodor Leschetizky, pupil of Carl Czerny (1791-1857)
Carl Czerny, pupil of Beethoven (1770-1827)

Sophie’s family came from Kolomea, then part of Poland and now part of the Ukraine. They moved to Vienna and her father applied to the local orchestra for a position. He was a violinist and teacher. He taught his two sons, Sigmund and Emmanuel, violin and cello respectively. Sigmund was an astonishing prodigy, playing with major orchestras while still a boy. Sophie studied piano. Equally talented, but, being female, largely ignored. Later she and Emanuel toured together playing double concerti, piano and cello.

The orchestra position was by no means easy to get. Everyone who was a musician in Vienna wanted to be in the orchestra. The senior Feuermann showed up for the audition with Sigmund. He put the boy front and center and there was discomfort and irritation at his presumption. Then the boy played. He got the job. The orchestra did not want to lose the prodigy.

Sigmund’s life was shortened, the date of his death is unknown. He was probably in his 20s or early 30s. He did not develop because of being pushed into public performance at too early an age.

Emanuel was mostly ignored while the father concentrated on Sigmund. This was a blessing because he was allowed to develop without someone hovering over him. In 1917 Emanuel went to study with Julius Klengel. Now Feuermann began to soak up training, music, and general knowledge. He systematically divided his day into practice sessions, work in music theory, piano practice, and building a epertoire. He interspersed this with avid reading. In 1918 the cello professor at the Gurzenich Conservatoire in Cologne, Friedrich Grutzmacher, died. Klengel proposed Feuermann replace him. Sixteen-year-old Feuermann was hired, with full responsibilities of a professorship, but not the august title.

From a work on his technique by Brinton Smith: Emanuel Feuermann (1902-1942) was almost universally recognized during his brief lifetime as a peerless master of the instrument. Artur Rubinstein said "Feuermann became for me the greatest cellist of all time"[1], Jascha Heifetz accepted him as the first cellist worthy of serious collaboration, and would not play with another for nine years after his death. He was the cellist of choice for conductors including Toscanini, who described him as "the greatest" and said that "there is no one after him"[2] and Szell, who said that he played with "...noblesse and distinction, and with the complete equipment in the service of an artistic purpose."[3] His premature death during routine surgery in 1942 at the age of 39 brought his career to an end before he had a chance to establish the type of widespread fame that Heifetz and Casals secured, but even today -more than half a century after his death- there is a clear consensus, among cellists who were privileged to hear Emanuel Feuermann play and among those familiar with his recordings, that Feuermann was a cellist without equal. His graceful, elegant playing shows both a warm, Kreislerian musicality and a fluid and facile command of the instrument that most cellists agree has never been approached since. (end excerpt)

Emmanuel was on tour in the States when the Nazis swarmed into Vienna. Sophie, who had married and was pregnant, got a call from patrons of the family that they had to run. She phoned her husband at his office and he wanted to come home and pack a bag. She said, no, go straight to the train and I’ll meet you there. She later learned that the Gestapo showed up 20 minutes after she left.

With help from friends, Sophie booked passage on an American ship. She was thinking ahead. If she gave birth en route, her child would be an American citizen. Her husband skied over the Alps into Switzerland and booked passage there. There was a woman in steerage who carried Sophie’s paperwork. When she arrived in New York, she was about to be denied entry because the address she had from her brother, was the apartment of his accompanist and her papers were in steerage. Emmanuel had arranged for her to camp out there while they were on tour. She was accused of meeting her lover, the father of her unborn child. She got on the phone and called the office of her patron, Erick M. Warburg of Warburg Pincus, the financial behemoth. An emissary was sent to vouch for her and she was admitted.

I am singularly blessed to have known and studied with Sophie who said, after we were together some years, that after hearing me play, she “didn’t know where to start.” She was phenomenal as a teacher, she was incredibly difficult, at times abusive, we survived a break, and then all was fine again until her death a month before her 100th birthday.

There is still so much I will never know because she is gone. There was no end to the learning.

There are several Feuermann recordings on You Tube, but only one is a video. It is”Feuermann plays Dvorak and Popper.” Well worth watching. Sophie was not a techie and had no use for modern technology but I think she might have been pleased to see how her brother is being remembered on YouTube.

xx, Teal


posted on Apr 5, 2015 2:39 PM ()

Comments:

It must have been very difficult to be separated from her husband and have to depend on the success of him skiing over the Alps to be reunited.
comment by troutbend on Apr 6, 2015 5:20 PM ()
She didn't fill me in on that part. By the time I met her, she and her husband were divorced and he was living with a woman she termed "a Nazi" and her adult daughters were being nice to the interloper and she was beyond angry.
reply by tealstar on Apr 9, 2015 8:21 AM ()
This is fascinating. Also ironic how immigration treated people whose talents make them -- or should make them -- sought-after refugees. I'll definitely listen to the youtube videos.
comment by drmaus on Apr 6, 2015 7:23 AM ()
I would guess the agents who dealt with her knew nothing of the arts or the people in the arts. T'was ever thus. Sophie and her husband wound up in Scarsdale with two grand pianos in her living room and entertained a lot. Later she lived in Lincoln Towers on 66th and West End Avenue and that is where I went for my lessons. Her daughters inherited that apartment. I know a reasonable amount about her private life but choose not to write about it.
reply by tealstar on Apr 6, 2015 8:35 AM ()
Fascinating!
comment by jondude on Apr 6, 2015 5:37 AM ()
Such a dramatic life that your Sophie had. It amazes me that human
beings are capable of so much endurance to triumph in the end.
comment by elderjane on Apr 5, 2015 6:15 PM ()
Sophie's married name was Braun, later Americanized to Brown. There were occasions when she had musical conversations with prominent musicians and in the middle, they would say, "Who are you," and she would answer "Sophie Brown" and they would insist, no I mean WHO ARE YOU?
reply by tealstar on Apr 6, 2015 8:38 AM ()

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