Theodor Leschetizky was undoubtedly the most successful piano teacher after Liszt, and amongst his pupils one finds the names of some of the most eminent pianists of the 20th century, including Paderewski, Schnabel, Friedman and Moiseiwitsch. Born in 1830 at Lancut (now in Poland), he had been a pupil of Czerny and himself started giving lessons before he was twenty. Leschetizky matured from a child prodigy into becoming a considerable virtuoso: during his career he gave concerts in Austria, German, Russia, France and England. When Anton Rubinstein founded the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1862 Leschetizky was made professor of piano, an appointment he held until 1878, when he moved to Vienna. It was to his home in the outskirts of this city that pupils flocked from both Europe and America. He continued to teach there until early in 1914.

Around 1,500 pianists took lessons from Leschetizky and aside from those who became concert pianists, a great many themselves developed into noted teachers. His secret, if it can be described as such, was that he applied himself to developing the artist within the pupil. Tone and rhythm were aspects that preoccupied him, but above all it was, he believed, the pupil’s intelligence that needed to be applied to piano playing – not the usual incessant  repetition of technical passages. The approach is typified in one of his favourite maxims – ‘think ten times and play once’.

The finely crafted compositions of Leschetizky belong in style to the mid-19th century and, as their titles reveal, for the main part they are virtuoso salon works and elegant genre pieces. Many are dedicated to fellow pianists of the day and also to individual pupils. A few pieces survived in the recital repertoire until the 1920s, the majority of exponents being either pupils or grand-pupils of the composer. Leschetizky also wrote a comic opera Die Erste Falte (‘The First Wrinkle’), which was produced at Prague in 1867.

James Methuen-Campbell © 2015