Violin Mastery - DAVID HOCHSTEIN - Part 1
THE VIOLIN AS A MEANS OF EXPRESSION
AND EXPRESSIVE PLAYING
The writer talked with Lieutenant David Hochstein, whose death in the battle of the Argonne Forest was only reported toward the end of January, while the distinguished young violinist, then only a sergeant, was on the eve of departure to France with his regiment and, as he modestly said, his “thoughts on music were rather scattered.” Yet he spoke with keen insight and authority on various phases of his art, and much of what he said gains point from his own splendid work as a concert violinist; for Lieutenant Hochstein (whose standing has been established in numerous European as well as American recitals) could play what he preached.
SEVCIK AND AUER: A CONTRAST IN TEACHING
Knowing that in the regimental band he was, quite appropriately, a clarinetist, “the clarinet in the military band being the equivalent of the violin in the orchestra”—and a scholarship pupil of the Vienna Meisterschule, it seemed natural to ask him concerning his teachers. And the interesting fact developed that he had studied with the celebrated Bohemian pedagog Sevcik and with Leopold Auer as well, two teachers whose ideas and methods differ materially. “I studied with Sevcik for two years,” said the young violinist. “It was in 1909, when a class of ten pupils was formed for him in the Meisterschule, at Vienna, that I went to him. Sevcik was in many ways a wonderful teacher, yet inclined to overemphasize the mechanical side of the art. He literally taught his pupils how to practice, how to develop technical control by the most slow and painstaking study. In addition to his own fine method and exercises, he also used Gavinies, Dont, Rode, Kreutzer, applying in their studies ideas of his own.
“Auer as a teacher I found altogether different. Where Sevcik taught his pupils the technic of their art by means of a system elaborately worked out, Auer demonstrated his ideas through sheer personality, mainly from the interpretative point of view. Any ambitious student could learn much of value from either; yet in a general way one might express the difference between them by saying that Sevcik could take a pupil of medium talent and—at least from the mechanical standpoint—make an excellent violinist of him. But Auer is an ideal teacher for the greatly gifted. And he is especially skilled in taking some student of the violin while his mind is still plastic and susceptible and molding it—supplying it with lofty concepts of interpretation and expression. Of course Auer (I studied with him in Petrograd and Dresden) has been especially fortunate as regards his pupils, too, because active in a land like Russia, where musical genius has almost become a commonplace.
“Sevcik, though an admirable teacher, personally is of a reserved and reflective type, quite different from Auer, who is open and expansive. I might recall a little instance which shows Sevcik’s cautious nature, the care he takes not to commit himself too unreservedly. When I took leave of him—it was after I had graduated and won my prize—I naturally (like all his pupils) asked him for his photo. Several other pupils of his were in the room at the time. He took up his pen (I was looking over his shoulder), commenced to write Meinem best…. And then he stopped, glanced at the other pupils in the room, and wrote over the best … he had already written, the word liebsten. But though I would, of course, have preferred the first inscription, had Sevcik completed it, I can still console myself that the other, even though I value it, was an afterthought. But it was a characteristic thing for him to do!
Violin Mastery
Talks with Master Violinists and Teachers
by Frederick H. Martens
Published 1919
