The woman who taught Britain to play piano
She is 95, but ‘Field Marshal’ Fanny Waterman has lost none of her lust for life – or music. By Ivan Hewett
She has been dubbed “Field Marshal Fanny”. And no wonder, because Dame Fanny Waterman is a force of nature. She played piano at the Proms in her teens, has published a series of piano teaching aids that have sold in their millions, and is a tireless fighter for music education. And she was the co-founder of the Leeds International Piano Competition, which this year celebrates its 50th anniversary (the anniversary actually fell in 2013, but there was no competition that year). It’s the most highly regarded of all piano competitions and the model to which the hundreds of competitions founded since all aspire. So I’m expecting to meet someone formidable, but the first thing that strikes me about Dame Fanny, when we meet in her large, rambling house on the outskirts of Leeds, is how little she is. “You’re very welcome,” she says, reaching up to take my hand. “Now come and look at these photos,” she adds, leading me off to the bathroom of all places. She radiates energy and decisiveness in her startling red suit, and shows only a hint of frailty as she descends the stairs. It’s hard to believe she is about to celebrate her 95th birthday. “I’m going to retire after this year’s competition, well actually I’m not really,” she says quickly, as if to banish that silly idea. “At the moment I’m working 10 hours a day, watching videos of performers for the next competition. Have you heard about my new project? I want to create a new audience for classical music among young people. I’m very concerned about the lack of music in schools.” In the bathroom every bit of wall space is crammed with memorabilia. “That’s me with Edward Heath in 1972… that’s Radu Lupu [winner of the 1969 competition]. Now he really is one of the greats. When I hear him play Bach, I’m in another world. “And this,” she says, peering at an older photograph of a young girl at the piano, “is Wendy Waterman, my niece and also one of my pupils. When the great Annie Fischer heard her play Bach’s D minor Concerto, she said she’d never heard a better performance. People said Wendy was a child prodigy, and I said, ‘Excuse me! Mozart and Beethoven were prodigies. What we have now are very gifted children.’” That “Excuse me!”, uttered in a tone of outrage, is one of Dame Fanny’s favourite phrases. I hear it quite often over our lunch of salmon and cucumber sandwiches, cut neatly and served on best china. Everything breathes an air of old-fashioned gentility, as if Dame Fanny is living in a family house that goes back generations. In fact, her origins were very modest. “I didn’t live in a house with an indoor loo until I was 19,” she says. “We were very poor. My father was a jeweller who came from Russia to Leeds at the turn of the century. He and my mother taught me proper values. They didn’t respect anything that money could buy. It was health, integrity, beauty,” she says with a rhetorical emphasis on each word. “I showed a talent for improvising on the piano, so they sent me to a piano teacher who taught me Pixies on Parade while cooking her husband’s meal.” She rolls her eyes sceptically. “I only hope her culinary skills were greater than her musical ones. Well anyway, we found a better teacher who got me on to the great music children can play, by Bartók and Beethoven.” The gifted child eventually won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, where she bagged most of the piano prizes and was invited to play at a Prom. Then came the war, which meant a choice for able-bodied young women; working on the land or teaching. The young Fanny Waterman chose the latter, and after a few years had a stellar reputation. “My pupils had the habit of winning prizes and appearing in public aged 11 or 12,” she says with a glow of pride. “The newspapers said the age of miracles was not over.” Teaching became the centre of Waterman’s life, after she had her first child in 1950. Her decades of experience as a teacher are revealed in her three volumes of graded piano tutors, some of which were co-authored with the concert pianist Marion Thorpe. For the past halfcentury, any household in Britain where there was a child taking lessons would be sure to have these tutors on the piano. They now feel a little fusty, in an era when piano tutors focus on pop songs and television theme tunes. But they still sell very well, and Dame Fanny is unapologetic about her emphasis on high art. “Bach and Beethoven and Bartók wrote pieces suitable for small hands. There’s a lot of music of the highest quality from the greatest composers, so there’s just no excuse for fobbing children off with second-rate stuff. No child should have to put up with Pixies on Parade,” she says with feeling. The mysterious part of the story is how the piano teacher from Leeds came to mix with all those people in high places, without whose help the Leeds International Piano Competition would never have got off the ground. Dame Fanny shrugs as if this is no mystery at all. “Well, I never changed from being a Yorkshire lass. I’ve always treated everyone the same, and I think people appreciate that. I remember playing chamber music with Lady Parkinson, who was a friend of royalty. She rang one day to say, ‘I’ve got Princess Mary coming for tea with her daughter-in-law Marion. Will you come?’ Well, I was taken aback, but the princess was so natural.” That led to the meeting with the Countess of Harewood, later known as Marion Thorpe, the wife of the Liberal leader Jeremy, and the co-creator of the Leeds Piano International Competition. Another key factor was Dame Fanny’s husband, the doctor Geoffrey de Kayser. “I think he was even more passionate about music than me. He knew the timings of every Beethoven sonata movement. Anyway, one night in 1961, I woke him and said, ‘I’ve just had an idea for an international piano competition in Leeds.’ He said it would never work, it has to be a capital city. I said, ‘I’ll show you.’” Show him she did, by creating the first Leeds International Piano Competition in 1963. Arthur Bliss, Master of the Queen’s Music, agreed to chair the jury and participants were invited from all over the world. Since then the competition has taken place every three years. The winner of the 1972 competition was the great Murray Perahia. “When he played the Davidsbündlertänze at the final round, all the jury members were weeping,” she says. It’s a fair bet she was weeping, too, as her feeling for music has the fervency of religion. “There’s a holy trinity of music,” she says. “First there are the great composers, who live in heaven. Then there are the great performers, who can penetrate to the truth of what the great composers meant. They bring a message down to us here on Earth. Then there are the audiences who are just as important as the first two.” I wonder whether her feeling for music is rooted in a religious faith. “Well, I was raised in an observant Jewish household, but I’m not observant myself. For me religion is all to do with how you behave. You have to give, give, give, and not expect anything in return.” At an age when most people would have long since retired, Dame Fanny is still living up to that principle. The 18th Leeds International Piano Competition takes place from August 26 to September 13; leedspiano.com