Hélène Grimaud: My first teacher – Jacqueline Courtin

I started piano relatively late on, at nearly eight, but I took to it right away. I was obsessed with it. I was very lucky with my first teacher. Jacqueline Courtin was such a fine person, gentle but strict, extremely dedicated to the music. She had vast horizons, an immense culture, and she was very generous about sharing those. Progress went very fast: she introduced me to the Berg Sonata when I was nine years old. Her scores were always heavily annotated.

The first time I laid eyes on that Berg Sonata, the score was nearly illegible, because Courtin was so dedicated, so precise, that she had everything underlined: all the punctuation in red, every phrase, every marking, and God knows it’s heavily marked to begin with. So there was red and blue everywhere, and with that and the fingering, I could barely even see the notes. I remember thinking, this is so daunting, how can I even read this, much less sight-read it? But I think we tend to underestimate children and their ability to absorb things, even things which seem more difficult than the level of a child’s ability. But the only way to make progress happen is to challenge them with more, and they find they can do it and they will do it, and it leads to an exponentially faster developmental rate. No doubt about it.

Then Jacqueline was the one who introduced me to Pierre Barbizet. My parents were rather against me doing this professionally, because they didn’t come from a musical background. They could see that I was doing better with music than without, but at the same time, they were concerned that it was going to be distracting me too much from schoolwork and a normal sort of home life. But Jacqueline was hell bent on convincing them that I needed to go to the Paris Conservatoire – which meant letting go their only child, and that required a lot of magnanimity on their part. But when I went and played for Barbizet, he told them: ‘She’s meant to do this. You have to let her.’ And they accepted that. So I owe her a lot.