Peter Feuchtwanger
‘Zen master of piano playing’ who helped leading concert pianists to relax and raise their game
PETER FEUCHTWANGER, who has died aged 85, was the go-to teacher for many of the world’s leading concert pianists. He prepared Martha Argerich for her win at the 1965 Chopin Competition in Warsaw; helped Shura Cherkassky to overcome his nerves; and coached David Helfgott, whose battle with mental illness was depicted in the film Shine.
Feuchtwanger had been a promising, self-taught pianist, but at the age of 20 gave up performing to carve out a niche as a teacher. Nevertheless, he turned down positions at leading music colleges, claiming that hour-long lessons and the requirement for students to sit examinations were not conducive to his methods. Some called him the Zen master of piano playing, with his belief in relaxation, deep breathing and total calm. “Posture combined with both the stability and the correct height of the piano stool are the sine qua non for correct playing,” he insisted.
He was particularly inspired by Clara Haskil’s technique. When he asked her about the fingering for a particularly difficult passage of music she replied: “Whatever comes”, inspiring Feuchtwanger to adopt a similar approach, urging his students to adopt different fingerings each time they played.
Peter Bernard Feuchtwanger was born in Munich on June 26 1930. In 1555 his ancestors had left the Bavarian town of Feuchtwangen, where he would later run a piano festival. His father, Theodore, a cousin of the German-Jewish novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, was a bank director in Munich who fled Germany early in the Second World War, taking his family to Haifa. His mother, Amalie, would be murdered in a hotel room in her eighties.
Details of young Peter’s early life are hazy. He told of playing truant to visit the home of a woman who owned a piano. He had heard recordings at home of Chopin, Beethoven and Liszt. He started playing them from memory, but the record player had been running too fast, so he had memorised the works in the wrong key.
Inevitably his truancy was discovered, but as the truth about his talent emerged his parents arranged a formal piano lesson, where he played the second of Liszt’s La Leggierezza, albeit in F sharp minor rather than F minor. Never having seen a score he failed a sight-reading test, and when the teacher placed a volume of Beethoven sonatas on the piano he guessed that they were the slow movements of the Moonlight,
Pathétique and Appassionata sonatas. He was wrong. Although he was easily able to transpose the Liszt into the correct key, Feuchtwanger was so embarrassed by the teacher’s scolding that he never returned.
He was sent to Zurich to become a banker, but wound up in London, took lessons with Edwin Fischer and Walter Gieseking, and gave a handful of public recitals. His performing career ended after he turned up at a concert expecting to play one Beethoven sonata but found that another had been advertised which the promoter insisted he play, even though he barely knew the work. “Everything went without a hitch until six or seven pages before the end,” he recalled. “Suddenly I had no idea which key comes next. I started to sweat; I improvised the fugue for maybe 10 minutes … at some point I found myself on the last page and remembered the end.”
During childhood visits to Druze and Bedouin villages, Feuchtwanger
had absorbed many Arabic musical styles, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London he studied Indian and Arabic music, mastering the sitar. Malcolm Binns performed his Variations on an
Eastern Folk Tune at the Wigmore Hall in 1958. “They contain good piano writing and show much invention in extracting interest from a repetitious little tune,” noted one critic. His Raga
Tilang, for violin, sitar, tabla and tamboura, was written for Menuhin and Ravi Shankar’s collaboration at the Bath Festival in 1966.
Although he was a regular juror, Feuchtwanger professed to disliking competitions, claiming that they “encourage fast, loud and mechanical playing”. Many of his students were “secret pupils”, famous pianists who did not want it known that they were still studying. One of his more promising “unknowns” was Domingos de Vasconcellos, who drowned in the
Marchioness disaster in 1989. Much of his time was split between Munich and London, where he lived in a penthouse apartment near Knightsbridge. Although he was seen at many concerts, he was an unassuming presence, offering only words of kindness and encouragement. He is survived by his partner, the artist Michael Garady.
Peter Feuchtwanger, born June 26 1930, died June 17 2016