I wrote a year or so ago (22 November 2012) about the dedication of the great Bohemian violin pedagogue, Otakar Ševčík, to teaching not so much how to play, but how to practise.
I see that the recently departed novelist Elizabeth Jane
Howard extends the same point in her memoir, Slipstream. In it she credited her
piano teacher at the Royal Academy of Music, Harold Craxton, in the same way,
adding that he taught “… how to learn; how to take the trouble and go on taking
it; and above all how to listen to what I was doing.”
And she continued: “Although I never emerged as a serious
pianist, his lessons have been useful to me in learning to write.”
Ševčík would have been proud of her.
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