By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Petersburg Conservatory was recognized as one of the world’s leading musical academies, preparing first-class performers. It was fitting that its founder was Anton Rubinstein, one of the two greatest pianists of the nineteenth century (the other was Franz Liszt). Rubinstein had brought such European luminaries as the pianist Theodor Leschetitzky and the violinist Henryk Wieniawsky to teach at the conservatory. They both left their mark on Petersburg, spending many years there.
Leschetitzky’s influence was particularly strong. One of his most talented students, Annette Esipova, became his second wife. Esipova toured the world many times; New York critics were thrilled by her, and even the sardonic George Bernard Shaw was impressed by her flawless technique. In the late nineteenth century Esipova settled in Petersburg, where she became a professor at the conservatory, making her appearances like a queen surrounded by a retinue of assistants and students. Being accepted in her class was considered a great achievement. One such fortunate student was Prokofiev.
At first he, like everyone else, was in awe of his professor’s fame, and considered himself as part of the “conservatory guards.” But soon the composer grew disillusioned with Esipova. His rebellious, impatient nature was exasperated by the severe discipline of Esipova’s teaching system. In addition, she demanded a clear, “pearl-like” technique, her trademark, from her students, while Prokofiev had trouble dropping his habit of playing rather carelessly.
Nevertheless, he performed powerfully on his final exam in the spring of 1914 and won the Rubinstein Prize, a grand piano given to the best graduating pianist. (There were 108 graduates that year and over twenty-five hundred students at the Petersburg Conservatory in 1914.) Later Prokofiev became a renowned interpreter of his own works, and gave concerts in Europe and the United States.
One of the main musical attractions of Petersburg in the early twentieth century was the much discussed piano trio of Esipova, the violinist Leopold Auer, and the cellist Alexander Verzhbilovich. Auer had appeared in Petersburg in 1868, and after Wieniawsky left he became the leading violin teacher at the conservatory. The list of Auer’s students reads like a who’s who of twentieth-century violin playing: Yascha Heifetz, Mischa Elman, Efrem Zimbalist, Nathan Milstein. No other pedagogue of the nineteenth or twentieth centuries could boast of such a roster. Auer’s class was legendary, and students from all over the world flocked to him.
In his last years Auer did not accept “rough draft” work: he demanded that the student come to class with the music already learned; only then would Auer concentrate on the artistic problems. Milstein recalled Auer’s advice: “Practice with your head, not your fingers.”50 That meant the priority of analysis and imagination over mechanical practice. According to Milstein, the impatient professor would not only yell at slow students, he would throw their music at them; even the incomparable Heifetz was not safe from Auer’s flashes of anger.
Yet Auer took an individual approach to each of his phenomenal students. He would help a violinist of lyric bent to discover highly dramatic colors, expanding his artistic palette that way. He would lead a student with a fiery temperament toward a more controlled interpretation. All pupils were expected to play with a beautiful, noble sound and in a lofty style.
Auer was a marvelous performer (Tchaikovsky wrote his Violin Concerto for him). The composer Yuri Shaporin recalled the following incident. Shaporin was studying at the Petersburg Conservatory when the word of Professor Auer’s extraordinary new student, Yascha Heifetz, circulated through the school. Only Auer’s students were permitted to attend his classes. In order to hear the prodigy play, Shaporin sneaked into the small space between the two doors leading to the classroom and scraped away some of the paint covering the glass of the inner door. With his eye glued to the “peephole,” Shaporin saw a curly-haired youth in a sailor suit, admirably playing the Glazunov concerto, which Auer himself had premiered in 1905.
When he had finished, Heifetz turned to the professor and asked, “Like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then how?”
Then Auer, who was in his late sixties, got out of his deep armchair, took the boy’s little violin, and played the Glazunov concerto from beginning to end with such brilliance and inspiration that Shaporin stood entranced behind the door.
When he had finished, Auer said to Yascha, “Like that!”51
