In Search of Alberto Guerrero

Chapter 5: Lessons—Changes—Glenn Gould—A Letter— The Final Public Recital

Lessons I had regular piano lessons with Guerrero from the fall of 1945 through the early summer of 1950. In June 1945 he heard me play in my home town of Victoria as a TCM examination candidate. I still have his exam report, a mighty example of “telling it as it is.” If I had inflated ideas of my own pianistic abilities, the report points out basic inadequacies: rushed tempi, blurred trills, and a considerable catalogue of other faults. He awarded me a grade slightly under first class; while this was a disappointment, I knew it was just. At the same time, Guerrero evidently recognized a certain musical aptitude worth developing, because I soon learned he had recommended me for a scholarship to come to Toronto for full-time music study. The terms left me free to choose any teacher on the conservatory’s staff, but his frank appraisal and the urging of another Victorian, Alexandra McGavin, then already in his class, led me to sign up with Guerrero. The lessons took place in the brightly lit sunroom studio, a relaxing space of cool colours, with shelves of books and scores, large prints of Renoir and Picasso on the walls, and, on a side table, a framed invitation to the funeral of Frédéric Chopin. Years later a fellow student, Margaret Sheppard, recalled, “taking the elevator to the top floor and then walking up the stairs to the studio penthouse with its wall of windows lined with red geraniums, a print of Picasso’s Woman in White nearby, the two baby grand pianos at one end…and over all the soft green hue that gave a Latin atmosphere to the room, even in the midst of a wicked Toronto winter.”1 To say my lessons opened a whole new world would be understating the case. We worked towards a more relaxed and more confident technique, and I learned the various exercises Guerrero found effective to this end— 91 five 05_beckwith.qxd 2006/03/29 12:24 PM Page 91 more interesting and more logical than the traditional keyboard exercises of Czerny and others. The muscular power needed for piano playing was, he showed, not enormous. Snapping a finger against a table top makes an already loud noise; much of the action required for even a strongly projectile forte need come only from the fingers. Ninety per cent of the repertoire was best presented with a solid finger technique: with the upper arm supporting the forearm and hand, the fingers were free to attack the keys. They had to play to the depth of the keys, and to stay close for accuracy. A photo of Guerrero taken in the late 1930s shows him with one hand in midair —an indication, I thought, that the shot was posed, rather than snapped in actual performance. For accuracy also, major changes of hand-position (the wide skips in Scarlatti, for example) were taken laterally—that is, sideways rather than up and down. He was critical of professional recitalists who “slapped” at the keys with the forearms, finding this an inefficient approach, besides which the impact destroyed tone. A New York reviewer of the period described a well-known pianist, Ania Dorfmann, as “swatting” the piano, and added that at one point he “could have sworn the piano swatted back”: Guerrero enjoyed quoting this bit of sarcasm.2 Swatting with
IN SEARCH OF ALBERTO GUERRERO  92 Alberto Guerrero, photographed by Allan Sangster, ca. 1937 (Collection Stuart Hamilton) 05_beckwith.qxd 2006/03/29 12:24 PM Page 92 the forearm was not his style, even in massive chordal passages by Chopin or Brahms or Franck: there were other, more musical ways of delivering power. His recommended exercises were important, but mostly we pupils learned technique by facing the problems of actual repertoire. In the first years I covered major Chopin and Schumann works (Études, Preludes, Waltzes, a Ballade, a Scherzo of Chopin’s, and Schumann’s Études symphoniques ); Beethoven’s Sonatas in B flat, Opus 27, no. 1, and in A, Opus 101, and his Bagatelles, Opus 126; Mozart’s Fantasia in c, K.475, and Sonatas in a, K.310, and D, K.311; a Brahms Rhapsody and several Intermezzi ; some Bartók, some Hindemith, Milhaud’s Saudades do Brasil, Ravel’s Valses nobles et sentimentales; Debussy’s Jardins sous la pluie, as well as several of the Préludes. Above all...