Times were uncertain in Germany in the early 1920s when Menahem Pressler was born to Moritz and Judith Pressler, owners of a clothing store in Magdeburg, ninety miles southwest of Berlin. But as Pressler recalls, he and his younger siblings, Leo and Selma, had a happy life at home as children.
“What I remember really is, the strongest part of the memory, was that there was always love. Yes, sometimes my father was very, how shall I say, rough. He would say, ‘That has to be done,’ or something like that. None of us children ever was rebellious or would think even in those terms, not to do what he had asked, and mother was as sweet and as kind as could be. And there was and is to this day very fine relations among the three of us.”
The family worked hard and was, as Pressler says, “very, very religious.” “We went to pray. We kept the Jewish holidays, which I, of course, became much less to keep them as I was traveling and playing. But I remember them, and I remember the prayers. And when I can, I like to go and pray. Yes, we were very, very much religious.
“Of course, when I came of age, I had a Bar Mitzvah, and my brother Leo had it. I remember that I had to learn the part of the Torah that I had to read, and that took at least six months, because you not only have to read, but you have to read and have to sing it the way it is marked in the Torah. You see, the Torah has little signs how to read it, how to sing it, and that’s not easy. And I had to learn it, and I did. And I even remember what is my capit in the Torah, which was Vayigash, which means ‘and he approached.’ ”
There were few concerts in Germany at the time, but the family loved music and enjoyed listening to records. Pressler remembers that his father “played very badly the violin,” but at the age of six, Menahem began violin lessons, and his brother began piano lessons with a Mr. Kitzl, the Lutheran church organist who came to the Pressler house. Leo didn’t practice much and didn’t really want piano lessons, but Menahem learned his brother’s piano pieces just by having heard them during the lessons. Soon, at age seven, he was allowed to discontinue his violin studies and begin learning the piano.
Because he played by ear, “cheating,” as he calls it, Menahem did not read music well. “I always asked the teacher to play the piece for me, and I would remember it. And then when I would play a wrong note, he would say, ‘Now why don’t you read the music?’ And I barely could, until he discovered the problem, and then he taught me to read. He was a good teacher and he was very kind, and I would say that my physical ability and also my desire were much greater than my musical advancement at this stage.”
Germany had come under the Nazis by this point, which made lessons difficult at times. Pressler recalls Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass” in November 1938, during which mobs throughout Germany and Austria broke into synagogues, Jewish homes, and Jewish-owned businesses, including his parents’ store, looting and destroying property and attacking scores of people. “But I also do remember something which is amazing. My brother was out on his bicycle and he fell and he broke his leg. The SS men, the ones in uniform, the Nazis, brought him to the house. They had kind of immediately set his foot, which later really proved to be of great help. So these were the murderers actually, but here on these terms they were marvelous, humane.”
Germans, of course, were not supposed to associate with Jews, and certainly not visit their homes or teach them music. Pressler recalls, however, the courage of his teacher. “I do remember the great, great, great kindness of Mr. Kitzl. It was difficult for me to go on a tramway to his house, so he would come to my house and teach me. His whole attitude, the kindness that he showed me, was of help to me. You couldn’t imagine what it would be like, when you wear the sign of Cain supposedly on your forehead. That’s how they make you feel. But he didn’t. He made me feel good.”
Pressler remembers the first pieces he played with his teacher. “I only played classical pieces, but I remember an anecdote with my father. I played that little Schubert F minor Moments Musicaux. And when I finished playing for Kitzl, he said to me, ‘The ending was wonderful.’ So I told my father with pride, ‘And the ending was wonderful.’ He said, ‘Well, what about the beginning?’ He didn’t understand what’s with the rest of the piece, but I understood what [Mr. Kitzl] meant. Instinctively I understood there is a difference between how you approach this and the other, and that there I succeeded more than with that.”
Despite growing political concerns, Pressler was able to attend three special concerts during these early years. The first was in 1936 when he was twelve or thirteen and on a business trip with his father in Poland. The two took a side trip to Lwow so Menahem could hear the great Ignaz Friedman play a solo recital, an event that Pressler says had an enormous impact on him. He attended the second concert the next year, when Walter Gieseking played the Strauss Burlesque and a Mozart concerto with orchestra, and the third was an all-Chopin program presented in Magdeburg that included majurkas, waltzes, a Polonaise, and the Bolero, “a very interesting, thoughtful and creative program,” Pressler recalls.
During his years of study with Kitzl, Pressler learned several Bach Preludes and Fugues, Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsodie no. 13, Beethoven’s Sonata Op. 2 no. 3, a Mozart concerto, Beethoven’s Piano Concerto no. 1, and Chopin works, including Impromptus, Nocturnes, Mazurkas, and Waltzes.
“To some extent,” Pressler muses about that period of his life, “I was considered special [in the family] because I did what I did, which was playing music, and being successful quite early, so they all tried to help. If I had a recital, they all publicized it. They all tried to sell tickets. That’s what I remember of home.”
While Menahem studied the piano, his father, Moritz, kept watch on the political climate, thinking that the situation for Jews would improve. Preparations for the horrifying exterminations of Jews were just beginning, and Moritz waited almost too long to get his family out of Germany. In 1939, when Menahem was fifteen, Moritz applied for tourist visas for the family to visit Trieste, Italy, supposedly for a family vacation just weeks before World War II started. “That we could leave was a matter of luck,” Pressler says. “The German border police let us through to Trieste, but they didn’t have to.” He remembers the “enormous act of kindness” of Mr. Kitzl forwarding to him in Trieste a copy of Debussy’s Reflets dans l’eau with all fingerings marked.
Many years later, in 2005, Pressler returned to Germany to receive the Deutsche Bundesverdienstkreuz (Cross of Merit), which was presented to him in Magdeburg. “They had everything,” he says of the event. “They even had a picture of my father’s store which was destroyed. That was unbelievable to me. And [the presentation] was read by the prime minister [Dr. Wolfgang Böhmer] of the province. That was in my hometown, where they made me an honorary citizen and they gave me my graduation, which I had never had the chance to complete.” While in Trieste, Pressler studied with a Mr. Rossi, who recognized Pressler’s talent and offered him lessons at no cost. “I remember he was very nice, very supportive,” Pressler recalls, “and I loved going to lessons. And one thing that helped me so much was my desire to practice.”
After a few months, the family applied for travel visas to Palestine, which were granted only days before Italy joined the war. They traveled on the last ship allowed to leave the port of Trieste, which, as it turned out, was not allowed to return to Italy once it reached Palestine. While on the ship, Menahem played a recital for the captain’s table, his first performance to have a printed program. His repertoire included the Beethoven, Debussy, Brahms, and Chopin pieces he had learned with Kitzl and Rossi.
When the family arrived in Palestine late in 1939, his father worked first at a grocery store and then opened another clothing store, known locally as Pressler’s Pants, that became quite famous. The family moved into an apartment on Hana Viem Street in Tel Aviv.
Menahem, sixteen, was advised to study at the Tel Aviv Conservatory (now the Tel Aviv Music Academy) with Abilea, a well-known piano teacher, but because he was in Switzerland at the time, Pressler began lessons with Eliahu Rudiakov, who taught Abilea’s students in the master’s absence. Pressler ended up staying with Rudiakov for four years. “Here again I met the most kind person who truly was wonderful and who taught me for free.” Rudiakov, from a Russian background, had studied first in Germany with Max Pauer and then at the École Normale de Musique with Yvonne Lefébure, an assistant to Alfred Cortot. With Rudiakov, Pressler studied the Op. 110 Sonata of Beethoven, the Chopin A-flat Ballade, and the Balakirev Islamey. “I asked him, ‘What is the most difficult piece in the repertoire?’ And he told me it was the Islamey, so of course I had to play that in my first recital.”
Each year in Palestine, Pressler performed a recital representing the best of the works he had studied during the year. For his second recital, Pressler played the extremely difficult Liszt Sonata. Another piece he learned during this time was the Grieg Concerto, which his teacher encouraged him to learn for the Palestine Symphony Orchestra (now the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra) competition. Pressler won first prize and the opportunity to perform the Grieg Concerto with the orchestra. It would be the first of his many concerto concerts. “It was a fantastic experience, first of all, because I had won this prize, and [secondly] to play with the Symphony Orchestra. It’s like here playing with the New York Philharmonic. And I practiced like a maniac, and all I remember was that I loved doing it. I felt, ‘That’s what I want to do. That’s how I want to spend my life.’ ”
Fig. 3.1. Eliahu Rudiakov, 1950. By permission of Ariel Rudiakov.
As a result of playing with the Palestine Symphony Orchestra, Pressler met pianist and educator Leo Kestenberg, the orchestra’s general manager. Kestenberg had been the Minister of Fine Arts in Germany and had left Berlin when the Nazis came to power. He had settled in Prague for a while and finally emigrated to Tel Aviv. Rudiakov thought it would be good for Pressler to study with Kestenberg, who had been a student of pianist and composer Ferrucio Busoni in Berlin and had also studied with Franz Kullak, a student of Franz Liszt, who in turn had studied with Carl Czerny, a student of Beethoven.
Fig. 3.2. Leo Kestenberg. By permission of The Archive of Israeli Music.
Pressler studied with Kestenberg for three years, until 1946, when he was twenty-three and came to describe himself as being “a natural” at the piano. He remembers Kestenberg saying, “It’s too easy for you. That’s why you don’t give it enough thought. That’s why you don’t look at the depths of these pieces. You just play.” As Pressler remembers, neither Rudiakov nor Kestenberg actually taught technique to him, but each assigned études, such as Czerny, so that, as he progressed, he would be forced to develop the specific pianistic skills required for the next piece.
Pressler considered Rudiakov to be the finer pianist, but he later credited Kestenberg with influencing him to “read between the lines.” “He was an extremely knowledgeable man and guided me, not just in piano playing, but in a philosophical approach to making music, helping me to understand it more as a way of life than just playing the piano.” Kestenberg also helped him learn to listen for “beautiful sound.” “He always said, ‘This is harsh. This is harsh.’ That in itself demanded of me to find something so he wouldn’t say that. It created within me, not a technique of how to do it, but a technique of what sound did I want to hear? If once you have in your mind the sound you want to hear, you will find a way of handling your arm, your fingers, and your touch in order to achieve that sound.”
With Kestenberg, Pressler learned Liszt’s Concerto No. 1 in E-flat Major and the three Op. 31 Sonatas of Beethoven. Knowing that Kestenberg loved Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, he learned these on his own and played them for his teacher on his birthday.
Later, Pressler read in a newspaper about a new competition, the First International Debussy Competition, to be held in San Francisco. The competition required contestants to play much of the Debussy repertoire by memory. Pressler had studied only a few of these pieces, so Kestenberg helped him learn the repertoire, which became an important part of his life-long teaching and performing.
During this period, Pressler also studied harmony, counterpoint, and music history with another refugee from Germany, Dr. Riesenfeld. Riesenfeld taught harmonic studies and repertoire analysis using the German system that Pressler describes as “thorough, careful, conscientious, and very important,” and he taught him musical structure and style, chordal relationships, and repertoire. “We studied analysis, music criticism, form, and harmony. He was very German in his attitude and his learning. He didn’t like twentieth-century music and so I think, like many other Germans, he looked down on Debussy.”
Riesenfeld became Pressler’s good friend. The two spent time at the seashore in Tel Aviv, especially on days following performances, buying falafel or corn on the cob, and playing chess as a release from the pressures of performing. Meanwhile, Pressler continued to practice his usual eight hours a day in preparation for the upcoming Debussy Competition.
