Just as his concert career began to soar, Pressler’s life took an unexpected detour. He received an invitation in October 1954 from Dean Wilfred C. Bain of Indiana University. “I said, ‘No, I can’t. I have concerts.’ “Bain wanted me to come to Bloomington, a great music school of course, and he had my name in his little black book because he had first invited Steuermann, my teacher. Steuermann had said, ‘No, I am a city man, but I have a young colleague,’ so Bain just wrote my name in his little black book, but didn’t invite me yet.”
Next Bain invited the pianist Willi Masselos to come to Bloomington. “Willi and I were part of a four-piano team and made recordings under assumed names playing things like Night on Bald Mountain just to earn some money. Willi believed in his stars. If the stars didn’t tell him to go, he wouldn’t go. And then one day, Masselos said, ‘Menahem, should I go or shouldn’t I?’ I said, ‘You must, of course.’ He said, ‘You wouldn’t, would you?’ In order to encourage him, I said I would, but I didn’t have the slightest idea what Indiana University was like.”
Masselos did take the position at Bloomington, and then enticed Pressler to follow. “When Bain called me, I said, ‘I can’t.’ When he called me a second time, I still said, ‘I can’t.’ So Masselos and Sidney Foster, who was already a professor here, called me, and Masselos said, ‘You told me you would come,’ so I accepted a position of Artist in Residence for one semester. That was in 1955.”
“But Bain was, from the beginning, interested in getting the best. Willi Masselos was a fantastic pianist, and so was Sidney Foster. Then he got me. Pretty soon he got [cellist Janos] Starker, then [violinist Josef] Gingold, and it grew. Always the best.”
When he arrived at Indiana, Pressler skipped a reception held by the university’s president, Herman B Wells, who was renowned for remembering everyone—even those he had not met—by name. Instead, Pressler left town immediately for a weekend concert tour. Winter weather set in during that weekend, and when Pressler found himself unable to make the drive home from the Indianapolis airport, he stopped to call his wife, still in New York, to let her know of his whereabouts. There in the airport stood Wells, who said, “Menahem Pressler, what are you doing here?” Rattled that Wells would recognize him, Pressler offered an explanation, and Wells said, “May I invite you to join me in my car? My chauffeur is coming.” “And so he took me,” Pressler says. “Wells became more and more interested in the School of Music, and every time I had a good notice in the New York Times or somewhere, I would get a little note from him. That this university is where it is was all his doing. He was a prince among princes.”
Pressler’s first years at the university did not pay all that well, though the position allowed him to continue his concerts. “I know that I got too little, because Bain knew how to divide up one salary check into two people in the beginning; and since there was a pool of so many, he could do it. Soon enough I got an invitation to another school with another salary offer and that helped.”
The school allowed him to concertize, as long as his obligations to his students were satisfied. “Just so you give them all their lessons,” he recalls being told. “And so if I was gone more than three weeks, I would sometimes bring in someone to teach them.” More often, Pressler himself would offer to teach his students two or three lessons per week to make up the missed lessons. “[Bain] couldn’t have attracted Starker and all these others if he hadn’t let them play,” Pressler says of the teaching and performance arrangements. He compares it to a School of Medicine: “The most honored teacher is the surgeon, not the one who doesn’t do surgery anymore. Music is the same.”
Pressler first lived in faculty housing on campus on the corner of East Third Street. “It was a nice apartment, small but nice.” Sara soon joined him in Bloomington, “and soon enough, with a child, we looked for a place.” He and Sara found the home in which they still live. “I have been happy that I bought that house—and then added to it. We enlarged the dining room and added two more bathrooms and enlarged the garage, too. It’s really a beautiful, beautiful house. I love it there.
“My studio [at IU] was downstairs right next to the bathroom, and so many times people would run into my studio thinking it was the bathroom. And then as soon as the round building [the Music Annex] opened, I moved into this studio. I have cleaned it a few times, but you can see I am overrun like the Brazilian jungle—it grows!”
And so Pressler began teaching. “During that first year I had some students who couldn’t even read music. But first of all, I learned to see what each one needed, and I guess some people are more born to be a teacher than others. And that has nothing to do with their knowledge, but it has to do with their desire and ability to transfer knowledge, to understand the psyche of the person that you transfer the knowledge to, what he or she is capable of receiving, and how much that particular person even needs. Because to be a perfectionist with someone who doesn’t need all that would break the spirit, and that little love for music would be killed.”
Pressler had more than twenty students during his first couple of years at the university. During his third year when Sidney Foster suffered a heart attack, he and Masselos divided Foster’s classes so that Foster could continue to receive a salary. “And every night after teaching and after practicing, we would go to Sidney’s, eat something, drink a glass of wine, and talk. It was wonderful. Sidney and Bronya, his wife, they were the most wonderful friends one could imagine. So I started to have good students, because his class was good, and from then on I had only good students. I could choose my class. Today the class is full way ahead of time from all over the world.
“But I learned many things. I learned to hone my technique of teaching. I learned to understand my students more, and I learned to pace myself, because it’s an enormous task to sit for six hours teaching and then to go practice, which was a must. So it is here that I grew to be a teacher. And I learned also to become a specialist in master classes. Now I have master classes all over the world.”
Pressler is quick to agree that he has had many wonderful colleagues in Bloomington, pianists as well as other musicians, who have been inspiring. “Absolutely. That’s also what helped me, because when the other job offers came along—Rochester, Stony Brook, Juilliard, Texas, Cincinnati—what helped me decide to stay was two things: the faculty and the administration. To have a Webb [Charles H. Webb, dean emeritus] as a dean is wonderful, and that has continued now with Gwyn Richards. He’s absolutely unbelievable, very, very special.”
The colleagues have been extraordinary. “Sidney helped Abbey Simon to come here. He was a consummate pianist. And then Sidney and Abbey brought Jorge Bolet here because they had studied with him at Curtis when he was a graduate student, and of course they knew what he could do. I enjoyed Bolet immensely. And György Sebök was a unique musician. We’ve had fantastic people.”
Pressler eventually become a specialist in master classes at Indiana University. “At first, Starker and I led the master classes in chamber music. Then he stopped and I took them alone. And then somebody dropped out of leading the piano master classes, so I had the chamber music master classes and the piano master classes and my studio with eighteen students. I mean, it was killing [me]. Sara began helping by selecting the students for the classes and eventually for my studio.
INTRODUCTION to A MASTER CLASS
It’s the sixteenth year [at Adamant, Vermont], and I’m delighted that we have so many new faces among our players, because, up to this point, no one would release his place in the class and I would never, never let one of my older students go for a new one, even if the new one is supposedly better.
Now that brings me to the point that I like to make before we start: we are here together, and the one thing that really brings us to be together is the love for music. And love for music is not exemplified only, or first, by how well you play. It is exemplified by how deeply you feel the music, and that can be exemplified by any one of us. We have had people who could not play very well but who learned something, and that in itself gave every one of us not only pleasure, but we were proud of that particular person’s battle for getting better. And in a way, it really doesn’t matter who the name of the player is. It is always the same battle to get a little bit better. Now I know one thing-and that comes with age–that you always pay a price, you get better in one way and you get less good in another, but better in a way you haven’t had before. You enrich your all-around experience, and your regard for the composers becomes deeper, richer, and with a greater love for what they represent, for what they have given us.
So, here we are in the master class and we all learn how to control our emotions, especially the one emotion that we all experience: fear. And we have to control that and overcome it, and we do that by simply sitting down to perform. That in itself is an act of courage. There is no one who’s trying to play badly; there is absolutely no one. So when we sit down to play, we would like to shine. We would like to be accepted as “Oh, you are wonderful.” And at the same time, it is also that to which we have devoted our lives. We want our lives to be rich, to be something that is bigger and better than we are.
We hear today Beethoven and Debussy and Chopin. Whoever had such a dowry before? But we do, and so I don’t want to delay the marriage. Let’s start.
“The next classes were offered in Ravinia. Edward Gordon, the director, was a pianist, and he invited me once and from that time on until this day in Ravinia.” Pressler has continued to offer master classes at many universities and musical centers around the world: in Germany, South America, Israel, Paris, Basel, Berkeley, Biola University, Adamant, “wherever I would say, ‘Yes, I agree to go.’” A typical master class lasts three hours; some, especially in Spain, are four. “Most often there are four students in three hours so that each student gets forty-five minutes.”
Pressler continues to judge several piano competitions. He has judged the Van Cliburn four times, the Queen Elisabeth of Belgium four times, and also judged for the Paloma O’Shea and the International Piano-e-Competition. “I have a letter from Leeds on my desk now,” he says, “but I have never accepted it because it falls at the beginning of the school year. This next year in March [2008] I’m invited to a competition for competition winners in North Carolina as well as the Rubinstein Competition in Israel.”
Pressler often says that he has truly learned the most about making music through his work with the Beaux Arts Trio, which he co-founded in 1955, not long after his first recording, the soundtrack for an MGM movie, Song of Love, about the life of Robert Schumann. Arthur Rubinstein had already recorded a soundtrack that had been released by RCA, and MGM was looking for someone to record the music for its own label. Pressler got the assignment, which eventually led to thirty more solo recordings for MGM.
Pressler had expressed interest in playing Mozart trios, and MGM encouraged him to find players for the project. He was introduced to Daniel Guilet, concertmaster of Toscanini’s NBC Symphony who had formed the Guilet String Quartet after years of playing in the celebrated Calvet Quartet. Guilet then introduced Pressler to cellist Bernard Greenhouse, who was cellist with the Bach Aria Group, and thus the Trio was formed.
The first session of the Beaux Arts Trio resulted in a recording of Ravel and Fauré trios, followed by a recording of Mendelssohn and Haydn trios. The Trio originally had a limited tour of nine concerts, but on July 13, 1955, they substituted for the Albeneri Trio at the Berkshire Festival (now known as Tanglewood) and received praise from several noted musicians, including Festival conductor Charles Munch and soloists Zino Francescatti and Robert Casadesus. The debut was such a stunning success that a tour of seventy concerts was arranged. The Trio’s third recording won the prestigious Grand Prix nationale du Disque.
Fig. 6.1. Beaux Arts Trio, 1955. Daniel Guilet (violin), Menahem Pressler (piano), Bernard Greenhouse (cello).
Pressler admits to being the least experienced chamber player when the Trio was founded. “Guilet not only had studied with fine teachers at the Paris Conservatoire but also had experience in outstanding string quartets, learning how to play a masterpiece not just from section to section but truly how to structure the entire piece. Then Guilet was concertmaster of the NBC Orchestra under Toscanini, and you learn a tremendous amount from a conductor like that. Then he became first violinist in his own quartet, so he really knew music on all these different levels, great music-making. And then he came [to] the Beaux Arts Trio. So I was the beneficiary of his knowledge of music-making.
“He was very difficult, worse than Steuermann. It was not only that he was critical; it was that every second word in the rehearsal was seemingly like an insult. Bernie Greenhouse saw it as such, and so there were many battles there. I didn’t see it as such, I must admit, until later. I only saw how much it meant to me to discover the extent to which one deepens oneself in the work and owns then the whole work, so that I, sitting at the piano, don’t just play my part. I play every other part, yes?”
(The Trio’s personnel has changed greatly over the years. Isidore Cohen replaced Guilet in 1969, and Peter Wiley took the cello position when Greenhouse retired in 1987. Violinist Ida Kavafian performed with the Trio from 1992 until 1998, when Young Uck Kim stepped in. The present players are cellist Antonio Meneses, who joined the group in 1998, and the newest member, violinist Daniel Hope, who began in 2002.
(At the time of this writing it has been announced that the Beaux Arts Trio will disband following the 2007–08 concert season with final concerts at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts in August 2008.)
Pressler has maintained his search for excellent teachers and new influences throughout his life, seeking the best he could find, both in Europe and in America. The lineage of his various teachers reaches into history to Bach, Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Liszt, and Chopin and includes the Germanic, French, and Russian traditions. He was carefully schooled in the details of form, musical theory, and style. Through his conversations with Loyonnet and teachings of Vengerova, Pressler incorporated a relaxed technical approach into his playing and his teaching. He gained tremendous interpretative insights from Loyonnet, Casadesus, Kestenberg, and Steuermann and from his experiences with the members of the Beaux Arts Trio.
Pressler’s desire for perfection has resulted in his being highly demanding both of himself and of his students, and his impulsive personality has led him to great spontaneity of interpretation. His amazing love for practicing as well as performing lends a quality of delight to his music making and his teaching. The ease with which he learns new pieces has allowed him to achieve an immense repertoire. And his personal drive and extraordinarily good health have enabled him to participate in a long and distinguished triple career of solo work, chamber music, and teaching.
Fig. 6.2. Beaux Arts Trio rehearsal, 2006. Daniel Hope (violin), Menahem Pressler (piano), Antonio Meneses (cello).
When asked if these different aspects of his career were ever in conflict with one another or if they worked together harmoniously, Pressler replied, “I think they feed each other. I feel very strongly about each of them and have felt them feeding each other musically and even technically. You play chamber music in the most serious manner. You learn how to look at a work, you learn how to use your hands, and you learn the sense of balance. Then you play as a soloist. You learn to balance the two hands. You see the sense in which you bring a work from the first note to the last note to a really organic conclusion. And then you bring that knowledge, that inspiration, into the studio, and you have a relationship with a student who is wide open and can take that advice from you. And then, in a sense, the way he or she takes the advice and makes it work for himself or herself is a teaching to you. You learn something there too, so then you come back out of it with renewed pleasure in making music.
Fig. 6.3. Antonio Meneses, Menahem Pressler, Daniel Hope
“I have felt very, very much energized by those three activities and have been able to do them because it is not easy to ‘dance at three weddings.’ And I’ve been doing it and doing it with great pleasure and, I would even say, with great inner satisfaction. There is a saying from the Talmud: ‘I learned a great deal from my teachers, I learned even more from myself, and I learned most of all from my students.’ “
