“Piano teachers have made greater advances in the tone developing technic of their instrument than the violin teachers.  One reason is, that as a class they are more intellectual.  And then, too, violin teaching is regarded too often as a mystic art, an occult science, and one into which only those specially gifted may hope to be initiated.  This, it seems to me, is a fallacy.  Just as a gift for mathematics is a special talent not given to all, so a natural technical talent exists in relatively few people.  Yet this does not imply that the majority are shut off from playing the violin and playing it well.  Any student who has music in his soul may be taught to play simple, and even relatively more difficult music with beauty, beauty of expression and interpretation.  This he may be taught to do even though not endowed with a natural technical facility for the violin.  A proof that natural technical facility is anything but a guarantee of higher musicianship is shown in that the musical weakness of many brilliant violinists, hidden by the technical elaboration of virtuoso pieces, is only apparent when they attempt to play a Beethoven adagio or a simple Mozart rondo.

“In a number of cases the unsuccessful solo player has a bad effect on violin teaching.  Usually the soloist who has not made a success as a concert artist takes up teaching as a last resort, without enthusiasm or the true vocational instinct.  The false standards he sets up for his pupils are a natural result of his own ineffectual worship of the fetish of virtuosity—­those of the musical mountebank of a hundred years ago.  Of course such false prophets of the virtuose have nothing in common with such high-priests of public utterance as Ysaye, Kreisler and others, whose virtuosity is a true means for the higher development of the musical.  The encouragement of musicianship in general suffers for the stress laid on what is obviously technical impedimenta.  But more and more, as time passes, the playing of such artists as those already mentioned, and others like them, shows that the real musician is the lover of beautiful sound, which technic merely develops in the highest degree.

“To-day technic in a cumulative sense often is a confession of failure.  For technic does not do what it so often claims to—­produce the artist.  Most professional teaching aims to prepare the student for professional life, the concert stage.  Hence there is an intensive technical study of compositions that even if not wholly intended for display are primarily and principally projected for its sake.  It is a well-known fact that few, even among gifted players, can sit down to play chamber music and do it justice.  This is not because they cannot grasp or understand it; or because their technic is insufficient.  It is because their whole violinistic education has been along the line of solo playing; they have literally been brought up, not to play with others, but to be accompanied by others.