“No student who looks on music primarily as a thing apart in his existence, as a bread-winning tool, as a craft rather than an art, can ever mount to the high places.  So often girls [who sometimes lack the practical vision of boys], although having studied but a few years, come to me and say:  ’My one ambition is to become a great virtuoso on the violin!  I want to begin to study the great concertos!’ And I have to tell them that their first ambition should be to become musicians—­to study, to know, to understand music before they venture on its interpretation.  Virtuosity without musicianship will not carry one far these days.  In many cases these students come from small inland towns, far from any music center, and have a wrong attitude of mind.  They crave the glamor of footlights, flowers and applause, not realizing that music is a speech, an idiom, which they must master in order to interpret the works of the great composers.

THE INFLUENCE OF THE TEACHER

“Of course, all artistic playing represents essentially the mental control of technical means.  But to acquire the latter in the right way, while at the same time developing the former, calls for the best of teachers.  The problem of the teacher is to prevent his pupils from being too imitative—­all students are natural imitators—­and furthering the quality of musical imagination in them.  Pupils generally have something of the teacher’s tone—­Auer pupils have the Auer tone, Joachim pupils have a Joachim tone, an excellent thing.  But as each pupil has an individuality of his own, he should never sink it altogether in that of his teacher.  It is this imitative trend which often makes it hard to judge a young player’s work.  I was very fortunate in my teachers.  William Lewis of Chicago gave me a splendid start.  Then I studied in turn with Schradieck in Leipsic—­Schradieck himself was a pupil of Ferdinand David and of Leonard—­Joachim in Berlin, and Charles Dancla in Paris.  I might say that I owe most, in a way, to William Lewis, a born fiddler.  Of my three European masters Dancla was unquestionably the greatest as a teacher—­of course I am speaking for myself.  It was no doubt an advantage, a decided advantage for me in my artistic development, which was slow—­a family trait—­to enjoy the broadening experience of three entirely different styles of teaching, and to be able to assimilate the best of each.  Yet Joachim was a far greater violinist than teacher.  His method was a cramping one, owing to his insistence on pouring all his pupils into the same mold, so to speak, of forming them all on the Joachim lathe.  But Dancla was inspiring.  He taught me De Beriot’s wonderful method of attack; he showed me how to develop purity of style.  Dancla’s method of teaching gave his pupils a technical equipment which carried bowing right along, ‘neck and neck’ with the finger work of the left hand, while the Germans are apt to stress finger development at the expense of the bow.  And without ever neglecting technical means, Dancla always put the purely musical before the purely virtuoso side of playing.  And this is always a sign of a good teacher.  He was unsparing in taking pains and very fair.