I will now tell you a few of my secrets for piano performers.

If in piano-playing, or in any art, you wish to attain success, you must resolve to work every day, at least a little, on the technique.  Sickness and other unavoidable interruptions deprive you of days enough.

Practise always with unexhausted energy:  the result will be tenfold.  Do you not frequently use the time for practising, when you have already been at work studying for five or six hours?  Have you then strength and spirit enough to practise the necessary exercises for an hour or more, and to study your music-pieces carefully and attentively, as your teacher instructed you?  Is not your mind exhausted, and are not your hands and fingers tired and stiff with writing, so that you are tempted to help out with your arms and elbows, which is worse than no practice at all?  But, my dear ladies, if you practise properly, several times every day, ten minutes at a time, your strength and your patience are usually sufficient for it; and, if you are obliged to omit your regular “hour’s practice,” you have, at any rate, accomplished something with your ten minutes before breakfast, or before dinner, or at any leisure moment.  So, I beg of you, let me have my minutes.

Practise often, slowly, and without pedal, not only the smaller and larger etudes, but also your pieces.  In that way you gain, at least, a correct, healthy mode of playing, which is the foundation of beautiful playing.  Do you do this when neither your teacher, nor your father or mother is present to keep watch over you?  Do you never say, “Nobody is listening”?

Do you take enough healthy exercise in the open air?  Active exercise, in all weather, makes strong, enduring piano fingers, while subsisting on indoor-air results in sickly, nervous, feeble, over-strained playing.  Strong, healthy fingers are only too essential for our present style of piano-playing, which requires such extraordinary execution, and for our heavy instruments.  So I still beg for the minutes:  your walks take up hours enough.

Excessive and fatiguing feminine occupations, and drawing, or painting, are by no means consistent with an earnest, practical musical education; not only because both those occupations require so much time, but because they deprive the fingers of the requisite pliability and dexterity, while knitting, according to the latest discoveries, produces an unnatural nervous excitement, which is unfavorable to healthy progress in music.  I at least, in my instruction on the piano, have never been able to accomplish much with ladies who are devoted to knitting, crochet, and embroidering.  My dear ladies, you who have been born in fortunate circumstances, and have been educated by your parents, without regard to expense, should, at least, allow the poor girl in the country, who is obliged to hide her talents under a bushel, the small privilege of making a collar for your mother’s or your aunt’s