Tilly Fleischmann continues:
‘During my student days, which came at the close of one of the greatest epochs of artistic
and creative activity in Germany, the influence of Liszt was still paramount. Most of the
famous pianists then active had been students or associates of Liszt in his later years –
Stavenhagen and Kellermann themselves, Sophie Menter, Moritz Rosenthal, Alexander
Siloti, Giovanni Sgambatti, Alfred Reisenauer, Frederick Lamond, Konrad Ansorge,
Arthur Friedheim, Emil Sauer [and] Eugen d’Albert. Berhnard Stavenhaghen, with
whom I studied at the Royal Academy of Munich from 1901 to 1904, was as a young
man the last pianist to work consistently under Liszt’s guidance, in Weimar, Budapest
and Rome. Stavenhagen succeeded Liszt at Weimar, in as much as he took over Liszt’s
Meisterklasse on the death of his master, and kept the tradition alive by continuing to
teach at Weimar during the summer months of each year. In 1890 he became Court
pianist at Weimar and in 1895 Court conductor. In 1898 he was appointed Court
conductor at Munich, and in 1901 Director of the Royal Academy of Music. As a pianist
Stavenhagen was one of those rare phenomena who combine the highest poetic and
imaginative qualities with incomparable technique; his performance were for me the most
memorable of all those which I heard abroad. As a teacher he possessed the ability to
impart a sense of style and an understanding of what interpretation really means. His
Meisterklasse at the Academy consisted of sixteen students of many nationalities,
including Grace O’Brien and myself from Ireland.
On Stavenhagen’s retirement from the directorship of the Academy in 1904 I studied for
a year with his colleague, Berthold Kellermann, who had been Professor of Piano-playing
at the Academy since 1881. In his youth Kellermann had acted as secretary to Wagner
and music master to his children, and had been a member of the Parsifalkanzlei. He
studied with Liszt at Weimar from 1873 to 1878, and knew Liszt intimately as master and
friend for sixteen years. Liszt thought highly of Kellermann’s playing, and often said: ‘If
you want to know how to play my works go to Kellermann – he understands me.’ By
1904 Kellermann had ceased to be a concert virtuoso, but as a teacher he had more
humanity and deeper psychological insight than Stavenhagen, together with a far greater
capacity for imparting detailed instruction. In 1910 he told me that he intended re-editing
Liszt’s piano works, but never seems to have done so. As a conductor and as a
propagandist for Liszt’s works, however, Kellermann was active up to his death in 1926,
and was frequently acclaimed as the living embodiment of the Liszt tradition.
In stressing the extent of Liszt’s influence and the indebtedness to Liszt of the pianists
and teachers of a generation ago, the question arises as to what the Liszt tradition has to
do with piano-playing today. First of all, in matters of technique Liszt did for piano-
playing what Paganini had done for violin-playing, with the difference that Liszt, to a far
greater extent than Paganini, used technical virtuosity as a means to an end, namely, the
enrichment of the means of expression. It is often said that there could be no Liszt
method of piano playing since he actually never taught technique. This may be partly
true, but he frequently gave technical hints to his pupils, and from his playing from them
they were able to deduce much valuable information. Liszt concentrated indeed on the
intellectual and spiritual content of the music, but as Stavenhagen noted: ‘If one is