Teachers who Shaped my Iife

Part I: Sonia Silverman

SONIA PAEFF SILVERMAN

When I was four I could just reach the keyboard while standing in front of our family’s piano. I loved the sounds I heard when I pressed the keys. My older brother was taking lessons, and soon I asked for them too. The teacher, Mrs. Silverman, thought I was too young but my mother somehow got her to take me.

She, like us, lived in a small house in Houston. Hers was on a somewhat busy street near the University of Houston, where her husband, Dr. Louis Silverman, taught mathematics. They were both elderly but actively teaching when I met them. Their house was modest except for the magnificent grand piano that took up half the living room. But they managed to take some vacations to Mexico, which they clearly loved. The evidence of this was on a small table near the front door, filled with little animals made of woven straw, tiny handcrafted pots and water jugs, and one-inch-tall metal people in colorful costumes. If Mrs. Silverman thought I’d played well one day, she’d let me choose from some of the little figures. My first was a donkey who wore a green saddle with tiny pink buckets attached.

Mrs. Silverman wore the strangest clothes I’d ever seen on someone not in costume. I soon learned these were the clothes of her homeland, Russia. Her dark, slightly grey hair too was unlike anything I’d seen except in a picture book or movie: parted in the middle and rolled on the sides in a kind of 1940’s look. Her dresses were mid-calf, and made mostly of a black crepe-like material. What I noticed most were the jewel-toned velvet bands she wore around her neck. They were the width of a ribbon and elegantly decorated with large pearl-like beads. She wore simple black low-heeled shoes. I don’t remember specific jewelry pieces, but she wore dressy earrings on recital days. With more jewelry she could have played a dowager empress in a period movie.

That regal look was part of why it seemed kind of weird but also funny to my little-kid brain, that when a lesson began and she and I sat together on the piano bench (with my feet dangling off it), she always offered me a piece of juicy fruit gum. It seemed so un-Empress-like! She chewed a piece herself even when I didn’t, so from then on I associated the smell of juicy fruit with Mrs. Silverman and her grand piano.

Sonia Silverman

She quickly taught me how to read music, and then how to use my hands and arms effectively. Over many months I progressed and was soon playing simple versions of pieces by Bach and Mozart. She always gave me the music. We never had to go out and buy it. On the top of the first page of every piece she gave me she would write a message in small, elegant script, always beginning with “To my dear Susie—.” What’s interesting about this is that I was rather locked up inside, often fearful, and very shy. I rarely accepted a piece of gum and, as my mother told me later, after Mrs. Silverman told her, I didn’t show much emotion. I felt terrible about this because I realized I must have hurt her feelings. I think I was such a socially anxious child with those I didn’t know well that I was unaware of the effect of it on others. Now I know that without Mrs. Silverman, her understanding of and respect for children, and her engaging me in learning the piano as long as she did, I might have never learned to handle my crippling anxiety.

On her piano there were a couple of dozen framed photographs, often with signatures. I learned many were of famous musicians, and that Mrs. Silverman had studied with one of the star piano teachers at Juilliard, Rosina Lhevinne, who also was Russian-born, became the “dean of American piano teachers,” and taught celebrated American pianist Van Cliburn. When I was old enough to appreciate it she told me more about the pedigree I was inheriting, proclaiming, “I studied with Rosina Lhevinne and she studied with (I forgot this name), who studied with Liszt, who studied with Czerny, who studied with Beethoven!” The full weight of this didn’t hit me for a few more years, I think partly because Mrs. Silverman herself didn’t seem to be famous. I’d heard of Chopin, Beethoven, and Mozart by then not just from her but from my father who studied violin as a child, fell in love with a classical pianist before he met my mother, and who built a recorded music collection that filled an entire room. But Mrs. Silverman taught me more about them and introduced me to Czerny, Liszt, and many other composers I would encounter in years to come.

My parents got to know the Silvermans well, and we learned that Dr. Silverman had at one time played in a string quartet with Albert Einstein. I think Dr. Silverman was studying or teaching in Princeton’s math department when Einstein joined the new Institute for Advanced Study there. We learned that the Silvermans were sad because they rarely saw their son, who was himself at the time a member of a famous String Quartet.

Gradually I learned that Mrs. Silverman not only knew many amazing musicians, but was an amazing musician herself. I realized this the first time I heard her play. Her piano, which I was so lucky to use for my lessons (I didn’t appreciate that till later either) became an orchestra when she played it. She would rip through Chopin’s exciting Military Polonaise as if she’d performed it for decades, and her arm strength on the chords that required power was remarkable. (On many of the pieces she gave to me is written, over certain climactic chords, “Arm!”)

One day during the first or second year of my lessons, I opened up a little, admiring one of the new toys on the little table. It was an ingenious handmade clay kitchen about three inches wide and less than a half inch deep. There were tiny shelves holding tiny dishes and pots, and a tiny table and chair with a seat thinner than a nail file and hardly bigger than a thumbtack. Even better, I could see that one of the inch-high metal people would fit perfectly into it. I was in love. Mrs. Silverman said I just might be able to win the kitchen one day, if I practiced very hard and played very well.

By this time I was working on some easy Bach pieces in a book that included bits of Bach’s biography. Mrs. Silverman wrote lots of comments on my music, and put shiny star stickers on the page if I played well. In the Bach book, at the end of one line were four eighth notes followed by a quarter, which, if you sang them, played the same melody as “whistle while you work.” She wrote each syllable of that phrase above each note, partly to help me to memorize the line, but I think also to make notes on a page more relatable to a young child who’d surely heard the song. (I’m pleased to report that this Bach piece had two stars on it, and I do remember practicing it a lot.) In the same book a version of one of his preludes that contained sustained, church bell-like notes, over each churchbell note she wrote “Bing,” which to this day I can hear her saying emphatically (along with “Arm!”) At the end of a prayer-like piece from a cantata were two sustained chords, over which she wrote “A” on the first and “men” on the second so I would play them sonorously and with reverence.

Around age 3, for some reason I would literally burst into song at times. I often sang, loudly, before I went to sleep. A few years later I was still singing, but only when my parents couldn’t hear me. (Why? I don’t know!) Around my third year with her Mrs. Silverman gave me a song with words and an easy piano part, the spiritual “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.” I’m not sure I sang it out loud, but I saw on the page and felt deeply a words-and-music connection. Years later after a long detour as a violinist, when I realized singing was what I’d always needed to do, I wanted to sing every song I could get my hands on, including some of the other great spirituals. I still love to sing “Deep River” and “A City called Heaven.” (I did begin to sing in front of my parents when I was around 14.)

The day came, finally, when Mrs. Silverman let me take home my beloved toy kitchen. I don’t remember which piece it was that so pleased her, but I was delighted with my prize (I probably even smiled), and kept it for years. Eventually I gave it away because it was falling apart and had lost two of its little pots. I hoped an artist would put it back together and give it to another child.

Mrs. Silverman invited parents to an annual recital in which every student played, and each who performed was more advanced than the last. At the end Mrs. Silverman played, and inspired us all. We were age 4 to about 16, and recitals allowed us to hear lots of composers and important piano music. I think going through the performing process with other children helped me feel connected to a community. This remained with me and informed my approach to all my music studies, later performances, and even producing operas.

I tended to suffer from stage fright, though not at first. At one of our recitals, in a public hall, for some reason I hadn’t learned my music well enough. I was terrified, and refused to go on, much to my parents’ consternation. I finally admitted I didn’t know my music, but they must not have believed me because I ended up onstage anyway. I just sat, unable to move, or even think of the first note. I don’t even remember how I got off the stage. This did not go well at home. But Mrs. Silverman never said a word about it. We continued with our lessons.

At one point I began to resent practicing, and wanted more time to play outside. My parents refused, but eventually I won the battle. My mother had been forced to play for years, and once she left home never played another note. I think they let me stop in order to save me from my mother’s fate. It was a good decision. I did come back to piano, later added serious violin studies, and kept singing (in secret).

One day my parents told me Mrs. Silverman was very ill with cancer. Little more was said. I knew little about cancer, except that she was often in the hospital. Months later, my parents told me she had died. This was my first experience of grappling with the death of someone close to me. It took a long time to begin to process there being no Mrs. Silverman in the world.

Years later I still felt awful about how I never even gave her a big hug. But I also felt more grateful than ever for the valuable foundation she’d given me. She helped me to understand how much attention to both technique and emotion is needed for good playing, despite my being emotionally not up to it at the time, and how the great composers’ lives influenced their music. I felt part of a broad community of musicians, many of whom became friends. I learned a great deal about music history and even terminology that made it much easier for me to prepare for a music degree and graduate school in music.

Mrs. Silverman possessed rare depth, a generous, selfless spirit, and love for music and for those who want to play it. Her talent was prodigious, her playing on a level I later heard in concerts of world-famous pianists, yet she was without ego.

In the next few years I studied music with some wonderful teachers, and some others who were not so wonderful. Some were intimidating or even hostile. I saw that being a great music teacher doesn’t require frightening students. I kept discovering how lucky I was to have studied with Mrs. Silverman. But there was something more. In addition to her marvelous talent and all she taught me, and despite my inability to respond as I wish I could have, Mrs. Silverman loved me.