如果你的钢琴老师是肖邦……
Chopin the Teacher :the Atmosphere and the Attitude
跟肖邦学钢琴是怎样一种体验？
By Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger
It would be wrong to imagine that Chopin saw his teaching as a burdensome task or as a poor substitute for the concerts he no longer gave. On the contrary, he was highly aware of the importance of this work and presented himself for lessons with meticulous punctuality, which only ill health eventually impeded, and with the zeal of an apostle.
很多人觉得肖邦视教学为一项繁重的工作，一种他不予参与的演出的备胎，这是错误的观点。恰恰相反，他很重视教学工作，亲自发布细致严谨的课程，只是由于身体欠佳最终没能推行，课程且有着使徒般的热诚。
Chopin daily devoted his entire energies to teaching for several hours and with genuine delight.Was not the severity, not so easy to satisfy, the feverish vehemence with which he sought to raise his pupils to his own standard, the ceaseless repetition of a passage till it was understood, a guarantee that he had the progress of the pupil at heart ?
肖邦每天都以真挚的热情，不遗余力地花费数小时投入到教学……不是严酷的练习，也不是轻易的满足，他寻求的是一种狂烈激昂来提升学生达到他的标准，是一直重复演练直到乐段被完全理解，是一种保证，能让学生从本质上得到进步？
Exactingness, passion, patience and firmness were united in Chopin; he wished for certain immediate results that would herald the future achievements towards which he tirelessly schooled the pupil's inner vision. The intensity of his concentration equalled that of his lucidity. Chopin was a born teacher: expression and conception, position of the hand, touch, pedalling, nothing escaped the sharpness of his hearing and his vision, for he gave every detail the keenest attention. Entirely absorbed in his task, during the lesson he would be solely a teacher, and nothing but a teacher, according to Maria von Harder (Adelung, p. 122).
精准，激情，耐心，坚韧，这四种品质在肖邦身上得到完美结合。他期望某些直接后果能预示未来的成就，指引他极力培养学生的内心视野。他专注的强度等同他的清晰度。肖邦是天生的老师，表达与构思，双手的姿势，与琴键的触碰，踏板的运用，这些全部难逃他敏锐的视听，因为他对所有细节都给予最犀利的关注。肖邦全神贯注于他的教学工作，课堂上他就仅仅是一位老师，除了老师别无其他身份，根据玛丽亚·冯·哈德的说法。
Chopin preferred pupils to follow the text carefully rather than always play from memory, and he would mark the score as it lay on the music stand. Generally seated at his small upright pianino while the student played on the large Pleyel, he would tirelessly point out each error, each carelessness, each weakness - more profuse with examples than with words. 'Often the entire lesson passed without the pupil having played more than a few bars'(Mikuli, p. 4).
肖邦建议学生认真照谱练习，不要按着回忆弹，他会在置于琴架的谱子上标记出重点、注意项。通常肖邦坐靠他的小钢琴旁（立式琴），他的学生弹普雷耶大钢琴（三角琴），他会不厌其烦地指出每一处错误，每一个疏漏，每一项不足，相比言语他偏好丰富的示例教导。“经常整节课过去了，学生还没弹几小节。”
Chopin's usual courtesy, even playfulness, could give way on days of illness or irritability to fits of anger, as violent as they were brief; the male pupils seem to have been more prone to these 'leçons orageuses' than were the women. Then again, repeated negligence or careless playing would sometimes exasperate him, with positively glacial results. But more often, without in any way relaxing his demands, Chopin showed a humane understanding of his students' personal, musical and technical problems. He knew how to inspire self-confidence and to find the right words of encouragement to free the pupil's inner resources at the right moment. Then he was a subtle guide blessed with an absolute sureness of intuition and psychological penetration.
肖邦平时彬彬有礼，甚至爱开玩笑，但在生病或烦躁的时日里可能会变得愤怒，好比短暂的暴力；男同学似乎比女同学更会经历到“暴风骤雨般的课堂”。此外，反复的疏漏与粗心的弹奏有时也会惹恼他，必然带来冰冷的后果。但更多情况下，本着不松懈要求的前提，肖邦对他学生的个性、音乐及技术上的毛病都表现出宽容理解。他懂得如何激发自信心，如何找到准确的鼓励用语，在合适的时机释放学生的潜能。所以他是精妙细腻的导师，拥有绝对精准的直觉和心理洞察力，这是他的天赋。
This aspect of Chopin's teaching has not yet been given the attention it deserves. To illustrate this, here is a passage from one of Emilie von Gretsch's letters, dated 30 April 1844: "Yesterday at Chopin's I tried to play his Nocturnes. I knew, I still felt clearly within myself the way in which he had played them. But partly because of uncertainty with the notes, and partly through a certain inhibition which comes out in our bearing and our performance when we are anxious or unhappy, I found myself unable to express the music as I heard it in my head; I did not have the strength to realise it in sound.
肖邦在教学方面的工作还没得到应有的重视。为阐明本观点，这里有段文字摘自艾米莉·冯·格雷奇的书信，写于1844年4月30日：“昨日于肖邦府邸，我尝试弹奏他的夜曲。我清楚，我心中仍能明确感受到他是如何演奏这首夜曲的。但一部分由于音符不确定，另一部分由于我们焦虑、不悦时会导致我们的承受力和执行力出现某种限制，我发现自己无法呈现出我脑海中听到的音乐，我也无力通过声音实现。”
It is wonderful then to see how tactfully Chopin puts one at one's ease; how intuitively he identifies, I might say, with the thoughts of the person to whom he is speaking or listening; with what delicate nuances of behaviour he adapts his own being to that of another. To encourage me, he tells me among other things, 'It seems to me that you don't dare to express yourself as you feel. Be bolder, let yourself go more. Imagine you're at the conservatoire, listening to the most beautiful performance in the world. Make yourself want to hear it, and then you'll hear yourself playing it right here.
看肖邦如何巧妙地化解难题真的很精彩，他如何凭直觉识别，我是说，他与之交谈、倾听的人们，通过他们的想法来辨别；通过行为上的细微差别他使自己的特质也能适应他人。为鼓励我，他跟我说了些特别的话：“我发觉你似乎不敢表达你的真实所感。勇敢点，让自己走得更远。设想一下你正身处艺术院校，聆听这世上最美妙的演奏。让你自己渴望去听，你就会听到自己正在这里弹奏。”
Have full confidence in yourself ; make yourself want to sing like Rubini, and you'll succeed in doing so. Forget you're being listened to, and always listen to yourself. I see that timidity and lack of self-confidence form a kind of armour around you, but through this armour I perceive something else that you don't always dare to express, and so you deprive us all.
“你要全然自信；使自己渴望能像鲁比尼（译者注：意大利男高音）那样歌唱，你就能成功做到。忘了你正被人聆听，而要常常聆听自己。我发现胆怯和缺乏自信正在你身上形成一种遁甲，但经由这个遁甲，我感受到了一些其他的东西，是你一直不敢表达的，因此你剥夺了我们所有的感观。”
When you're at the piano, I give you full authority to do whatever you want; follow freely the ideal you've set for yourself and which you must feel within you; be bold and confident in your own powers and strength, and whatever you say will always be good. It would give me so much pleasure to hear you play with complete abandon that I'd find the shameless confidence of the vulgaires unbearable by comparison' " (Grewingk, p. 10-11).
“当你在钢琴旁，我给你全权去做任何你想做的事; 尽情地遵循你为自己设定的目标，并且你得从自身去体会； 通过自己的能力及力量变得勇敢自信，无论你说什么都永远是好的。若能听到你完全放开的弹奏我将特别高兴，相对而言我会在强忍难耐的粗俗表达中找到不害臊的自信。 ”
Such testimony is by no means unique in Chopin's pupils' memoirs. In his lessons, Chopin worked simultaneously with music and words. Not content with demonstrating a few passages over the pupil's shoulders, he would often play the piece from beginning to end, even repeating it several times, constantly striving for greater perfection. And many a lesson was prolonged while he sat at the piano playing one piece after another, not only his own works but also those of other composers. Several of his pupils agree in saying that Chopin the pianist was never greater, never more complete and more ideal than in these transcending moments of grace.
这类证言在肖邦学生们的记忆中绝不少见。课堂上，肖邦会同时用音乐和言语教学。他不满足于只向学生们演示一小部分片段，他常常一首作品从头至尾地弹下来，甚至重复多遍，不断地争取尽善尽美。他的课都会拖堂，因为他在琴上一首接一首地弹，不仅弹他自己的作品，也弹其他作曲家的。他的很多学生都赞同道，肖邦作为钢琴家，再也没有比这些超越恩典的时刻更伟大、更完全、更完美的时候了。
He did not, however, neglect to make the pupil analyse the formal structure of the works studied, and readily resorted to images or analogies to evoke the mood of a piece and to arouse the right musical impulse in the pupil. In order to obtain a particular expressiveness and sonority, for instance, he once suggested to Georges Mathias during a section of Weber's Sonata in A flat (op. 39) that 'an angel is passing over the sky' (first movement, bars 81ff, Mathias, p. VI).
然而，他并没有忽视让学生分析所学作品的形式结构，且乐此不疲地借助图像或类比，唤醒学生们对一首作品的情绪，在他们当中引出准确的音乐推动力。为达到到一种特别的表现力及宏亮度，比如他在一段韦伯的《降A大调奏鸣曲》中，曾如此向乔治·玛提亚斯形容，“天使正划过上空” 。
Where the young Liszt in 1832, making use of his freshly acquired education, sought to stimulate the pupil's imagination by reading him a page of Chateaubriand or a poem by Hugo, Chopin achieved the same result with a single, concise image - so intensely was he imbued with the reality of his vision even as he translated it into words. These spontaneous creations of the mind, evoking here a legion of capricious spirits, there a house of the dead, elsewhere a dialogue between a tyrant and his victim, are the result not so much of a literary temperament as a visionary imagination and a feeling for poetry rooted in popular Slavonic legend.
年轻的李斯特于1832年，利用他刚获得的学位，试图通过朗诵夏多布里昂的一页著作或雨果的一首短诗，来激发学生们的想象空间，肖邦也用独立简明的一幅画实现了同样的目的，他是如此强烈地要把他真实的所见所想分享出来，甚至把画面译成了文字。这种自发的精神创意，在这儿引出一众变幻无常的灵魂，在那儿成了一处死者之屋，别处还有暴君和受暴者间的一段对白，这样的结果并没有太多文学的味道，而是基于虚幻的想象，还有源于斯拉夫民间传说的诗颂感。（译者注：肖邦出生的波兰最早由西斯拉夫民族建立）
Sometimes a pupil's sensitivity would meet with Chopin's recognition on a higher, privileged level, as is shown by this astonishing declaration to Juliette de Caraman: "I give you carte blanche to play all my music. There is in you this vague poetry, this Schwärmerei that is needed to understand it" (Hedley, p. 8). We know Chopin was generally quite strict about the exact comprehension and performance of his works, and it required no less than the genial personality of the young Filtsch to make him admit : 'We each understand this differently, but go your own way, do as you feel, it can also be played like that.' .
有时学生的敏感度能在更高的特级水平上得到肖邦的认可，正如这段令人惊奇的表述所示，致朱丽叶·德·卡德曼：“我赋予你可以弹奏我所有音乐的权利。在你当中，这种暧昧不明的诗性，这种殷切热忱需要你理解透彻。” 我们知道肖邦一般对他作品的确切理解与呈现要求很严，直到性格温和的小费里奇（译者注：肖邦最看重的学生，被称为音乐神童）才使他承认：“我们每人对乐曲理解不同，但继续以你的方式，表达你的感受，也可以这样弹奏。”
Professional or not, many pupils experienced a feeling of revelation and liberation through Chopin's teaching; his absolute novelty opened wide to them the doors of all music, not just of piano playing. Then it would not be long before they noticed radical changes in their playing, their listening and their mental attitude. Chopin for his part did point out these improvements to them.
专业与否，很多学生通过肖邦的指点都受到启发与释放感；他所向披靡的顶尖水平向他们敞开了所有音乐的大门，不止是钢琴演奏。于是学生们不久便注意到他们在弹奏，聆听及精神状态上的彻底改变。肖邦则以教师的角度向他们指明如何改进。
Emilie von Gretsch relates: "During the last lesson [...] Chopin showed me how best to practise the Etudes. Some of them required no comment from him, 'since you understand them perfectly' - that was his opinion. It was a special joy to me to be able to play easily what had previously seemed to involve perilous difficulties, particularly when I was working on these Etudes with Henselt.
艾米莉·冯·格雷奇叙述道：“最后一节课……肖邦示范我怎样练弹练习曲最好。有些曲子他不给任何建议, 只要你能完全理解，这就是他的意见。能够轻松拿下之前看去有陷阱有困难的曲目于我是种特别的享受，尤其当我和亨泽尔特合奏练习曲的时候。”
Chopin (I think he can read hearts), at the precise moment when this agreeable discovery about my progress crossed my mind, told me, 'This seems perfectly easy to you now, doesn't it ? - not like it was before. Well! In this short time you've made miraculous progress!' He told me that within a few months I'd be more aware of it, or, at any rate, he presumed that I would, since he had found this happened with his best students." The student could then forge ahead powered by creative energy, since his work was now based on a natural method, revealed by a poet who could turn his hand equally to dialectic.
“我觉得肖邦会读心术，恰逢此刻我发觉自己取得进步的愉悦感浮上心头，他对我说：现在，这首对你来说已经很简单了，不是吗？不像先前那样难了。很好，这么短的时间内你就取得了非凡的进步！他告诉我几月之内我会更加明白这首曲子的深意，无论如何，他断定我能做到，因为这已经在他最好的几个学生身上实现了。”学生可以通过创新型理念继续获取进步，因为他的教学基于一种自然方法，由一位能将双手转换为辩证法的诗人呈现。
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