It is a very great mistake to let
learners play with violin accompaniment until they have thoroughly
mastered the piano-forte without it. Fingering, the first of fundamental
acquirements, is almost sure to be overlooked by the master, whose
attention is not on the hands of his pupil but on his own bow; and the
pupil, anxious to keep up with the violin, slurs over rapid passages,
scrambles through difficult ones, and acquires a general habit of merely
following the violin in time and tune, to the utter disregard of steady,
accurate execution. As for me, I derived but one benefit from my old
violin accompanier, that of becoming a good timist; in every other
respect I received nothing but injury from our joint performances,
getting into incorrigible habits of bad fingering, and of making up my
bass with unscrupulous simplifications of the harmony, quite content if
I came in with my final chords well thumped in time and tune with the
emphatic scrape of the violin that ended our lesson. The music my master
gave me, too, was more in accordance with his previous practice as
leader of a theatrical orchestra, than calculated to make me a steady
and scrupulous executant.
We had another master for French and Latin--a clever, ugly, impudent,
snuffy, dirty little man, who wrote vaudevilles for the minor theaters,
and made love to his pupils.
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