A teacher’s gift to his student

These two Kalmus volumes carry the complete Beethoven piano sonatas in the publisher’s “Ur-text” printing — unedited, in Kalmus’s own words, meaning no editor’s fingerings or phrasing have been added to the plates. But the title page of this set tells a different story in ink: “To Lorin, with my most cordial wishes, Edward Steuermann. July 1956.”

Eduard Steuermann (1892–1964) was a Polish-born pianist who studied with Busoni, worked closely inside Schoenberg’s circle — he gave the first performances of several of Schoenberg’s and Berg’s works — and later taught at the Philadelphia Conservatory and Juilliard. Among his students there was Lorin Hollander, who had begun piano at five, started “serious musical arguments” with his violinist father at six, and was accepted by Steuermann at eight. What the Kalmus title page calls “unedited,” Steuermann treated as a working text: the personal editing in these volumes — the markings a teacher leaves for a pupil working through a piece — is his, laid over a printed page that claims to carry none.

The pianist who hated that word

In 1956, the summer of this inscription, Hollander was twelve and already a concert pianist — he’d substituted at a week’s notice for an ailing soloist with the Little Orchestra Society that November, playing Ravel’s G major Concerto at Town Hall. He’d made his Carnegie Hall debut the year before, at eleven.

By 1966, twenty-one and a decade into a career that had put him on magazine covers captioned “child prodigy,” Hollander had grown to despise the label. “I have always hated that word ‘prodigy,’” he told the New York Times that March. “It has come to be a filthy word that makes me think of an effeminate little fellow being brought up in seclusion, doing nothing but working from morning to night. But I never lived the prodigy’s life. I was never exploited, I was never sheltered.” He credited his parents for resisting the pressure to treat him as extraordinary, and Steuermann himself for setting him loose rather than fencing him in: asked when he’d be ready to take on Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto, his teacher told him not at seventy — “but he didn’t say not to do it.”

He went on playing through the late 1960s and 1970s — an electronic-piano recital at the Fillmore East in 1969 (“I’m here for sociological reasons, not acoustical ones,” he told the crowd), free outdoor concerts on the streets of East Harlem and Queens, Carnegie Hall programs mixing Copland, Brahms, and Ravel with Gershwin preludes, and a refusal — on principle, following Gary Graffman’s lead — to play segregated halls in the South. By 1971 he’d married Margot Scheer and started a family in Stockton Springs, Maine; a son, Jesse Morgan, was born that May.

It’s the second item on these shelves with a line back to the Hollander family. A shelf over sits Max Hollander’s old copy of Goetschius’s Larger Forms — Lorin’s father. Between the two, the library holds a small, accidental record of one family’s musical education: the father’s textbook, and the son’s inscribed set of the repertoire itself, passed teacher to pupil, from a man who never once called him a prodigy.