‘Deeply helpful training’: Percy Grainger’s First Piano Teachers in Late Nineteenth-century Melbourne

Abstract

Looking back in the mid-1930s at his early student years, Percy Grainger—with characteristic binary opposition—contrasts a remembered Frankfurt of early adolescence, where the teachers were ‘rude and unpleasant to me’, with the ‘deeply helpful training’ provided immediately beforehand in Melbourne. This article looks at the brief period between 1892 and 1895 when the young Grainger first received piano tuition outside the home from the Prussian-born Louis Pabst and then, immediately after Pabst left Melbourne, from his pupil, Adelaide Burkitt. It contextualizes these years broadly and allows the Melbourne depression of the 1890s, which reached its zenith in the middle of this period, to resonate throughout. The article reveals that the young Grainger belonged to a nexus of gifted ‘scholarship’ pupils and that when he decided to leave Melbourne Pabst tried to make provision for them all. It also observes, in passing, the irony that while Grainger, like all colonial musicians, was understood to require study abroad, he upheld his Melbourne tuition to be superior to all that followed in Frankfurt and Berlin. The best of Europe had, for the then impressionable young Grainger, come to him.