My first piano teacher Gertrud Nettl.(The Back Page)

My mother was determined that my brother and I would receive piano lessons. The year was 1951; the circumstances of our first instruction were unique, at least by the standards in our small, provincial town of Ellettsville, Indiana--population 1,500. Fortunate for my musical future, Ellettsville was located seven miles from the Indiana University School of Music. My mother creatively arranged for Gertrud Nettl to teach in our living room on Saturday mornings. In compensation for the use of our home as the piano teaching studio and for my mother's active recruitment of additional area students, Mrs. Nettl provided a full scholarship for our lessons. At my mother's 90th birthday in January 2000, I acknowledged her tenacious efforts and publicly thanked her for the precious gift of musical training and especially for securing Gertrud Nettl as my beginning piano teacher.

Even though, in 1951, I was a naive nine-year-old boy who would rather shoot baskets than play Bach and practice scales, I have fond, vivid memories of those early piano lessons. One activity we did, which I still mention to my college pedagogy classes, was an exercise in ear training. We would line up throw rugs on the hardwood floor and assign a musical note name to each of them. I would then take melodic dictation by jumping to the rug that represented the pitch she played.

The story of Gertrud Nettl's journey to Bloomington, Indiana, and, ultimately, to our living room in 1951 for piano lessons, would be sufficient material for a novel or movie script. She was born Gertrud Hutter, in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and attended the Prague Musikhochschule, majoring in piano and minoring in dance. By age 19, she had begun concertizing in Prague, performing the standard repertoire, as well as Schoenberg and Busoni. In the late 1920s and 1930s, she played frequently in various Czechoslovakian towns, as well as in Vienna and Frankfurt, including concerti performances like Mozart's D Minor Concerto, K. 466. In 1928, she married the noted musicologist Paul Nettl, who was seventeen years her senior. Commuting monthly to Vienna, she continued her music studies with Conrad Ansorge and, particularly, with the great interpreter of new music Eduard Steuermann. She also studied the Jaques-Dalcroze method, which she pursued at the original Dalcroze School in Hellerau.

In 1939, after living for a half year under the Nazi occupation, the family was forced to immigrate to the U.S. because Paul Nettl's Jewish background placed him in mortal danger. Paul Nettl had taught in the German University of Prague until 1937; in 1939, he and his family were brought to America by means of a fund raised by the faculty and students of Westminster Choir College. After his arrival, Paul Nettl was given a special (non-permanent) appointment at the college, with a small salary. In reality, Gertrud Nettl was the principal breadwinner during this time with a large studio of private pupils and part-time positions at Westminster and the Philadelphia Music School Settlement. A letter from College President John Finley Williamson to the Indiana School of Music Dean Robert Sanders, explained why the college assisted Paul Nettl and his family. The letter states, "We assisted Professor Nettl because we considered him one of the five greatest musicologists in the world, and knew he would be killed if he stayed in Europe." My mother recalls Mrs. Nettl sadly telling about two wonderful grand pianos she was forced to leave behind in Czechoslovakia.

During the family's time in Princeton, Gertrud and her family became acquainted with distinguished scholars and scientists residing there, and she once famously accompanied ...