'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 ..