Schytte

Dear friends of piano music,

Actually today I wanted to introduce you to possibly the most musical pharmacist of all time, possibly the most musical Danish pharmacist of all time, to be precise. Nothing will come of it, unfortunately. Full of zest for action, I threw myself into research in order to find next to nothing. I hadn't really expected that, because a relatively large number of works by Ludvig Schytte, who was the subject of today's discussion, have survived. Above all, he has written a lot for his numerous piano students, but also a lot that is pianistically demanding. So we know when he lived (1848-1909), that he initially dealt with pharmacy and did not receive any professional musical training before he was 22, that he studied with Gade in Copenhagen and Liszt in Weimar, among others. He lived and taught mainly in Vienna, a few years before his death he moved to Berlin, where he also taught. His daughter Anna was a violinist. Unfortunately, that's all I could find out about him. Ludvig Schytte, it seems, is nothing more than a marginal note, a footnote in the history of music. He had studied with two greats of his time. Anyone who was allowed to be a pupil of Franz Listz deserves all my posthumous recognition and jealousy anyway, because for me Liszt is the greatest, unreached and unreachable god of the piano. The 19th century was the century of letter writing, it is actually hard to imagine that he did not exchange one or the other letter with his famous teachers and at least one could have learned something about him.. Is it really the case that posterity applies a high standard of who deserves eternal fame and who not, and that Ludvig Schytte was, so to speak, weighed and found too light? Judging by his image, he was sure to be a really nice guy. And his music is nice and charming too. I also came up with completely different, completely antiquated Austrian vocabulary, which are difficult to translate and only meaningful in the original language: „fesch“ (smart), „schneidig“ (dashing), "famos" (great), These are words from the time of the Austrian monarchy, and all of this belongs to the past as well as the music of Ludvig Schytte, quite obviously. It was quite popular at his time, and  I cannot help imagining him to be like his music - charming, entertaining, with good manners. Of course he's not one of the greats, his music doesn't open up heaven or hell to us, it is more of a pleasant pastime. But that is also justified. His real merit, in my opinion, is that he was a "super spreader". He learned the art of piano playing personally from Liszt, and he passed on a tremendous amount of it, in turn trained piano teachers who in turn passed on what they had learned. So probably very, very many of us piano players could trace our pianistic pedigree back to Liszt if that were possible. Isn't that incredibly fascinating? And Ludvig Schytte played an important part in this wonderful fact - I am incredibly grateful to him for that !!!!

Kerstin