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Working hard, partying hard...Fanny at 90
For nearly half a century, Dame Fanny Waterman has been spotting pianists with the x-factor. She tells Grant Woodward the secret of her happy life.
FANNY Waterman is excited.
As well as a family celebration, she has already had a birthday bash in America, a private concert from the most famous winner of her world-renowned piano competition and a civic reception in Leeds.
Now she's looking forward to her seventh party marking her 90th year.
"I never had parties when I was growing up because we were too poor," she tells me, suddenly looking 19 rather than 90. "And I do love a good party."
On becoming a nonagenarian most of us, if we hadn't done so already, would be putting our feet up. With Fanny you get the impression she's only just getting started.
A pocket battleship of a woman, she's still travelling the world giving piano masterclasses – China and South Africa are her next stops – and has just taken on the presidency of the Harrogate International Festival, roping in some famous friends to help.
Leeds playwright Alan Bennett gave an 'evening with', while Prince Charles, the royal that Fanny says has the greatest appreciation for music, agreed to her request to become the event's patron for at least the next five years, though you rather get the impression he had little choice in the matter.
The result, unsurprisingly, was a rip-roaring success.
Given her still razor-sharp mind and abundant energy, it's hard to think Fanny Waterman has been on this earth for nearly a century.
But when she bustles off to show me the photographs in the downstairs bathroom of her beautiful Oakwood home, the history is all there, neatly framed on the walls.
"That's me with my dear friend Benjamin Britten," she says, pointing to a small black and white image high up near the ceiling, "and that's Edward Heath standing in my drawing room."
Other photographs show Gordon Brown planting a kiss on her cheek, John Major making a presentation to her inside Number Ten and a group shot at the home of the President of South Korea.
But taking pride of place on one of the two Steinway pianos in front of the French doors leading to her sunlit garden is a portrait of her late husband, Dr Geoffrey de Keyser.
"He was my rock and inspiration," she says. "Apart from our love for each other, our great passion was music. I always say it was a marriage made in heaven."
The idea for a piano competition in Leeds came to Fanny one sleepless night in 1961.
She woke Geffrey to tell him but he was adamant it would only work in the capital. So she set about proving him wrong.
Recruiting Marion Thorpe, then Countess of Harewood, and with help from her husband, she set about establishing the Leeds International Pianoforte Competition.
Staged at the Great Hall of the University of Leeds and the Town Hall since 1963, it is now regarded as the world's premier piano competition, kickstarting the careers of modern masters such as Romania's Radu Lupu and American virtuoso Murray Perahia.
"I'm still surprised, looking back, that we had this marvellous reaction from the international musical world," she admits. "For some reason we inspired enough confidence in these great pianists to come to an industrial city they had never even heard of."
Such is the affection in which Fanny is held by former winners that Lupu cleared his diary two years in advance to fly over from Switzerland and perform Schubert for her on her 90th birthday in March.
Born in Leeds, in what she says was "a slum" on what is now North Street, Fanny's upbringing was a very different one from the world she inhabits now.
The daughter of a Russian jeweller, she remembers growing up in the 1920s as a tough business.
"Being the Depression, my father didn't sell much jewellery. We shared an outside toilet with our neighbours and our holiday was to go to Roundhay Park. We couldn't afford the tuppence to sit on the deckchairs, we just sat on the grass.
"But I had marvellous parents who nurtured my talent and taught me the greatest values in life: Never to covet the things money can buy but to value good health, integrity, beauty and talent."
From the age of four she would clamber on to a stool at home to play the ditties of the day on the family piano.
Lessons with a Mrs Goldstone, who had an upright piano in her kitchen and would cook as she taught, followed.
"I always say I hope her culinary skills were better than her piano lessons because all I learned were pieces like Pixies on Parade and The Grasshopper's Dance," says Fanny, with thinly-veiled disgust.
"Bach, Beethoven, Mozart and Tchaikovsky wrote very simple pieces for beginners and that is the diet I give my pupils, but I had all these tiddly pieces so I didn't stay there very long."
Her father scrimped and saved to afford her lessons with the acclaimed Tobias Matthay and for six years she played during morning prayers at Chapel Allerton High School, even though she was Jewish.
Brilliant enough to win a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London, of which she is now a Fellow, she studied under the acclaimed concert pianist Cyril Smith.
"Ninety years ago a fairy godmother was at my birth and gave me good health and talent," is how she explains it now. "I truly believe these are God-given gifts."
Raising two sons meant Fanny needed to teach if she wanted to keep on playing, so she did so with gusto as a local piano teacher, before writing the Me and My Piano series of instruction books which have since been bought by more than two million people.
She still teaches now on the gleaming Steinways in her sitting room and says her students' enthusiasm helps keep her young, as does the work she continues to do for the Leeds piano competition.
The competition helped put the city on the musical map and was recognised as such when Fanny was awarded the Freedom of the City of Leeds, joining the likes of Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela.
Despite a glut of awards including an OBE in 1971, CBE in 1999 and a damehood in 2005, as well as countless musical honours, it is still the one that means the most to her.
But the competition doesn't organise itself. Planning for the 2012 Leeds began as soon as the 2009 contest ended, with Fanny taking on the task of raising the enormous sum of money required to stage the event.
So how does she do it?
"I'm a perfectionist and I'm probably very hard to work for and to live with, but I've always been content with my lot. Apart from not having my husband, who was a wonderful person, I'm very happy.
"As far as work goes, I have a favourite saying: You don't stop working because you get old, you get old because you stop working."
I tell her it's the exact same thing she said to me shortly before turning 85.
"Is it really?" she asks. "Well, here's a new one from an Irish prayer: Grant me life until my work is done and grant me work until my life is done."
And the twinkle in her eyes tells me she means every word.
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Thursday 24 May 2012
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