Another Dumb Musical Theory

 Theory: every person involved in music has a 'mother tongue' and a 'father tongue.'

The mother tongue is the language they grew up speaking: the first language of their serious training.

The father tongue is the tongue they picked up in the first flush of youth, the formative tongue, the tongue that set direction to their natural instinct.

For example, who can deny that Toscanini's mother tongue was Verdi: hearing him not only in the opera but in the cafes, the brass bands, the home entertainment and recitals. Then, as a cellist, he must have encountered Beethoven: the sonatas, the quartets, eventually as an orchestral cellist. The two influences made Toscanini.

Rubinstein, Polish born, probably heard Chopin in every household: not just his own practices but everybody else's, the folk bands that played folk mazurkas and polonaises probably started playing Chopin as though he were folk music. Then he got to Berlin, and Joachim's supervision, and he encountered Brahms, not the man but the music and all the stories about him and the insider tips about how to play him, and Brahms became his second language, the father tongue, and started playing romantic Chopin with classical restraint.

Abbado? Grew up the son of a conservatory director. He was a pianist, but probably even moreso a chamber musician who constantly heard it at the conservatory and in his house, probably played at the houses of friends: and it gave him a thorough grounding in the Austro-German line: think of the work he was most praised for... Schubert, Mendelssohn, Brahms, to a lesser extent Mozart and Beethoven, these are the chamber composers, and all that prepared him for Mahler. Then at some point he must have become a La Scala regular, and clearly Puccini didn't make much impression on him, but he encountered Verdi, Strauss, the Mozart operas, and most importantly: Rossini. Suddenly the natural instincts for listening and self-effacement encountered a vocal line, and like a chamber musician his Verdi had little of the grand airs generally associated with il grande maestro.

Muti? Grew up a pianist too, not in a musical family, and probably played alone. His first language was probably the Schumann and Liszt that makes a bigger impression on young people, and he probably responded to their fiamma, Florestan qualities. Then he probably started going to Teatro San Carlo, encountered Verdi and Cherubini for the first time, Donizetti and the serious Rossini, and while he always played them naturally, he always played them with a Lisztian virtuosity. He even copied Liszt's hair.

Horowitz? Grew up with Scriabin as a family friend, played for Scriabin at ten, through Scriabin probably learned about his BFF Rachmaninov, and he learned late Russian empire piano music as a mother tongue. Then, as he discovered himself as a virtuoso, he was given Liszt and Schumann, and began playing everything with both virtuosity and inward sensitivity that was positively manic.

Carlos Kleiber? It's tempting to say he was a single parent household. His father was one of the great maestros of Beethoven, Richard Strauss and Johann Strauss, and from his father at Teatro Colon he learned Beethoven 7 and Der Rosenkavalier and Ritter Pazman. But he was such a formidable writer, and married a ballerina (imagine Kleiber doing the Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev ballets...). I would imagine one of the two, or both, was his father-tongue, which enabled such flights of imagination, color, and propulsion.

Barenboim? Probably grew up with a steady diet of Beethoven and Mozart from his father like a good student should, then he encountered Furtwangler at 12, started learning to conduct, learned his Wagner and Bruckner and started playing playing Beethoven and Mozart with Wagnerian aspirations to profundity.

Bernstein? Barely encountered music until he was ten. Believe it or not perhaps his mothertongue wasn't music at all. He approached music like a student learning it his whole life, constantly assimilating new influences, new music, new ways of making it (I bet with ten more years Bernstein would have embraced HIP). Then he started piano, he felt the freedom to explore anywhere, and his father tongue became teaching.

Boulez: a thirteen hour education every day as a schoolboy, then went to university in Lyon to study math. His mothertongue is mathematics, then encountered serialism and atonality at the Paris Conservatoire.

The key to all this is not just their listening, but their practical experience. It's not enough to understand it from hearing it, one has to understand how to make it from the inside just as one has to learn to speak and read a language rather than hear it to know it. It takes work, it takes routine and practice, it takes habit. Like any other profession, it has to be learned, not just appreciated, and like any person, whether raised by them both, everyone has a mother and a father.