Edward Teller - Learning the piano (7/147)

To listen to more of Edward Teller’s stories, go to the playlist: • Edward Teller (Scientist)
Hungarian-American physicist, Edward Teller (1908-2003), helped to develop the atomic bomb and provided the theoretical framework for the hydrogen bomb. He remained a staunch advocate of nuclear power, calling for the development of advanced thermonuclear weapons. [Listener: John H. Nuckolls]
TRANSCRIPT: But one of my very important memories of Lugos was connected with piano playing, with music. I started to be taught to use my fingers on the piano two years earlier and I don't- didn't like it very much. I just loved to listen to my mother, who herself intended to become a pianist. She was a good one. I remember the Beethoven sonatas, the 'Pathétique', the 'Appassionata', that she liked to play. Now, there in Lugos I got piano lessons that I started really to like. That was a Hungarian official who lost his job and I forgot to tell you why. During our stay in Lugos, that little town was taken off- taken over by the Rumanians. And the Hungarian employees of the state all lost their jobs. And there was - I now remember his name - a very wonderful man, Mr Willer, had no job, was quite willing to give me piano lessons. He was not a piano teacher but he loved music. And he did much more than use my fingers. He started to explain both harmony and the way how, let us say, a piece like a sonata is constructed. Had I stayed with him, I might have satisfied my mother's wish, I might have become a pianist but after a little while we came back to Budapest. We had stayed down there for maybe half a year or a little longer. And my next teacher did not tell me anything about theory, anything about harmony, but told me that to play a piece well you have to play it slowly a hundred times. And in the course of years, she proceeded very far, not all the way but very far, in spoiling all my interest in music. My interest in mathematics, that remained. My father knew very little about it. But he had a friend. I believe they had gone together hiking in the mountains, in a group of them. But the leader of that group, a Professor Klug, was a mathematician. And my father took me to him. Now, by that time, you know, I knew how to handle numbers, but I did not know what mathematics was about. I heard that there is much more to mathematics than handling numbers, but what that was, I did not know.

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Einstein also played piano, not just violin, as disclosed by Helen Dukas, Einstein’s Secretary, in a conversation I had with Dr. John Stachel only yesterday afternoon,,12/04/2018. This resolved a long standing inquiry I had attempted (unsuccessfully) to resolve with Dr. Eugen Wigner In 1983.... at which point, the elderly Nobel Prize winner roundly rebuked and insulted me, but at least mentioned me in the same sentence as Dr. Einstein. Dr. Stachel & I had a good laugh over it yesterday, helping to disperse some of the 35 years of pain and humiliation incurred.

[@veenabijalwan1226]

Doug R. You are everywhere!