Endeavour to play easy pieces well and beautifully; that is better than playing difficult pieces badly. When you play, don't worry about who may be listening to you.
If anyone should place before you a composition to play at sight, read it over before you play it.
How often have you found yourself repeating advice like this to your pupils? We may live in a world that seems to be changing more rapidly than ever before, but some things remain the same, and among them are the guiding principles of learning to play an instrument.
The precepts quoted above are taken from Robert Schumann's ‘Advice to Young Musicians: Musical Rules for Home and in Life’, originally intended as a preface to his 1848 piano anthology Album for the Young, but published separately two years later in the Neue Zeitschrift für Music, a music magazine founded in 1834 by Schumann, his teacher and future father-in-law Friedrich Wieck, and his close friend and fellow composer-pianist Ludwig Schuncke.
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