‘The Classical Life: How to Promote Yourself as a Young Performer’ is a selfhelp guide that consists of three parts, a Consulting Part, an Autobiographic Part and a Research Part.

In the Consulting Part I have shared insights about how to promote yourself as an aspiring performing artist so as to attract the support of record companies and concert agents and their management and marketing services. While there is no standard recipe for this to happen in your creative life, you can well prepare yourself in one or the other way so as to make it more likely to happen!

In the Autobiographic Part I have shared my own accidented music story, based on the insight that there is no exception from the rule that outstanding musical performers all come from intact and supportive homes. Having myself suffered from abuse in early childhood with no support for my talent, and no attention to my repeated requests for piano lessons, it is no wonder that I ended up becoming a lawyer, as this was what was expected from me, becoming a late starter at the piano at age 18. But the real breakthrough in nurturing my talent occurred only in my sixties, that is, quite recently, with extraordinary changes in my mind and body that led to a liberation from all technical handicaps and their psychological correlates. In one word, I was set free to experience the thrill of a learning process that others go through in childhood and youth.

In the Research Part I share the story about a letter I have written to Maestro Svjatoslav Richter back in 1982, and present my genius research on the late Russian pianist of world renown. I also analyze the pianistic genius of Claudio Arrau, who was via his teacher Martin Krause directly resourced with Franz Liszt’s revolutionary piano method, and compare the two pianists by analyzing their rendering of Franz Liszt’s B Minor Sonata and Schubert’s D958 Sonata.

Peter Fritz Walter