Summary
Polish-Jewish pianist who came to Cairo in 1933 and ran a Conservatoire de Musique there; Edward Said’s piano teacher and later his friend, and in Said’s memoir essay “Cairo Recalled” the last and best result of the traffic between Europe and the Cairo of Said’s 1940s childhood (Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, PDF p.268).
Details
- A wunderkind student of Leschetizky and Ignaz Friedman, Tiegerman came to Cairo in 1933, attracted by the city’s warmth and possibilities in contrast to what was coming in Europe; no one played Chopin and Schumann with such grace and unparalleled rhetorical conviction. He taught piano in Cairo, tying himself to the city’s haute société — teaching its daughters, playing for its salons — to free himself for his own pursuits of conversation, good food, music and unknown kinds of human relationships (PDF p.268; memoir, as Said presents it).
- Said was his piano student at the outset and, many years later, his friend; in the late 1950s and early 1960s they gathered stalwarts from Cairo’s old days to play music and talk memory, and in the early 1960s Said saw him in Kitzbühel, Austria, where Tiegerman had built a tiny cottage with an old Broadwood grand and a Pleyel upright (PDF p.268).
- Tiegerman died in 1967, a few months after the June War. Although he kept his Polish passport he was subject to Egyptian residency laws, taxes and the rigors of Nasser’s regime, chafed under the restrictions, but refused to consider moving to Israel: “Why should I go there?” he said rhetorically. “Here I am unique; there many people are like me. Besides,” he added, “I love Cairo.” (PDF p.268).
- Said’s last symbolic memory, from 1959, is of Tiegerman at his conservatoire listening to his most gifted student, a young married woman, a mother of four, who played with her head completely enclosed in the pious veil of a devout Muslim; Tiegerman entered her in the Munich piano competition, but she did not do well there. Like Tiegerman she was an untransplantable emanation of Cairo’s genius; unlike him, her branch of the city’s history has endured and even triumphed (PDF p.268-269).
Related pages
Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Edward Said, Gamal Abdel Nasser