I was very proud to have had the honour of announcing Carol von Syberg as Teacher Emeritus at our Convocation in 2022 so I was looking forward to our conversation.
I meet with Carol in her lovely Garden Crest Condo on Summer Street, in a large windowed, bright room filled with winter sunlight. The room contains comfortable furniture and a grand piano, upon which sheet music by Beethoven sits ready on the stand.
Carol reminisces about the Conservatory and remembers all the locations that the Conservatory has occupied over the years saying, “and in every one of those I was there”. This began at the Uniacke-Duffus house where she began her study at the Conservatory aged 9 in the same year that the second war broke out in Europe. Her teacher was Miss Hills, but her mother (also a piano teacher) disliked her teacher’s technique and sent Carol to the Academy of Music instead, a school founded by Harry Dean who had fallen out with Ifan Williams Sr, the Director of the Conservatory. Happily the then Halifax Conservatory of Music and the Academy of Music were destined to join together again in 1954. Carol’s first teacher there was Hester Beach and then later as a senior student, Harry Dean and Rita Morton. She is proud of the qualification that she earned there: a Licentiate in teaching that was awarded to her by London’s Royal School of Music after examination in Halifax in 1949 at the age of 19, the last time that such examinations were held here. The examination was notoriously difficult. It was in the very same year that Irene Apine and Jury Goltshalks established dance at the Conservatory and she remembers them dancing, “They brought ballet to Canada” she says.
She fondly recalls all the studios that she has taught in at each location as the Conservatory plotted its long and nomadic history in a multitude of locations in Halifax. I ask her of all the buildings that the Conservatory has occupied which was most suited to be the home of the Conservatory. Unequivocally she says, “where we are now, by far. With the beautiful studios and the Lilian Piercey Concert Hall. I remember when that was dedicated. There was no elevator so Lilian had to be carried up all those stairs. It was a convocation and she was sitting in the middle of the room. When it came time for her to give her speech she stood up, her hands on her wheelchair. She looked around and said ‘I wish I could be renovated like this place!’”
Carol is like the memory of the Conservatory. She was even a school student there when it was the Chebucto Road School in the 1940’s
Carol is very proud of her students and collects the letters and postcards that they still send “to the best piano teacher in the world”. Many have gone on to other professions. Carol has gathered together a myriad of items that she kept in her piano stool to share with me. They include one of her student registers from 1994 containing the names of her thirty students at the time; there are old recital programs and newspaper clippings of her former students. She holds one out for me, “This one, David Waddington, he was brilliant. It was a three hour drive from where he lived. He came in for a one or two hour lesson every second week and we didn’t even finish what he had practiced! His father would sit in the corner in a comfortable chair and he would fall asleep while David was having lessons. David was left a piano by Glenn Gould…This one,” (she shows me another newspaper clipping) “he went on to play the organ and piano professionally”. I look at the clipping describing how the composer is writing the music for a film. Carol shows me a recital program, “This one is studying engineering now! She came at Christmas with a poinsettia so big I could hardly see her!” Many of her students keep in touch. There is a flowering amaryllis on a table nearby—the mother of two of her students brings one at every Christmas and Carol is touched that she is remembered by parents too. She still gets an email from one of the first students she ever taught. She has dozens of Christmas cards many of which are handmade and coloured which she reads from and holds in her lap, “somebody else can throw these out” she says with a smile. Her students are now if not professional musicians, engineers, philosophers, doctors etc. and she says that she knew because of their dedication at the piano that they would flourish. COVID 19 forced the decision for her to finally stop after thirty years of part time and forty years of full time piano teaching and she has loved it, this life in music.
It’s time for me to leave and we chat some more. What stands out is her respect for the piano teachers who continue in the Conservatory today. She sites Betty Ro and Natalia Pavlovskaia as examples saying, “They are so wonderful. Wonderful teachers. And they stay…so humble about it all”.
I wonder if this is a longstanding trait of Conservatory piano teachers.