Page 184 - Weiss, Jernej, ur. 2020. Konservatoriji: profesionalizacija in specializacija glasbenega dela ▪︎ The conservatories: professionalisation and specialisation of musical activity. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 4
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konservator iji: profesionalizacija in specializacija glasbenega dela

(back row, first from the right) and Slavko Osterc (middle row, first from
the right). On Osterc’s right is Emerik Beran, Osterc’s first teacher, now
quite elderly, whom Hubad had invited to the Conservatory in 1927 to
teach cello. Even before this, Hubad regularly consulted Beran on ques-
tions related to teaching. Beran was one of the most experienced teach-
ers at the Conservatory. Two of his cello syllabuses from this period have
been preserved. These were based on the existing syllabus of the men’s
teacher training college in Maribor (Državno moško učiteljišče v Mari-
boru, formerly the k. k. Lehrerbildungsanstalt Marburg), where he had
taught previously.31 This syllabus was, in turn, modelled on those of the
Organ School in Brno, where Beran himself had trained, a circumstance
which demonstrates how the pedagogical models adopted in Ljubljana
did not originate exclusively in the conservatories of Prague and Vienna.
In addition to teaching cello (like the other teachers, he was required to
teach 20 hours a week and, in the event of an insufficient number of hours
of cello lessons, to teach piano as well), Beran shared responsibility for
ensemble rehearsals at the State Conservatory with Jan Šlais. He was fre-
quently disappointed at the standard of the Conservatory’s students and
admonished them that under Leoš Janáček in Brno they would not have
passed the year.32

The relatively low standard of students in the first years of the Con-
servatory‘s operation may to a certain extent be linked to the lack of ade-
quately qualified teachers. It appears that Hubad devoted the majority of
his time to seeking suitable staff across the whole of the new state. In the
immediate post-war years he also made several visits to the conservatories
in Zagreb and Prague. A vivid picture of the modest pedagogical condi-
tions in the first post-war years is provided in an autobiographical account
by Vida Jeraj-Hribar, the daughter of the already mentioned Karel Jeraj, lat-
er a teacher at the Ljubljana Conservatory and the founder of the Glasbena
Matica Orchestral Society (Orkestralno društvo Glasbene matice). In 1919,
having studied the violin at the Vienna Conservatory for two years, Jera­ j-
Hribar decided to continue her studies in Ljubljana. Recalling this time in
later years, she wrote:

31 Jernej Weiss, Emerik Beran (1868–1940): samotni svetovljan (Maribor: Litera, 2008):
65.

32 Ibid., 67.

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