Willow Glen Resident

Cover Story

Photograph by Vicki Thompson

Musical Vision: Celia Méndez taught part time in the music department at San José State University. Although she suffers from a debilitating hip disease, it has not stopped her from teaching piano. In 1986 she created a Beethoven competition for young pianists while studying for her master's degree.

Take Note

Celia Mendez founded the Young Pianist's Beethoven Competition

By Alicia Upano

When Celia Méndez pores over a musical score, she sees a language all its own arising from the pages. Even the content of Ludwig van Beethoven sonatas, she says, is like a window into the chapters of history.

"The whole world is music," says Méndez, sitting in her Willow Glen home. "It's a universal language."

It's a language that she has honed from her early years in Argentina to her adult years in San Jose, where in 1986 she founded the Young Pianist's Beethoven Competition.

Now, after 20 years of performing as maestro in the competition, 74-year-old Méndez is retiring.

Hans Boepple, chairman of the Santa Clara University music department, says, "If you want to get something done, get the busiest person you know--that's Celia."

He has known Méndez for more than two decades. He was a former judge for the Beethoven competition, and today many of his students compete in the event.

Along with her organizational finesse, Méndez is known in the local music world for being an outstanding piano teacher, Boepple says, as well as a discerning judge and, when her health allowed her to play, a superb pianist.

Music came naturally to Méndez. She grew up in the Argentine province of La Pampa, where her pianist mother gave lessons. At age 4, Méndez would sit for hours at the piano, mimicking what her mother's students practiced. Noticing her daughter's aptitude for music, her mother, Lidia de Las Heras, began giving her young daughter formal lessons.

Méndez advanced quickly through the aptitude tests given at the Conservatory of Music in Buenos Aires, where she studied. She completed all the elementary pianist tests by the age of 12.

Her family then moved to Buenos Aires, 500 miles east. Méndez studied to be a teacher at the Normal School for Teachers No. 9, graduating in 1950. She also received a credential to teach music from the Argentine ministry of education.

Méndez taught intermediate grammar and mathematics and music education for 10 years in the Buenos Aires public schools. In 1963, she moved with her husband, Horacio, to Pasadena, where he was completing his engineering studies at the California Institute of Technology.

Nine months later he completed his master's degree, and his wife gave birth to their daughter, Ana.

The Méndez family moved to San Jose after Horacio was offered a position at IBM in 1964. Their second child, Fred, was born in 1965.

The births worsened a congenital problem Méndez had with her hips, protrusio acetabulum, which is an abnormal placement of the femoral head.

In 1970, she had arthroplasty surgery in both hips and spent six months recovering at Stanford Hospital. She had additional surgeries in 1971, 1974, 1984 and 1991. Some of those surgeries left her in a wheelchair, until rehabilitation enabled her to progress from crutches to a cane. Today, Méndez can walk no farther than a couple of blocks and lives with chronic pain. This has impaired her ability to play piano and perform, but has not hampered her love for learning.

In the mid-1970s, even during all the surgeries, Méndez went back to school. She studied at San Jose City College and West Valley and De Anza community colleges. She later transferred to San José State University to pursue a bachelor's degree in piano performance. There, she studied under pianists Adolph Baller, John Delevoryas, Fernando Valenti, Alfred Kanwischer and Aiko Onishi.

In a word, Delevoryas, now retired, says Méndez was "tops."

"She was a very gifted Bach player. She had excellent fingers and concept of Bach's music," Delevoryas says.

Méndez' ailing hips hampered her pedaling, Delevoryas says, making Bach a good choice. Bach's music is mainly written for keyboard instruments and does not require using the piano pedal, he says.

In 1982, Méndez graduated with a 4.0 grade point average from San José State University. She was 50 years old.

The gain did not come without its losses. Méndez's hips began to worsen, eventually disrupting her lifelong piano playing, and she was unable to sit for long periods of time to practice.

Instead of giving up on the instrument, Méndez refocused her passion for music and returned to teaching. In 1982, she began teaching piano to the children of friends.

During those early years, Méndez taught students of all ages and judged area piano competitions.

Méndez enjoyed working with the young pianists, believing playing the piano was more than mere memorization.

Training as a pianist gives students the discipline to perfect their craft and teaches them how to present themselves in front of others, she says. The decoding of notes and the intellectual exercise of playing also helps in strengthening abstract thinking.

"You're never so naked as when you perform on stage. If, from an early age, you learn how to do that, you're at an advantage," Méndez says.

A pianist should also be more than a set of fingers, or a technician, Méndez says. He or she should appreciate the art in context of its origin. For example, she links Impressionist paintings with impressionism in music, or romantic literature with romantic musical pieces.

While teaching, Méndez began to see a strong pool of talent.

"I wondered, 'Why don't we have a competition for high school students with Beethoven?' " she says.

That's exactly what Méndez posed to William Meredith, director of the Ira F. Brilliant Center for Beethoven Studies at San José State University. The center holds the largest collection of the composer's works outside of Europe.

Méndez liked the connection between the Beethoven center and a Beethoven competition. She also thought it would be a good challenge for high school-aged pianists. Beethoven sonatas, she said, are among the richest in music literature.

The competition premiered in 1987 and has grown in prestige since then. Students from across the state send in recordings of a prelude or fugue from J.S. Bach's "Well-Tempered Clavier," and one of Beethoven's sonatas written before his Opus 90 work. Beethoven's late sonatas after Opus 90 are more mature works and very difficult for young pianists, Méndez notes.

The judges and Méndez have spent days poring over the recordings, writing down 20 to 25 comments for each entry and finally selecting the six finalists for the competition. This year, the six finalists played their Bach and Beethoven pieces for the top three spots on April 9.

"They're sort of like Shakespeare plays. They truly are the greatest challenge for any pianist to play well. They require a profound understanding," Boepple says. "For a high school student to play a Beethoven sonata, it's an enormous challenge."

These works are also the required audition pieces for the most noted music conservatories in the world, Boepple adds.

The top three finalists win $200 to cover expenses and a class with a master instructor. This year, the lucky three attended a class with Menahem Pressler, a concert pianist who founded the Beaux Arts Trio, which tours extensively in the U.S., Europe and Asia. He has made numerous recordings ranging from Bach to Paul Ben Haim and has been nominated for four Grammy awards.

Competition birthed

Méndez developed the competition as a SJSU graduate student in music history, while working toward the master's degree she earned in 1988. She then taught part time for several years at the university's music department.

Méndez lived out of state with her husband in 1994, but still stayed involved with the annual competition, relying on the help of several of her San Jose-based colleagues.

But Méndez also set out to build a life for herself in these new cities. True to her nature, Méndez used the move as an opportunity.

During that time, the couple rented out their Willow Glen home and moved to Wisconsin for four years. Her husband accepted a position at Marquette University in Milwaukee after her husband retired from IBM, and Méndez pursued a doctorate degree in musicology at the University of Madison-Wisconsin.

Mendez had to commute two hours on a bus between Milwaukee and Madison. Once a week she would stay in student housing overnight.

"I was back with the young minds," she says, "I was the mama there. I listened to all their love stories."

The couple returned to San Jose, but not for long. Her husband accepted a post at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh in 2000. Eventually the couple would return to their sun-filled Willow Glen home in 2003.

Settled in for retirement, Méndez says she's right at home in Willow Glen. There is enough room for a piano in the living room, a swimming pool that is therapeutic for Méndez's hips, and a piano studio where she teaches 10 high school-aged pianists.

Each of her students studies with Méndez once a week for an hour. Many don't aim toward becoming concert pianists, but Méndez believes music offers her students an important educational component that will serve them in the future.

Likewise, the purpose of the Beethoven competition is purely educational. For Méndez, it has been a joy to see young pianists strive for the love of music.

"I never imagined it would be so long-lived. It's been tremendously rewarding," she says.