Piano Teacher Was Tuned In to Joys of Life
At 93, Frances Knigge Bishop was still at it.
From time to time, she’d sit at the keyboard of her century-old Steinway and fill the house with some lush musing by Rachmaninoff, or, just for fun, a little ragtime.
That she could still play was unusual.
But that she was still giving lessons, singing “Three Blind Mice” along with 5-year-olds, encouraging fumble-fingered grown-ups with a cheery “well-isn’t-that-wonderful!” . . . well, that really was wonderful.
Frances died last week. For the last year of her life, there were no lessons. Her vision and hearing had been going, and a stroke erased her memory.
But at the top of her game, there was no one like her.
For most of the past 13 years, Frances lived in Ventura with her grandson Russ Bishop, his wife Maureen, and their two children. The other day, they were thumbing through yellowed clippings about Frances and the people she taught. They remembered her constant bustling, her doting over the great-grandkids, the way she’d parry Russ’s jokes with: “Oh, you rascal!”
“People would say, ‘How nice it is that you’re caring for her,” he said. “But we never really thought of it like that. She was part of the family.”
In the living room, she gave her lessons. In the dining room, she painstakingly transcribed music for her students, giving them her own simpler, more accessible versions of everything from “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” to Mozart’s Fantasia in D Minor.
Settling into a rocker in front of the TV, she offered a running commentary on old movies: Of some forgotten vamp, Frances would say, “Oh, she was really big back in 1934. Oh, she was really going places. . . .”
That now-faded star may have brought her child to Frances Knigge Bishop’s studio for a proper grounding in trills and arpeggios and “Three Blind Mice.” Sought out by the Hollywood elite, Frances, a Kansas farm girl, taught the children of Joe DiMaggio, Jane Wyatt, Harold Lloyd, Walt Disney.
Her favorite was Freddie Bartholomew, the child actor who starred in “Little Lord Fauntleroy” and “Captains Courageous.” Freddie studied two hours daily with Frances. Against her better musical judgment, she agreed to teach him boogie-woogie, and the two became lifelong friends.
“He called me last Christmas to tell me he still loves me,” she told an interviewer in 1988.
Over the years, Frances cut her teaching load, but she never stopped. Teaching was a joyous compulsion, and she acquired students with the unabashed zeal of a sales rep making contacts. Dining at a Thai restaurant with the Bishops, she started chatting with the waiter and the chef, and signed up their children on the spot.
“It was a little embarrassing to watch,” said Russ, a commercial photographer. “But then you thought: ‘Why can’t I be more like her?’ ”
At 92, Frances offered six piano lessons to the highest bidder at an auction for Blanche Reynolds, her great-grandchildren’s elementary school.
Michael Namm, a marriage and family therapist, won the lessons and continued with Frances once a week until her stroke seven months later. By then, he was playing Bach.
“She got me to enjoy myself,” he said. “She loved teaching so much that our lessons always lasted beyond the hour.”
Some of her students went places.
“I remember her as a lady who was very patient and very, very kind,” said Lawrence Foster, who started lessons with her when he was 9. “She gave me a really good classical education. She was nurturing, she was encouraging--and she put up with my lack of practice.”
He learned to practice.
An hour after sharing his memories, Maestro Foster strode on to the stage at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion to conduct the Los Angeles Philharmonic.
Steve Chawkins can be reached at 653-7561 or by e-mail at steve.chawkins@latimes.com.
