Igor Stravinsky took private piano lessons from Leokadiya Kashperova starting in December 1899, and she served as his music teacher for two years. Under her guidance, Stravinsky studied Mendelssohn's G minor concerto, as well as sonatas and other works by Clementi, Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. However, Kashperova placed a ban on the works of Chopin. Stravinsky noted that she was an excellent pianist who blindly shared the views of her own teacher, Anton Rubinstein, but he found it difficult to make her accept the scores of Rimsky-Korsakov and Wagner, which he was studying at the time.
Despite their aesthetic disagreements, Kashperova gave a new impetus to Stravinsky's pianism and helped him improve his piano technique. A specific characteristic of her pedagogy was a complete prohibition on the use of pedals; she required Stravinsky to hold the sound with his fingers, similar to an organist. Stravinsky later acknowledged that this method likely influenced his compositional style, as he never wrote music requiring heavy pedaling. British musicologist Graham Griffiths has suggested that Kashperova influenced the development of Stravinsky's neoclassical style and aspects of his composer technique.
