I Know A Little Something About Music, Having Studied The Art With
Considerable Diligence For A Number Of Years.
Impossible to enumerate
all the composers and executants on various instruments, the conductors
and opera-singers and ballet-girls with whom I was on terms of
familiarity during that incarnation.
Perhaps I am the only person now
alive who has shaken hands with a man (Lachner) who shook hands with
Beethoven and heard his voice; all of which may appear when I come to
indite my musical memoirs. I have written a sonata in four movements,
opus 643, hitherto unpublished, and played the organ during divine
service to a crowded congregation. Furthermore I performed, not at my
own suggestion, his insipid Valse Caprice to the great Antoine
Rubinstein, who was kind enough to observe: "Yes, yes. Quite good. But I
rather doubt whether you could yet risk playing that in a concert." And
in the matter of sheer noise I am also something of an expert, having
once, as an infant prodigy, broken five notes in a single masterly
rendering of Liszt's polonaise in E Major - I think it is E
Major - whereupon my teacher, himself a pupil of Liszt, genially
remarked: "Now don't cry, and don't apologize. A polonaise like yours is
worth a piano." I set these things down with modest diffidence, solely
in order to establish my locus standi as a person who might be expected
to know the difference between sound and noise. As such, I have no
hesitation in saying that the first three bars of that nightingale
performance are, to sleeping ears, not music. They break upon the
stillness with the crash of Judgment Day.
And every night the same scare. It causes me to start up, bathed in
sudden perspiration, out of my first, and best, and often only sleep,
with the familiar feeling that something awful is happening. Windows
seem to rattle, plaster drops from the ceiling - an earthquake? Lord, no.
Nothing so trivial. Nothing so brief. It is that blasted bird clearing
its throat for a five hours' entertainment. Let it not be supposed that
the song of these southerners bears any resemblance to that of an
English nightingale. I could stand a hatful of English nightingales in
my bedroom; they would lull me to sleep with their anaemic whispers. You
might as well compare the voice of an Italian costermonger, the crowing
of a cock, the braying of a local donkey, with their representatives in
the north - those thin trickles of sound, shadowy as the squeakings of
ghosts. Something will have to be done about those nightingales unless I
am to find my way into a sanatorium. For hardly is this bird started on
its work before five or six others begin to shout in emulation - a little
further off, I am glad to say, but still near enough to be inconvenient;
still near enough to be reached by a brick from this window - - A brick.
Methinks I begin to see daylight....
Meanwhile one can snatch a little rest out of doors, in the afternoon.
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