Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

io6 MY MUSICAL EXPERIENCES
played a few bars, just to show the unfortunate
aspirant his reading of 'Cob •polonaise. But instead of
saying this time, ' Let me hear you play the rest of
it,' Liszt stood up, and moving away from the piano,
began to pace up and down, saying as he did so, as if
partly to himself, partly to us, and in a voice calcu-
lated to strike terror in the bravest there, ' Such
playing indeed ;
and to me, who have so often listened
to Tausig \ Ah, how he played this piece !' The
discomfited young man stood beside the piano pale as
death, seeming to be transfixed with terror. A pro-
found and painful silence reigned among the students,
and no one seemed to know what was coming next,
until a young Belgian pianist—of whom I shall ever
think with pleasure for the kindliness he showed on
this occasion—managed by gestures, without saying a
word, to make the discomfited young pianist under-
stand that, as the Meister had not taken the music of
the polonaise oS the piano, the inference was that he
should continue playing.
The mother of Mademoiselle Eanuschewitz never
failed to accompany her daughter, and perhaps she
may be some day induced to show me the book in
which she noted down not only the title of every piece
that was played to Liszt throughout the entire sum-
mer, but also the names of the different pianists by
whom the pieces were performed (for the same piece
might happen to be heard many times during the
months when these reunions des jeunes pianistes were