Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

126 MY MUSICAL EXPERIENCES
of many lovely tone-poems, by turns soothing, stimu-
lating, saddening, and yet as little insistent as the
sounds in nature—the wind as it murmurs among the
forest trees, or the sweet odours that exhale from the
flower-spangled meadows in June.' And so thoroughly
at her ease was the young pianist, that once or twice,
before she commenced playing a piece (performed as
if she were in her own room), she made some very
curious movements with her fingers on the keyboard.
On playing the first movement of Beethoven's Sonatas
she took up the music-book that lay beside the desk,
and seemed to be noting some point in the adagio, for
she looked at it carefully for a moment or two without
betraying the slightest flurry or anxiety, and then,
laying it down again, she gave the reading of this
movement to which I have already alluded as giving
me so high an idea of what Herr Deppe's musical
conceptions must be.
Eeturning now, however, to the time when I had
seen Herr Deppe only three times, and had, after
one lesson from him, been drifted away, I come to
speak of Xaver Scharwencka, who is regarded as one
of the leading teachers in Germany, and one of the
highest authorities on technique.
The one lesson I had had from Herr Deppe had so
far helped me, that I had reached the conviction that
all the practice in the world never gives anyone
perfect mastery over the keyboard ; that it is only
reached by getting inside of certain lines, which