Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

146 MV MUSICAL EXPERIENCES
facilities, and was very gifted ; and yet he had been
.allowed to advance so slowly, that he was then only
beginning to work at Moscheles' Studies—they had
hitherto been too difficult for him to play in the
technique of the school. I can perhaps make this last
observation more intelligible. On the day before I
left Berlin he played to me, for the first time, one or
two of the Moscheles Studies at which he was then
working, and I must confess that, in the first instance,
I was far more taken up in observing his hands and
fingers, which to me looked like claws on the key-
board, than in analyzing any special quality of tone
in his playing ; for, as I have before often said, my
perception of tone was as yet very undeveloped.
After he had played several of the Moscheles
Studies to me, Mr. Clarke changed the position of his
hands, and then began to play most brilliantly and
with great force several grand concert pieces, saying
as he did so, ' I am not now playing in the Deppe
technique, but in the manner which I had before I
ever went to him.'
'But you are playing very well,' I replied; 'most
brilliantly, and with great effect.'
' But don't you observe the difference of tone ?
Don't you perceive that, although I am playing much
louder now than I did before, yet the tone I produce
has little or no timbre, no ring ?'
I remember feeling in a sort of maze as I looked at
. him and listened to him ; and yet, in just a year