Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

HENSELT 213
beyond their reach—a perception and appreciation
which are more to its possessors than any degree of
personal attainment.
This first winter in Eussia I did not quite mider-
stand the Meister, and often thought him rude, when
he was really trying to help me, and doing me the
best service one human being can ever do to another,
by speaking out the truth without putting on any
gloss or varnish to make it pleasant. He expected
one to start the time of a piece in a very decided
manner, and to come in with the greatest exactness
in the middle or end of a bar before which there had
been a rest or a pause. Everything that he ever said
on these points remained indelibly impressed on my
mind, because he had been so severe in his manner
of pointing out the delinquency, that the blow to one's
ainour propre left an ineffaceable mark behind it.
"When I knew him better, I used to tell him it was
giving one a moral ' box on the ear,' when he would
say, ' That has been studied like a dilettante ;' or,
'What would the orchestra do if you came in with
such an uncertain beat ?' or again, if there was any
deviation from a fingering which had been fixed on,
' Yes, it is the same to you, I suppose, what finger
you put there.'
Besides this, he often seemed to go out of his way
just in order to come tilt against one's amour propre,
and tear one's self-esteem into shreds. He would say,
after himself recommending a piece, and knowing