Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

230 My MUSICAL EXPERIENCES
present at the concert). I fear I shall be thought
very bold when I confess that I went on to say, ' If I
don't know the difference between good and bad play-
ing, especially in the performance of a piece which I
have just been studying with you, dear Meister, the
obvious conclusion at which any person with sense
can arrive is, that I am a fool. But I do know the
difference,' I said, ' and for this reason I am your
disciple ; and I fear not to say that the man who had
the impertinence to criticise that beautiful reading of
the Chopin Study was not worthy to hear it, and I
still further venture to assert that it was envy that
made him say it. You are our king, dear Meister,' I
finally said ;
' but surely you would not care to reign
over slaves, but over those who have some faculty of
thinking and judging for themselves.'
He listened to all this and never interrupted me ;
indeed, I believe he at least ' half ' felt that I was in
the right, but, of course, he would not say so. I had,
he said, pushed his words to the most extreme con-
clusion possible—I had taken them in a much more
personal sense than he had intended ; I was very
touchy. Then he turned the subject, and said quite
pleasantly that he was coming the next day to give
me a lesson. Everything seemed to have been
smoothed over, and I greatly enjoyed his masterly
suggestions and drill in Beethoven's C Minor Con-
certo, and many of Chopin's Studies ; I quite believed
that he would never again refer to what he had been