Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

256 MY MUSICAL EXPERIENCES
Ijlaced twelve hours every week of his own time at
Eubinstein's disposal until the difi&culty should have
been tided over, and the recusant professors should
have been replaced. I feared not only that the
Meister was overtaxing his physical powers, but I
saw (as I invariably do) ' rocks ahead,' and I ventured
to entreat of him to think well before giving away so
many hours of a life so valuable to art, and so dear
to us his followers (I may say disciples) ; and this,
too, in a direction which was wholly contrary to his
lifelong bias. He promised me that he would think
it over, and then (it was indeed a day of days) he sat
down to the piano, and played his own Aurora Valse,
and a considerable part of his Concerto. Taking up
Beethoven's E Flat Concerto, he allowed me to play
it all through to him, glancing en passant at the
printed fingering (Eheinecke's edition), and showing
me why, and wherein, he differed from it. He im-
pressed me during this lesson as he had never before
done in the same degree with the conviction that, as
regards ideal purity of tone and faultless beauty of
expression, he stood— perhaps wUl ever stand— quite
alone. In his presence all false pretences vanished,
and every shred of vanity and self-conceit fell away,
leaving behind thena devotion to the pursuit of an
unattainable ideal, and grateful reverence for the
man who, ever reaching and aspiring upwards and
onwards from height to height, compelling, by the
force of his strenuous will, vista after vista to open