Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

S/Ji STERNDALE BENNETT
said in a decided tone, ' This is not what I told you
to play ; please let us have it.' The piece he had
given me was luckily at hand ; I had studied it, and
it went rather well. But the characteristic point of
the whole was, that he then said, in a tone and
"' manner that was commanding, Now play the other.'
I understood as clearly as if he had said it in so many
words that he meant, ' Since you placed it there to
play to me, I expect it will have been studied as
thoroughly and carefully as everything you bring to
me always is ;' and I was conscious that he would
have looked on the fact of its being otherwise as
an act of disrespect—a departure from the attitude
which a pupil owed to one who felt himself to be in
a very special sense ' a master.'
But my veneration for him was profound, and I
had never dreamed of playing a trick in a vulgar
sense. I played the piece from beginning to end
quite correctly; and I can just recall, as if it were
yesterday, how stiff he looked when I began, and
how, as the piece went on, he relaxed ; and though
he said nothing when I had finished, except to show
me where to improve some passages, yet there was a
look of amusement in his face.
Speaking once to me of the amount of practice
an artist must give to a piece before he plays it in
public, he related of himself that once he had
practised a piece of his own composition, which he
was to play at a' concert in Leipzig, with such steady