Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

S/J? STERNDALE BENNETT
to study, unless I asked him to do so. The lovely
Hondo Place role, his Studies, Preludes, and Lessons,
the fine F Minor Concerto, with the harcarnUe —
all recall to me happy hours when I believed
that I should attain all I aspired to ! Sterndale
Bennett told us that, from the beginning of his own
career as a professor, he had set his face against
teaching any but classical music ; and he was so
severely classical that he could not bring himself
to accept many modern composers, without whom we
should feel ourselves at the present moment in a
sense orphaned. Schumann had been his personal
friend, but with Schumann's compositions he had no
sympathy; and though he did not say 'no,' when I
asked him to give me a piece of Chopin's to study,
yet I felt that he had no such love for Chopin as he
had for Handel, Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Hummel,
Weber, and even Moscheles. The result was, that
when with him I gradually lost all wish either to play
Chopin myself or to hear him played by others.
It may easily be imagined that he could not admire
Kubinstein either as an artist or composer; and,
curiously enough, I, who was at that time a disciple
even to fanaticism of the classical school, was always
carried away and transported with delight whenever
I heard Eubinstein. Never did I miss any possible
chance of going to a concert at which he was to
appear ; and all the while I believed that I was
wrong, for when I told Sterndale Bennett how I was