Walker-My_Musical_Ex.. - Walter Cosand

6o MY MUSICAL EXPERIENCES
more material than the many hues where sky and
ocean seem to melt and blend, in a dream of tender
ecstasy, along the coast-line between Baia and
Naples. His playing of Schumann was also ' a
speciality ' ; and I remember vividly his delicious
wrist-played staccato, from the first to the last bar in
the left hand of the last variation but two of the
Etudes Symphoniqiies. And yet I only heard him
play it en robe de chambre, as it were— just to show
me how it went ; for he had little time for practice,
and had not played it in public for years before I
knew him. I also recall his playing of Schumann's
Carneval, as one of the pieces which gave him great
scope for showing his masterly range in many
directions. Besides hearing him play it at a concert
at the Sala Dante, I had the good' luck to hear him
rehearsing it in the concert sala a day or two previous
to the concert. His wife, whom I had gone to visit
that afternoon, told me that she was just then going
to fetch him home, and asked me if I would accom-
pany her. It was early in April, and there was a
breath of coming summer in the air, and as the door
opened to let us in, the rich tide of complex
harmonies, fraught with all the mystery, the passion-
ate questioning, which the magician Schumann has
poured out there, floated through the sala—all the
more weird and all the more mysterious because he
who evoked the phantoms was brimful of life and
strength, and a conscious delight in achieveniient.