I feel very much like the tutor of Prince Karl Heinrich in the pretty
play _Old Heidelberg_. After a long absence he returned to Heidelberg
where his student life had been happy--or at least had seemed so to him
in the latter, lonesome years. Behold, he found the same reckless crowd,
swaggering, carousing, flirting, dueling, debt-making, love-making, and
occasionally studying. He liked it so well that, if I mistake not, the
place killed him. I felt very much in the same position as the Doctor
Jüttner of the play when I returned to Paris last summer. The
_Conservatoire_ is still in its old, crooked, narrow street; it is still
a noisy sheol as one enters at the gate; and there is still the same old
gang of callow youths and extremely pert misses going and coming. Only
they all seem more sophisticated nowadays. They--naturally enough--know
more than their daddies, and they show it. As they brushed past,
literally elbowing me, they seemed contemptuously arrogant in their
youthful exuberance. And yet, and yet--_ego in Arcadia!_
I stood in the quadrangle and dreamed. Forty years ago--or is it
fifty?--I had stood there before; but it was in the chilly month of
November. I was young then, and I was very ambitious. The little Ohio
town whose obscurity I had hoped to transform into fame--ah! these mad
dreams of egotistical boyhood--did not resent my leaving it. It still
stands where it was--stands still. I seem to have gone on, and yet I
return to that little, dull, dilapidated town in my thoughts, for it was
there I enjoyed the purple visions of music, where I fondly believed
that I, too, might go forth into the world and make harmony. I did; but
my harmony exercises were always returned full of blue marks. Such is
life--and its lead-pencil ironies!
To be precise as well as concise, I stood in the concierge's bureau some
forty years ago and wondered if the secretary would see me. He did.
After he had tortured me as to my age, parentage, nationality,
qualifications, even personal habits, it occurred to him to ask me what
I wanted in Paris. I told him, readily enough, that I had crossed the
yeasty Atlantic in a sailing vessel--for motives of economy--that I
might study the pianoforte in Paris. I remember that I also naïvely
inquired the hours when M. François Liszt--he called him _Litz!_--gave
his lessons. The secretary was too polite to laugh at my provincial
ignorance, but he coughed violently several times. Then I was informed
that M. Liszt never gave piano-lessons any time, any-where; that he was
to be found in Weimar; but only by passed grand masters of the art of
pianoforte-playing. Still undaunted, I insisted on entering my name
amongst those who would compete at the forthcoming public examination. I
was, as I said before, very young, very inexperienced, and I was alone,
with just enough money to keep me for one year.
I lived in a fourth-story garret in a little alley--you couldn't call it
a street--just off the exterior boulevard. Whether it was the Clichy or
the Batignolles doesn't matter very much now. How I lived was another
affair--and also an object lesson for the young fellows who go abroad
nowadays equipped with money, with clothes, with everything except
humility. Judging from my weekly expenses in my native town, I supposed
that Paris could not be very much higher in its living. So I took with
me $600 in gold, which, partially an inheritance, partially saved and
borrowed, was to last me two years. How I expected to get home was one
of those things that I dared not reflect upon. Sufficient for the day
are the finger exercises thereof! I paid $8 a month--about 40
francs--for my lodgings. Heavens--what a room! It was so small that I
undressed and dressed in the hall, always dark, for the reason that my
bed, bureau, trunk, and upright piano quite crowded me out of the
apartment. I could lie in bed and by reaching out my hands touch the
keyboard of the little rattletrap of an instrument. But it was a piano,
after all, and at it I could weave my musical dreams.
I forgot to tell you that my eating and drinking did not cut important
figures in my scheme of living. I had made up my mind early in my career
that tobacco and beer were for millionaires. Coffee was the grand
consoler, and with coffee, soup, bread, I managed to get through my
work. I ate at a café frequented by cabmen, and for ten cents I was
given soup, the meat of the soup--tasteless stuff--bread, and a potato.
What more did an ambitious young man want? There were many not so well
off as I. I took two meals a day, the first, coffee and milk with a
roll. Then I starved until dark for my soup meat. I recall wintry days
when I stayed in bed to keep warm, for I never could indulge in the
luxury of fire, and with a pillow on my stomach I did my harmony
lessons. The pillow, need I add, was to suppress the latent pangs of
juvenile appetite. My one sorrow was my washing. With my means, fresh
linen was out of the question. A flannel shirt, one; socks at intervals,
and a silk handkerchief, my sole luxury, was the full extent of my
wardrobe.
When the wet rain splashed my face as I walked the boulevards on the
morning of the examination I was not cast down. I had determined to do
or die. With a hundred of my sort, both sexes and varying nationality, I
was penned up in a room, one door of which opened on the stage of the
Conservatory theater. I looked about me. Giggling girls in crumpled
white dresses stalked up and down humming their arias, while shabbily
dressed mothers gazed admiringly at them. Big boys and little, bad boys
and good, slim, fat, stupid, shrewd boys, encircled me, and, as I was
mature for my age, joked me about my senile appearance. I had a numbered
card in my hand, No. 13, and all those who saw it shuddered, for the
French are as stupid as old-time Southern "darkies." Something akin to
the expectant feeling of the early Christian martyrs was experienced by
all of us as a number was called aloud by a hoarse-voiced Cerberus, and
the victim disappeared through the narrow door leading to the lions in
the arena. At last, after some squabbling between No. 14 and No. 15,
both of whom thought they had precedence over No. 13, I went forth to
my fate.
I came out upon a dimly lighted stage which held two grand pianofortes
and several chairs. A colorless-looking individual read my card and with
marked asperity asked for my music. Frightened, I told him I had brought
none. There were murmurings and suppressed laughter in the dim
auditorium. _There_ sat the judges--I don't know how many, but one was a
woman, and I hated her though I could not see her. She had a
disagreeable laugh, and she let it loose when the assistant professor on
the platform stumbled over the syllables of my very Teutonic name. I
explained that I had memorized a Beethoven sonata, all the Beethoven
sonatas, and that was the reason I left my music at home. This
explanation was received in chilly silence, though I did not fail to
note that it prejudiced the interrogating professor against me. He
evidently took me for a superior person, and he then and there mentally
proposed to set me down several pegs. I felt, rather than saw, all this
in the twinkling of an eye. I sat down to the keyboard and launched
forth into Beethoven's first _Sonata in F minor_, a favorite of mine.
Ominous silence broken by the tapping of a nervous lead pencil in the
hand of a nervous woman. I got through the movement and then a voice
punctuated the stillness.
"Ah, Mozart is _so_ easy! Try something else!" And then I made my second
mistake. I arose and, bowing to the invisible one in the gloom, I said:
"That, was _not_ Mozart, but Beethoven." There was an explosion of
laughter, formidable, brutal. The feminine voice rose above it all in
irritating accents.
"Impertinent! And what a silly beard he has!" I sat down in despair,
plucking at my fluffy chin-whiskers and wondering if they looked as
frivolous as they felt.
Nudged from dismal reverie, I saw the colorless professor with a music
book in his hand. He placed it on the piano-desk and mumbled: "Very
indifferent. Read this at sight." Puzzled by the miserable light, the
still more wretched typography, I peered at the notes as peers a miser
at the gold he is soon to lose. No avail. My vision was blurred, my
fingers leaden. Suddenly I noticed that, whether through malicious
intent or stupid carelessness, the book was upside down. Now, I knew my
Bach fugues, if I may say it, backward. Something familiar about the
musical text told me that before me, inverted, was the _C-sharp Major
Prelude_ in the first book of the _Well-tempered Clavichord_.
Mechanically my fingers began that most delicious and light-hearted of
caprices--I did not dare to touch the music--and soon I was rattling
through it, all my thoughts three thousand miles away in a little Ohio
town. When I had finished I arose in grim silence, took the music, held
it toward the chief executioner, and said:
"And upside down!"
There was another outburst, and again that woman's voice was heard:
"What a comedian is this young Yankee!"
I left the stage without bowing, jostled the stupid doorkeeper, and fled
through the room where the other numbers huddled like sheep for the
slaughter. Seizing my hat I went out into the rain, and when the
concierge tried to stop me I shook a threatening fist at him. He stepped
back in a fine hurry, I assure you. When I came to my senses I found
myself on my bed, my head buried in the pillows. Luckily I had no
mirror, so I was spared the sight of my red, mortified face. That night
I slept as if drugged.
In the morning a huge envelope with an official seal was thrust through
a crack in my door--there were many--and in it I found a notification
that I was accepted as a pupil of the Paris _Conservatoire_. What a
dream realized! But only to be shattered, for, so I was further
informed, I had succeeded in one test and failed in another--my sight
reading was not up to the high standard demanded. No wonder! Music
reversed, and my fingers mechanically playing could be hardly called a
fair sight-reading trial. Therefore, continued this implacable document,
I would sit for a year in silence watching other pupils receiving their
instruction. I was to be an _auditeur_, a listener--and all my musical
castles came tumbling about my ears!
What I did during that weary year of waiting cannot be told in one
article; suffice it to say I sat, I heard, I suffered. If music-students
of today experience kindred trials I pity them; but somehow or other I
fancy they do not. Luxury is longed for too much; young men and young
women will not make the sacrifices for art we oldsters did; and it all
shows in the shallow, superficial, showy, empty, insincere
pianoforte-playing of the day and hour.