SOME MORE MUSICIANS
Professor Granville Bantock—Frederick Delius—Joseph
Holbrooke—Dr Walford Davies—Dr Vaughan Williams—Dr W. G.
M‘Naught—Julius Harrison—Rutland Boughton—John Coates—Cyril Scott
At the present moment there are only two names that are of
vital importance in British creative music—Sir Edward Elgar and
Granville Bantock. No two men could be in more violent contrast:
Elgar, conservative, soured with the aristocratic point of view,
super-refined, deeply religious; Bantock, democratic, Rabelaisian,
free-thinking, gorgeously human.
Of the two, Bantock is the more original, the deeper thinker, the more
broadly sympathetic.
It must be about ten years ago that, staying a week-end with Ernest
Newman, I was taken by my host one evening to Bantock’s house in
Moseley. I remember Bantock’s bulky form rising from the table at
which he was scoring the first part of his setting of _Omar Khayyám_,
and I recollect that, as soon as we had shaken hands, he took from
his pocket an enormous cigar-case of many compartments that shut in
upon themselves concertina-fashion. From another pocket he produced a
huge match-box containing matches almost as large as the chips of wood
commonly used for lighting fires. Having carefully selected a cigar for
me, he struck a match that, spluttering like a firework, calmed down
into a huge blaze. He gazed upon me very solemnly and rather critically
all the time I was lighting up, but his face relaxed into a smile
when, having plunged my cigar into the middle of the flame, I left it
there for many seconds and did not withdraw it until the cigar itself
had momentarily flamed and until it glowed like a miniature furnace.
I was destined to smoke very many of Bantock’s cigars, and I hope that
when the war is over I shall smoke many more; but I never lit a cigar
he handed me without noticing that he invariably observed me very
closely and a trifle anxiously, as though afraid I should fail in some
detail of the holy rite. I do not think I ever did fail, for he never
met me without offering me a cheroot, which he certainly would never
have done if I had omitted any necessary observance of the lighting
ceremonial.
That first evening we talked a good deal—at least, Newman and a few
other friends did; but Bantock, never a very loquacious man, committed
himself to nothing save a few generalities. By no means a cautious
man in his mode of life, he is nevertheless cautious in his choice of
friends, and no man can freeze more quickly than he when uncongenial
company is thrust upon him. There were several strangers in our little
circle, and Bantock was content for the most part to sit back in his
easy-chair and listen.
The following night we met again at the Midland Institute, Birmingham,
where Ernest Newman was giving one of his witty and brilliant lectures.
Bantock insisted upon my sitting on the platform, though for what
reason I do not know, unless it was to satisfy his impish instinct for
putting shy and self-conscious people into prominent positions. At
that time he and Newman were the closest of friends, and as Newman and
I were on very friendly terms, Bantock was disposed to regard me very
favourably; at all events, before we parted that evening, he showed me
clearly enough that he did not actually dislike me, for he invited me
to visit him for a week-end whenever I saw my way clear to do so. From
that time onward I met him frequently in his own house, in Manchester,
London, Wrexham, Gloucester, Liverpool, Birmingham and elsewhere.
Soon it became a regular practice of mine to run over from Manchester
to Liverpool every alternate Saturday to attend the afternoon rehearsal
and the evening concert of the Philharmonic Society, the orchestra of
which Bantock conducted. These were very pleasant meetings, for a party
of us used to stay at the London and North Western Hotel and we would
sit until the small hours of Sunday morning talking music, returning to
our respective homes on Sunday afternoon. At these times Bantock was at
his best, and Bantock’s best makes the finest company in the world. In
his presence one always feels warm and deeply comfortable, and yet very
much alive; he made a glow; he reconciled one to oneself. I would not
call him a brilliant, or even a good, talker, but I can with truth call
him a very wise one; and in argument he is unassailable.
* * * * *
Though I used frequently to go to Liverpool to hear Bantock conduct, I
did not do so because I regarded him as a great artist with the baton.
Of his ability in this direction, there is no doubt; but that he is an
interpretative genius no qualified critic would assert. No: it was the
personality of the man himself, and the new, modern works he used to
include in his programmes that drew me to Liverpool. Bantock, at that
period, was almost passionately modern. I remember with amusement how
pettish he used sometimes to pretend to be when, perhaps in deference
to public opinion (but perhaps he was overruled by a Committee?), he
felt compelled to include a Beethoven symphony in one of his concerts.
On one occasion I met him at Lime Street Station, Liverpool, when he
emerged from the train carrying a bundle of loose scores under his arm.
“Let me carry your books for you,” said I.
He selected the least bulky and lightest of the scores he was carrying,
and handed it to me.
“You are always a good chap, Cumberland,” he remarked. “Do take
this; it’s the heaviest of the lot: Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. So
very heavy.” He sighed. “And so dry that merely to carry it makes me
thirsty. How many times have you heard it?”
But he was poking a cigar into my mouth, and I could not answer until
it was well alight.
“At least fifty or sixty. Oh, more than that! Eight times, say, every
year for the last fifteen years—one hundred and twenty.”
“Yes, always a good chap, and so very patient,” he murmured to himself.
“Do you know, Cumberland, I had to work—yes, to _work_—at that Symphony
in the train. And I define work as doing something that gives you no
pleasure. Talking about work, I must post these before I forget.”
He took from his pocket a number of post cards all addressed to Ernest
Newman. These post cards appeared to amuse him immensely, and he handed
them to me with a smile. There were about a dozen of them, and each
bore an anagram of the word “work”—KROW, WROK, ROWK, RWKO, etc.
“He’ll receive these by the first post in the morning,” Bantock
explained, “and if they don’t succeed in making him jump out of bed
and finish his analysis of my _Omar Khayyám_ for Breitkopf and Härtel,
nothing will.”
Point was added to the jest by the fact that Newman has always been a
particularly hard, and generally very heavily pressed worker.
* * * * *
In his early manhood Bantock travelled a good deal in the East, not
so much by choice, but because circumstances drove him thither. Yet I
often feel that the East is his natural home. Whether or not he has
any close acquaintance with Eastern languages, I do not know, but he
certainly likes his friends to think he has, and many of the letters
he has sent me contain quotations and odd words written in what I take
to be Persian and Chinese characters. I should not, however, be in the
least surprised to learn that these are “faked,” for Bantock loves
nothing so much as gently pulling the legs of his friends.
He has not, however, the foresight of Eastern people. His enthusiasms
drive him into extremes and into monetary extravagances. When he lived
at Broadmeadow, with its extensive wooded grounds, outside Birmingham,
he had a mania for bulbs, and I remember his showing me a stable the
floor of which was covered with crocus, daffodil, jonquil and narcissus
bulbs.
“But,” protested I, “these ought to have been planted months ago.”
“I know, I know,” he said sadly. “But the gardener is so busy. Still,
there they are.”
His philosophic outlook has been largely directed by Eastern
philosophy. He admires cunning and takes a beautiful and childlike
delight in believing that he possesses that quality in abundance. But
in reality, he cannot deceive. Even his card tricks are amateurish, and
his chess-playing is only just good.
Apropos of his chess-playing, I remember that some years ago a chess
enthusiast—a bore of the vilest description—used to visit him regularly
and stay to a very late hour for the purpose of playing a game. These
visits soon became intolerable, and, one evening, as Bantock, irritated
and petulant, sat opposite his opponent, he resolved to put an end to
the nuisance.
“Excuse me a moment,” said he; “I have left my cigar-box upstairs, and
I really can’t do without a smoke.”
He left the room, and went straight to bed and to sleep. Next time he
met his visitor, they merely bowed.
Bantock used to relate this story with the greatest glee, and in the
course of time the yarn grew to colossal dimensions. It became epical.
One was told how his visitor was heard calling: “Bantock! Bantock! I’ve
taken your Queen,” how strange noises proceeded from dark rooms, and
how, next morning, his visitor, having sat up all night, was found wide
awake trying the effect of certain combinations of moves on the board.
When a thing is said three times, it is, of course, true, but Bantock
never told exactly the same story three times. He believes, I think,
that consistency is the refuge and the consolation of the dull-witted.
* * * * *
Frederick Delius, a Yorkshireman, has chosen to live most of his
artistic life abroad, and for this reason is not familiarly known to
his countrymen, though he is a great personage in European music. A
pale man, ascetic, monkish; a man with a waspish wit; a man who allows
his wit to run away with him so far that he is tempted to express
opinions he does not really hold.
I met him for a short hour in Liverpool, where, over food and
drink snatched between a rehearsal and a concert, he showed a keen
intellect and a fine strain of malice. Like most men of genius, he is
curiously self-centred, and I gathered from his remarks that he is not
particularly interested in any music except his own. He is (or was)
greatly esteemed in Germany, and if in his own country he has not a
large following, he alone is to blame.
He is a man who pursues a path of his own, indifferent to criticism,
and perhaps indifferent to indifference. Decidedly a man of most
distinguished intellect and a quick, eager but not responsive
personality, but not a musician who marks an epoch as does Richard
Strauss, and not a man who has formed a school, as Debussy has done.
* * * * *
Joseph Holbrooke, for sheer cleverness, for capacity for hard work,
and for intellectual energy, has no equal among our composers. It was
Newman who first spoke to me about him, and it was Newman who made me
curious to meet this extraordinary genius.
Holbrooke’s weakness—but I do not consider it a weakness—is his
pugnacity. He has fought the critics times without number and, in many
cases, with excellent results for British music, though Holbrooke must
know much better than I do that in fighting for his colleagues he has
incidentally injured himself. A chastised critic is the last person in
the world likely to write a fair and unbiassed article on a new work
produced by the hand that chastised him. But not only the critics have
felt the lash of Holbrooke’s scorn: conductors, musical institutions,
some very prosperous so-called composers, committees, publishers and,
indeed, almost every kind of man who has power in the musical world,
have felt his sting.
But if he is clever and witty in his writing, he is much cleverer and
wittier in his talk. I do not suppose I shall ever forget one Sunday I
spent with him, for by midday he had reduced my mind to chaos and my
body to limpness by his consuming energy. When he was not playing, he
was talking, and he did both as though the day were the last he was
going to spend on earth, so eager and convulsive was his speech, so
vehement his playing.
Perhaps his most remarkable quality is his power of concentration. I
remember his telling me that when he was yachting with Lord Howard
de Walden in the Mediterranean, he was engaged on the composition of
_Dylan_, an opera containing some of the most gorgeous and weirdly
uncanny music that has been written in our generation. At this opera
he worked, not in hours of inspiration (for, like Arnold Bennett, he
does not believe in inspiration), but when he had nothing more exciting
or more necessary to do. For example, he would begin work in the
morning, cheerfully and without regret lay down his pen at lunch-time,
return to his music immediately lunch was finished, and unhesitatingly
recommence writing at the point at which he had left off. Interruptions
that arouse the anger of the ordinary creative artist do not disturb
him in the least. He can work just as composedly and as fluently when a
heated argument is being conducted in the room as he can in a room that
is absolutely quiet. Music, indeed, flows from him, and if moods come
to him which render his brain numb and his soul barren, I doubt if they
last more than a day or two.
Of the truly vast quantity of music he has written, I, to my regret,
know only a portion, and that belongs chiefly to his very early
period, when he was under the influence of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is his
spiritual affinity, and Holbrooke’s setting of _Annabel Lee_—a work
which I can play backwards from memory—is more beautiful and haunting
than the beautiful and haunting poem itself.
I have called Holbrooke pugnacious and, some years ago, much to his
amusement and, I think, gratification, I called him the stormy petrel
of music. But what makes him stormy? What are the defects in our
musical life that he so persistently attacks? First of all, he hates
incompetence, especially official incompetence, and the incompetence
that makes vast sums of money. He hates commercialism in art, and by
that phrase I mean the various enterprises that exploit art for the
sole purpose of making money. He hates publishers who issue trash;
he hates critics who write rubbish. He hates the obscurity in which
so many of his gifted colleagues live, and he hates the love of the
British public for foreign music inferior to that which is being
written at home. And I believe he hates the system that presents
editors of newspapers with free concert tickets for the use of their
critics.
But, in dwelling at such length on Holbrooke’s combativeness, I feel
I am giving a rather one-sided view of his true character. For he is
not all hate. Indeed, it is true to state that no composer has written
more in appreciation of men who may be considered his rivals. He is
anxious and quick to study the work of men of the younger generation,
and whenever any of that work appeals to him he either performs it in
public or writes to the papers about it.
I have heard him called perverse, unreliable, injudicious, and many
other disagreeable things. He may be. But Holbrooke is not an angel. He
is simply a composer of genius working under conditions that tend to
thwart and paralyse genius.
* * * * *
Dr Walford Davies!... Well, what can I say about Dr Walford Davies
except that he represents all the things in which I have no deep
faith?—asceticism, fine-fingeredism, religiosity, “mutual improvement,”
narrowness of intellect, physical coldness. I love some of his
songs—simple things of exquisite tenderness, but it would be futile to
regard him as anything more than a cultured gentleman with considerable
musical gifts.
On two or three occasions I have been thrown into his company, but I
have never been able to decide whether he is ignorant of my existence
or whether he dislikes me so intensely that he cannot bring himself to
recognise my existence.
He is terribly in earnest—in earnest about Brahms and perhaps about
Frau Schumann also. He wrinkles his forehead about Brahms and poises
a white hand in the air.... Please do not imagine that I do not love
Brahms: I adore him. But Brahms was not God. He was not even a god.
Whereas Wagner.... It was in 1911, I think, that I heard Dr Walford
Davies preaching about Brahms. Now, if you preach about Brahms, you are
eternally lost, for you exclude both Wagner and Hugo Wolf.
How exasperating it must be to possess a temperament that can accept
only part of what is admirable! It seems to me that Walford Davies
distrusts his intellect: in estimating the worth of music, he seems to
say, intellectual standards, artistic standards, are of no value. To
him the only sure test is temperamental affinity. And he wishes all
temperaments to conform to his own limitations.
I have seen Dr Davies near Temple Gardens with choir-boys hanging on
his arm, with choir-boys prancing before him and following faithfully
behind him. A shepherd with his sheep! I am sure he exerts upon them
what is known as a “good influence.” But in matters of art how bad that
good influence may be! Did ever a worshipper of Wagner walk the rooms
of the Y.M.C.A.?
* * * * *
I have a very bad memory for the names of public-houses and hotels
(though I love these places dearly), and I regret that I am unable to
recall the name of that very attractive hotel in Birmingham where,
early one evening, Dr Vaughan Williams, travel-stained and brown with
the sun, walked into the lounge and began a conversation with me. He
had walked an incredible distance, and though, physically, he was
very tired, his mind was most alert, and we fell to talking about
music. He told me that he had studied with Ravel, and when he told me
this I reviewed in my mind in rapid succession all Vaughan Williams’
compositions I could remember, trying to detect in any of them traces
of Ravel’s influence. But I was unsuccessful. To me he, with his
essential British downrightness, his love of space, his freedom from
all mannerisms and tricks of style, seemed Ravel’s very antithesis.
Like myself, he had come to Birmingham to listen to music, and the
following evening, after we had heard a long choral work of Bantock’s,
we had what might have developed into a very hot argument. With him was
Dr Cyril Rootham, a very charming and cultivated musician, and both
these composers were amazed and amused when, having asked my opinion of
Bantock’s work, I became dithyrambic in its praise.
“But I thought you were modern?” asked Williams.
“I am anything you please,” said I; “when I hear Richard Strauss I am
modern, and when I listen to Bach I am prehistoric. But why do you ask?”
“Moody and Sankey,” murmured Rootham.
Williams laughed.
“Good! damned good!” he exclaimed, turning to his companion. “You’ve
got it. Hasn’t he, Cumberland?”
“Got what?”
“It. Him. Bantock, I mean. Now, don’t you think—concede us this one
little point—don’t you think that this thirty-two-part choral work of
Bantock’s is just Moody and Sankey over again? Glorified, of course:
gilt-edged, tooled, diamond-studded, bound in lizard-skin, if you like:
but still Moody and still Sankey.”
I clutched the sleeve of a passing waiter and ordered a double whisky.
“One can only drink,” said I. “And when people disagree so
fundamentally as we do, whisky is the only tipple that makes one
forget.”
But, either late that night or late the following night, we found music
in which we could both take keen pleasure. Herbert Hughes played us
some of his songs, and I remember Samuel Langford, breathing rather
heavily behind me, becoming more and more enthusiastic as the night
wore on. Williams, to whom also the songs were new, took a vivid
interest in them.
“I like your Herbert Hughes,” said Langford.
“_My_ Herbert Hughes?”
“Well, you do rather monopolise him. And I don’t wonder. He’s what one
calls the ... the ...”
“The goods?”
Langford laughed in his beard and his eyes disappeared.
The last glimpse I had of Vaughan Williams was two or three years
later, outside Hughes’ studio in Chelsea. We stood for a minute in the
darkened street.
“Going to see Hughes?” I asked.
But he was busy with preparations for enlisting, and a few weeks later
he, Hughes and myself and nearly all our Chelsea circle were swept into
the army.
In June or July, 1917, I missed Vaughan Williams at Summerhill, near
Salonica, by a day. But perhaps when the war is finished...?
* * * * *
Dr W. G. McNaught, though a musician of the older school, is one of the
youngest, most up-to-date and most powerful of our musical scholars. By
one means or another, the influence of his personality is felt in every
town and village in the British Isles. He is the editor of the best
of our musical papers, a faultless and ubiquitous adjudicator at our
great musical festivals, a witty and most reliable writer, a profound
scholar, and a man of such natural geniality and spontaneity that he is
liked by everyone. As a rule, I detest men who are liked on all hands,
but I could never detest Dr McNaught even if he were to detest me and
tell me so.
I do not remember when I first met him, and I do not think I have any
special anecdotes to relate about him. But, in thinking of him now, and
reviewing our friendly acquaintanceship of eight or ten years, I recall
that I have never been able to persuade him to take me seriously.
He has printed all the articles I have sent him, but he has always
laughed indulgently at both them and me. I cannot help wondering why.
Perhaps his exasperatingly clever son has betrayed the secrets I
have entrusted to him: the facts that my piano-playing is amateurish,
my scholarship nil, and my ear fatally defective. And I think I once
showed McNaught, jun., some of my compositions. One should never show
(but of course I mean “show off”) one’s compositions when one cannot
compose.
* * * * *
Unless you are something of a musician yourself, you will probably
never have heard the name of Julius Harrison, for though he has fame
of a kind, and of the best kind, he is scarcely known to the man in
the street. Just as Rossetti is primarily a poet for poets, so is
Julius Harrison a musician for musicians. Only one word describes
him: distinguished. Very distinguished he is, with the refinement
and sensitiveness of a poet, the intuition of a novelist, and the
waywardness of all men who allow themselves to be governed by impulse.
When I first met him he was little more than a brilliant boy full of
rich promise. He lived at Stourport, where I used to go occasionally
and pass a few days with him on the river. I knew of nothing against
him save that he was an organist, and I feared that he might be tempted
to remain an organist and build up a teaching “practice,” just as a
doctor builds up a practice. But I was mistaken. He ventured on London,
suffered obscurity for a year or two, worked like a fiery little devil,
and at length threw up the hack-work that kept him alive. Then he
emerged, very engaging and very likeable, into the real musical world
of London. Sir Thomas Beecham gave him _Tristan und Isolde_ and other
operas to conduct, the London Philharmonic Society invited him to
interpret to it one of his own works, and concerts devoted entirely to
his compositions were given in several provincial towns. In five years
he will be recognised as the greatest conductor England has yet given
us; in ten years he will have a European reputation as a composer.
What is he like? He is mercurial, passionate, loyal, snobbish,
charming, outspoken, very open to his friends.
“I _am_ snobbish, Gerald; we have agreed about that, so you won’t
quarrel with me, will you?” he has asked several times.
“Apropos?” I have answered.
“Well, I really can’t stick your pal, So-and-so. An out-and-out
bounder.”
“Yes, Julius. But he bounds so beautifully. Besides, he has real
talent.”
“But you’ll never ask me to meet him, will you?”
“When I’m rich, Julius, I shall have two flats—one where you and
your friends can come, and another where my bounderish friends may
foregather. But I’m afraid I shall be oftener at the flat you visit
than at the other. You _are_ a beast—what makes you so snobbish? And
why do you continue to like me, who am not ‘quite’ a gentleman in your
eyes?”
“Oh, but you are, Gerald. Well, perhaps you’re not. Only in your case
it doesn’t seem to matter. You are so full of affectations—jolly little
affectations, I admit, but still....”
I don’t think anything will break our friendship, for Julius is good
and generous enough to allow me to say the rudest things in the world
to him. He only laughs. For my part, I can forgive him anything, for
he admires my poems. And I suppose he will always forgive me much for
I admire without stint his genius as a conductor and his genius as a
composer. I think that at heart he will always remain a boy, a boy full
of passionate dignity, of untarnished ideals, of frequent impulses.
* * * * *
Of all unhappy artists the most unhappy are those who are impelled
by temperament to mingle social propaganda with their artistic work.
Rutland Boughton has the soul of the artist-preacher. He has persuaded
me to many things: he almost persuaded me to “try” vegetarianism, and
I remember one morning very well when, sitting on the end of my bed,
he pointed a finger at me and enumerated all the evils that infallibly
follow on the immoderate drinking of whisky.
I regret this tendency in him: it does not strengthen his art, and it
exhausts a good deal of his energy and time. A practical mystic, a
man of intense and sometimes difficult moods, a man so honest himself
that he is incapable of suspecting dishonesty in others, a man who is
always poor, for he loves his art better than riches: he is all these
things. Now, a man who endures poverty as cheerfully as he may, who
is continually bashing his head against the brick-wall indifference
of others, and who at the same time is extraordinarily sensitive, may
seek happiness, but, if he does, it will always elude him. Boughton,
of course, would deny this. I can hear him saying: “But of course I’m
happy!” At times, Rutland, you are happy. You are happy when you are
immersed in a new composition, when you are playing Beethoven (do you
remember that evening when, on a poorish piano, you played so bravely
a couple of sonatas for Edward Carpenter and me?), when you are
lecturing, when you have made a convert. But when you believe, as you
do, that the world is awry, has always been awry, and shows every sign
of continuing indefinitely to be awry, how can you, with your ardour
for rightness, for justice, for goodness, be happy?
For years Boughton has done very special Festival work at Glastonbury
where, when the war has spent itself, I hope to go for a week’s music,
for at Glastonbury strange things are being done—things that are
destined, perhaps, to divert in some measure the stream of our native
music.
In the early days of August, 1914, Boughton burst into my flat. I was
still in civilian clothes and was reading Ernest Dowson to discover
how he stood the war atmosphere: I thought he stood it very well.
“What, Gerald!” Boughton exclaimed; “not enlisted yet?”
“My _dear_ chap,” I protested, “I am old and married and have a family.
Besides, I don’t like killing people: I’ve tried it. And I strongly
object to being killed.”
“Oh, you can help without killing people. There’s the A.S.C., for
example.”
“A.S.C.? What’s that?”
“I’m going to enlist as a cook. Come along with me.”
But I told him that I was reading Dowson, that I was presently going
to read a volume of Æ, and after that I had the fullest intention of
strangling Debussy on the piano.
So he went away to enlist as a cook. I heard, however, that when he
was told that, in addition to his duties as an army cook, he might be
called upon to slaughter animals, he came away sad and dejected, and, I
think, turned his mind to other things.
Where he is now, I do not know. The war has blotted most of us out,
and few men know whether their best friends are at the other end of
the world or fighting in the trenches in the very next sector on their
right or left.
* * * * *
I have said somewhere that singers do not interest me. Nor do they. But
John Coates is something more than a singer—superb artist, generous
friend, unflagging enthusiast, maker of reputations. He is at once a
grown-up boy full of high spirits and a profound mystic. There are
many men who have seen him on the stage in some light opera who have
never guessed that his buoyant spirits are the outcome of a soul that
is content with its own destiny. To me, his interpretation of Elgar’s
_Gerontius_ is one of the great things of modern times—as great as
Ackté’s _Salome_, as great as Kreisler’s violin-playing, as wonderful
as the genius of Augustus John. “Honest John Coates!” is his title: I
have heard him so described many times in London and the provinces.
A man you can trust with anything: a very fine and noble gentleman,
humble yet proud.
His reverence for Elgar is extraordinary. I have been told that, on one
occasion, after being in the company of the distinguished composer for
an hour or so, he joined a few friends who were sitting in another room.
“I have just been talking to the greatest man living,” said he, with
deep impressiveness and in the manner of one who has been in the
presence of someone holy.
I love such hero-worship. The man who can feel as Coates does about
Elgar is himself noble and not far removed from greatness.
* * * * *
Cyril Scott possesses a mind of such exquisite refinement that it can
react only to the most delicate of appeals. He is perhaps a little
exotic, like his swaying and deliciously scented _Lotus Flower_. Many
years ago I was introduced to his music, and in pre-war days I very
rarely let a week go by without playing something of his. On only one
occasion was I thrown into his company, and even then I was not aware
of the identity of the somewhat excited and, to me, extraordinarily
interesting man who sat restlessly in his chair and spoke a little
vehemently. He struck me as a man easily carried away by his ideals,
carried away into a world where logic is useless and facts are worse
than dust.