Ah, if I had only studied with Deppe before I went to Weimar! When I was there I didn't play half as often to Liszt as I might have done, kind and encouraging as he always was to me, for I always felt I wasn't worthy to be his pupil! But if I had known Deppe four years ago, what might I not have been now? After I took my first lesson of Deppe this thought made me perfectly wretched. I felt so dreadfully that I cried and cried. When I woke up in the morning I began to cry again. I was so afflicted that at last my landlady, who is very kind and sympathetic, asked me what ailed me. I told her I felt so dreadfully to think I had met the person I ought to have met four years ago, at the last minute, so.—"On the contrary, you ought to rejoice that you have met him at all," said she. "Many persons go through life without ever meeting the person they wish to, or they don't know him when they do."—Sensible woman, Frau von H.!—After that I stopped fretting, and tried to believe that there is "a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we may."
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BERLIN, February 12, 1874.
I am now taking three lessons a week from Fräulein Steiniger and one lesson of Deppe himself, and he says I am almost through the technical preparation, though I still practice only with one hand, and very slowly all the time. Fräulein Steiniger says that she also practiced slowly all the time for six months, as I am now doing. In fact, she completely forgot how to play fast, and one day when Deppe finally said to her in the lesson, "Now play fast for once," she could not do it, and had to learn it all over again. Of course she very soon got her hand in again, and now she has the most beautiful execution, and can play anything perfectly.
Deppe wants me to play a Mozart concerto for two pianos with Fräulein Steiniger, the first thing I play in public. Did you know that Mozart wrote twenty concertos for the piano, and that nine of them are masterpieces? Yet nobody plays them. Why? Because they are too hard, Deppe says, and Lebert, the head of the Stuttgardt conservatory, told me the same thing at Weimar. I remember that the musical critic of the Atlantic Monthly remarked that "we should regard Mozart's passages and cadenzas as child's play now-a-days." Child's play, indeed! That critic, whoever it is, "had better go to school again," as C. always says!
Deppe is remarkable in Mozart, and has studied him more than anybody else, I fancy. Indeed, to turn over his concertos, and see how he has fingered them alone, is enough to make you dizzy. He is always saying, "You must hear Fannie Warburg play a Mozart concerto. She can do it!" and, indeed, I am most anxious to hear her.
It is ludicrous to hear Deppe talk about the artists that everybody else thinks so great. Having been a director of an orchestra for years, he has constantly directed their concerts, and he weighs them in a relentless balance! The other day he gave me Mendelssohn's Concerto in G minor, and just at the end of the first movement is a fearful break-neck passage for both hands. "There!" cried Deppe, "that's a good healthy place. Nehmen Sie DAS für Ihr tägliches Gebet (Take that for your daily prayer). When you can play it eight times in succession without missing a note, I'll be satisfied. That is one of the places that when the pianists come to, they get their foot hard on to the pedal and hold on to it—Herr Gott! how they hold on to it—and so lie themselves through." He said he never heard anyone do it right except those to whom he had taught it. Steiniger played it for me the other day and it so astonished my ears that I felt like saying, "Herr Gott!" too. It was as if some one had snatched up a handful of hail and dashed it all over me. Br-r-r-zip! how it did go!—Like a bundle of rockets touched off one after the other. And yet this concerto is one of those things that everybody thrums, and is one of the regular pieces you must have in your repertoire. Deppe was quite shocked to find I had never learned it.
My lesson usually lasts three hours! Nothing Deppe hates like being hurried over a lesson. He likes to have plenty of time to express all his ideas and tell you a good many anecdotes in between! I usually take my lessons from seven till ten in the evening. Then he puts on his coat and saunters along with me on his way to his "Kneipe," or beer-garden, for he is far too sociable to go to bed without having taken a friendly glass of beer with some one. Every block or so he will stand stock still and impress some musical point upon my mind, and will often harangue me for five or ten minutes before moving on. It seems to be impossible to him to walk and talk at the same time! In this way you may imagine it takes me a good while to get home.
On Tuesday there is to be a grand ball at the opera house which the Emperor and the whole court grace with their presence, and lead off the first Polonaise. There are two of these grand public balls every winter. The tickets are sold, and it is the sole occasion where the public can have the felicity of gazing upon royalty in close proximity. I have never been, though all my German friends have been dinning it into my ears for the last four years that I ought to go and see it, for the decorations are magnificent. This year there is to be but one, as the Emperor is not very well, and I expect it will be as much as one's life is worth to get in and get out again, such is the rush!
The German officers waltz perfectly, and with great spirit and elegance. Dancing is a part of their military training and they are obliged to learn it. But they are not very comfortable partners, for one rubs one's face against their epaulets unless they are just the right height, and you've no rest for your left hand. They take only two turns round the room and then stop a moment or two to fan you and rest—then they take two more. The consequence is, one never gets fairly going before one has to stop. At first I used to think the effect of so many people whirling round in the same direction dizzying and monotonous. But when I became accustomed to it, the continual reversing of the Americans who come to Berlin struck me as angular, in contrast to the graceful German circling. It is not "the thing" here for the girls to look flushed and disordered—skirts torn, and hair out of crimp—as our belles do at the end of an evening. They retire from the ball-room with their dresses in faultless condition, so that going to parties in Germany must cost the pater familias considerably less than with us! The floor is never so crowded with dancers at one time, and as they are going in the same direction, they don't run into each other as our couples do. On the other hand, they don't have such a "good time" out of it as do our girls, with their long five and ten minute turns to those delicious waltzes! Strange, that though Germany is the native home of the waltz, and the Vienna waltzes surpass all others, the Schottisch or Rhinelaender should be their favourite dance. They dance it very gracefully and rythmically.