I looked up and answered, "You surely don't think I'm doing it for pleasure, do you?"
"It only bores you because you do it badly." He went on quietly, "If you took a little more trouble about it, it would bore you less."
The simple, sensible words, and the gentle and persuasive kindness which marked their quiet utterance, made such an impression on me, that I do not think I ever offended again by negligence or inattention to my work. They brought me a sudden revelation, as complete as it was precise, of what diligence and attention really mean. I returned to my imposition, and finished it in a very different frame of mind. The irksomeness of the task was lost in the satisfaction and benefit of the good advice I had been given.
Meanwhile my musical studies bore good fruit, and daily grew more and more absorbing.
My mother seized the opportunity of a vacation of some days' duration, the New Year's holidays, to give me what was at once a great pleasure and an exceedingly precious lesson.
Mozart's "Don Giovanni" was being played at the Théâtre Italien, and thither she took me herself. The exquisite evening I spent with her, in that small box on the fourth tier, remains one of my most precious and delicious memories. I am not certain of being right, but I think it was by Reicha's advice that my mother took me to hear "Don Giovanni."
When I look back on the emotion that masterpiece roused within me, I feel inclined to doubt whether my pen is capable of describing it, not indeed faithfully—that were impossible—but even so as to give some faint conception of what I felt during those matchless hours, whose charm still lingers with me, as in some luminous vision, some revelation of hidden glory.
The first notes of the Overture, with the solemn and majestic chords out of the Commendatore's final scene, seemed to lift me into a new world. I was chilled by a sensation of actual terror; but when I heard that terrible threatening roll of ascending and descending scales, stern and implacable as a death-warrant, I was seized with such shuddering fear, that my head fell upon my mother's shoulder, and, trembling in the dual embrace of beauty and of horror, I could only murmur—
"Oh, mother, what music! that is real music indeed!"
Rossini's "Otello" had awakened the germs of my musical instinct; but the effect "Don Giovanni" had on me was very different in its nature and results. I think the two impressions might be said to differ in the same way as those produced on the mind of a painter called from the study of the Venetian masters to the contemplation of the works of Raphael, of Leonardo da Vinci, or of Michael Angelo.