Life on the Stage: My Personal Experiences and Recollections

by Clara Morris

Had it not been for the generosity of the leader of the orchestra (Mr. Navoni) I could not have enjoyed the luxury of even a few music lessons, but he saw my willingness to learn—to practise when possible, and loving music rapturously himself, he took a generous delight in helping others to the knowledge he had such a store of. Therefore, for a ridiculously small price, just enough, he said, to properly mark our relations as master and pupil, he introduced me to my notes and lines and ledger-lines, too (confound them!), and accidentals and sharps (which I hated) and flats (which I liked), and I developed a great affection for c, because I could always find it, while I hate a to this hour because of the trouble it gave me so long ago.

One thing I am sure of, had anyone awakened me suddenly from a deep sleep at that time I would instantly have exclaimed: "One and two and three and." Mr. Navoni and his wife had the room directly over ours; of course I knew every loud sound we made must penetrate to his room, and as I could conceive of nothing more maddening than to have to listen to a beginner's one, two, three—one, two, three, I tried to practise when he was out, which was difficult, as our hours were the same. Then one day, knowing he was composing a march for a special occasion, I closed the piano and determined I would not disturb him with any noise of mine.

Upstairs, then, Mr. Navoni sat, rumpled as to hair, fiery as to eye, with violin on table and pen in hand. He hummed a little, tried one or two bars on the violin, then savagely threw a few notes of ink on to his ruled paper. Then he hummed a little, and seemed to listen, jotted down a note or two, listened attentively, and then burst out: "Do you hear a sound of practice from Miss Morris's room?"

"No, dear," gently replied Mrs. Navoni, "she doesn't want to disturb you at your work, she——"

But a burst of wrath stopped her. Mr. Navoni was clattering down-stairs and pounding on our door: "What does this mean? Get you to that devilish bad piano and do your scales—scales, mind you—let the exercises wait till the last! Interrupt me? Love I not music! nothing is sweeter to me than the 'one, two, three' of the beginner—if the beginner is not a fool—if the beginner counts the 'one, two, three' correctly! Damn! yes, I say damn! look at the time lost! afraid to disturb me? How the devil am I to compose that march they want with this room still as the dead? Now I go back, and if you don't do those scales, all smooth and even, and the exercises rightly timed, you—well, you know what you'll get! I can hear, even if I am composing. So you get to work, quick now! before I get back to my table!"

And he tore off again, while, with clammy fingers, I sat down to the wretched old piano, that was showing its teeth at me in a senile grin, and feebly and uncertainly began to wobble up and down the keyboard.

Mrs. Navoni afterward told me that when her husband returned to his work he hummed to himself a few moments, jotted down a few notes, listened to the sound of the rattling old piano, and, smiling and nodding, remarked: "Now I can do something—one, two, three—one, two, three—that's right. I couldn't compose a bar with her wasting a precious hour down there. She keeps good time, eh, doesn't she? Now I'll give the boys something that will move their feet for them!" and he returned to the march.

The thing which I was to get if I failed to practise correctly was so unusual that I feel I must explain it. Mr. Navoni wore an artificial foot and leg of the cumbrous type then offered to the afflicted, and in the privacy of his own room he used to remove the burdensome thing and lay it on a chair by the couch on which he rested or read or wrote, and when I, down-stairs, made a first mistake in my practice, he growled and kicked viciously with his "for-true" leg, while a second blunder would make him seize his store-leg and pound the floor. Then when I began again he would whack the correct time with it with such emphasis that bits of my ceiling would come rattling down about me and the gas-fixture threatened not to remain a fixture.

Another trick of his was to bring down his violin with him. How my heart sank when I saw it, and, my lesson over, he requested me to play such or such an exercise: "And keep to your own business, and leave my business to me, if you please, Miss. Now!"

I was then expected to go over and over that exercise and keep perfect time, while he stood behind me and improvised on the violin, growing more and more distracting every moment, and if that led my attention away from my one, two, three, what a crack I got across the top of my ear from his fiddle-bow, and a sharp order to: "Go back—go back! one, two, three; one, two, three! Cry by and by, but now play! One, two, three!"