Falbe stopped him at the end of the first two lines.
“This won’t do, Michael,” he said. “You played it before for me to see whether you could play. You can. But it won’t do to sketch it. Every note has got to be there; Chopin didn’t write them by accident. He knew quite well what he was about. Begin again, please.”
This time Michael got not quite so far, when he was stopped again. He was playing without notes, and Falbe got up from his chair where he had the book open, and put it on the piano.
“Do you find difficulty in memorising?” he asked.
This was discouraging; Michael believed that he remembered easily; he also believed that he had long known this by heart.
“No; I thought I knew it,” he said.
“Try again.”
This time Falbe stood by him, and suddenly put his finger down into the middle of Michael’s hands, striking a note.
“You left out that F sharp,” he said. “Go on. . . . Now you are leaving out that E natural. Try to get it better by Thursday, and remember this, that playing, and all that differentiates playing from strumming, only begins when you can play all the notes that are put down for you to play without fail. You’re beginning at the wrong end; you have admirable feeling about that prelude, but you needn’t think about feeling till you’ve got all the notes at your fingers’ ends. Then and not till then, you may begin to remember that you want to be a pianist. Now, what’s the next thing?”
Michael felt somewhat squashed and discouraged. He had thought he had really worked successfully at the thing he knew so well by sight. His heavy eyebrows drew together.