“Let us go to the piano,” he said, rising.
So we left the little room in which we were sitting and moved to the large music-room at the far end of which was a grand piano. Frau Klindworth, Dawson and I sat in the semi-darkness near the door; Klindworth’s tall but rather shrunken figure moved down the room to the little light that hung above the keyboard. He played some almost unknown pieces of Liszt, interpreting them in a style at once noble and half-ruined. The excitement of playing seemed to increase rather than add strength to his physical weakness, and many wrong notes were struck.
It was very pathetic to see this old man trying to revive the fires within him, trying and failing; and I felt that if, by some miraculous effort, he had succeeded, if the ashes of long-spent fires had indeed broken into hot flame, his frail body would have been consumed.
He gave me his photograph and wrote on the back some message, and when I left him I thought I should never see him again. But, a few days later, I saw him in the front row of one of Frederick Dawson’s recitals, and I occasionally heard from him a deep-noted “Bravo!” as Dawson electrified us with one of his stupendous performances.
Klindworth lingered on for some years later and, when I was in Macedonia last year, I saw in some newspaper a few lines recording his death. In the seventies he was a great figure in London, and Wagner-worshippers of those days worshipped Klindworth also, not only for his genius, but [219] ]also for his loyalty, his noble-mindedness, his devotion to his art.
. . . . . . . .
Out of curiosity on the last day of my stay in Berlin, I went to a famous concert agent’s office, ostensibly to make some business inquiries, but, in reality, to have a look at the underworld of art; for the business side of all art has almost invariably an underworld of its own in which there is much irony and in which dwells a spirit of strangely sardonic humour.
The office was crowded with artists, most of them prosperous, all of them of recognised position. Though they were clients of the agent—that is to say, people able and eager to engage his services and pay handsomely for them—they were kept waiting an unconscionable time, as though they had come to beg favours. As, indeed, they had. For Herr Otto Zuggstein always made it perfectly clear by his manner that the favour was his to confer, the honour yours to accept. He had a hot, eager brain, cunning hands and hairy wrists.
And his work, his object in life? Well, he was the connecting-link between the artist and the public, just as a publisher is the connecting-link between authors and those who read. Otto Zuggstein “published” pianists, singers, violinists. He engaged concert halls for them, sold their tickets and collected the money, printed their programmes, distributed tickets to the Press, advertised their recitals, and so on. There are, of course, many such men, men engaged honourably in an honourable profession, in all the big cities of Europe; but Zuggstein was steeped in dishonour. It was freely said of him that he had all the powerful music critics of Berlin in the hollow of his hand. Instead of working for their respective editors they really worked for him. He could command a long and enthusiastic “notice” about almost any artist in almost any paper; he could also secure the publication [220] ]of the most damning criticisms. If you were a really great artist desiring to “succeed” in Berlin and he, or his friends, considered it against his own and his friends’ interest for you to succeed, he could and would prevent you doing so.
He occasionally emerged from the inner room in which he sat, moved among us for a minute or so, exchanging handshakes, smiles and other insincerities, and, singling out a man or a woman with special business claims upon him, returned with his companion to his private office. As he disappeared, some of those who waited smiled significantly at each other.