“Seriously?”
“Quite. I mean it. These people really do know. You see, for the last fifty years they have had nothing but the best. They have a tradition and stick to it.”
“The Clara Schumann tradition? Joachim and Brahms and Hallé and all that?”
“No, no! That is on its last legs, on its knees even. The tradition, I admit, is hard to define, but it’s there all the same. If you get a couple of encores here, you may well consider that a success.”
“Funny thing, the public,” he muttered. “You never know where you have it. But, of course, there is no such entity as ‘the public.’ There are thousands of publics and they are all different.”
. . . . . . . .
Emil Sauer has a glittering style and had, fifteen years ago, a technique that no word but rapacious accurately describes. The piano recital he gave in Manchester nearly two decades ago was the first recital I ever attended, though I was a lad in my late teens; the occasion then seemed, and still seems, most romantic. It is true that, on the nursery piano at home, one of my elder brothers used to give recitals with me as sole auditor, and that [183] ]I used to return the compliment the following evening, but though we took these affairs very seriously and even wrote lengthy criticisms of each other’s playing, our performances were not of a high order. But one evening, defying parental authority and risking paternal anger, we slipped unseen from home and went to hear Sauer.
I think we must both have been much younger than our years—certainly we were much younger than the average educated boy of eighteen or nineteen to-day—and we were in a very high state of nervous excitement as we sat in the gallery of the Free Trade Hall waiting for the great man’s appearance. His slim and, as it seemed at the time, spirit-like figure passed across the platform to the piano, and two hours of pure trance-like joy began for at least a couple of his listeners. My brother and I knew all there was to know about the great pianists of the past, and often we had tried to imagine what their playing was like; but neither he nor I had conceived that anything could be so gorgeous as what we now heard. For once, realisation was many more times finer than anticipation. Only one thing disturbed my complete happiness—and that was the notion that the pianist might possibly be disappointed with the amount of applause he was receiving, though, of a truth, he was receiving a great deal of applause. So I clapped my hands and stamped my feet as hard and as long as possible. The Appassionata Sonata almost frenzied me and a Liszt Rhapsody was like heady wine.
But all beautiful things come to a close, and towards ten o’clock my brother and I found ourselves on the wet pavement outside, feeling very exalted but at the same time uncertain whether we had done our utmost to make Sauer’s welcome all that we thought it should have been.
“Let’s wait for him outside the platform entrance and cheer him when he comes out,” suggested my brother.