“He really had very great powers,” Shaw continued, “but the weakness in him was that he had not sufficient faith in himself. His faith came and went. A single hostile word was sufficient to make him suspect his own genius.”
He stayed for half-an-hour and then rose to go.
“I am going to your concert to-morrow, of course,” he said; “perhaps you will come and sup at my flat when it is over. My place is in Oxford Street, less than five minutes’ walk from Queen’s Hall.”
There are few experiences so salutary, and yet at the same time so galling, as that undergone by an inexperienced composer when he listens to the first performance of his orchestral works. His music may look extraordinarily lucid on paper, but in actual performance all kinds of elaborately calculated effects fail to “come off”: they are destroyed by lack of balance between the different sections of the orchestra. The ideas are there, but they are not heard.
At the long rehearsal of his music, Xavier suffered deeply. It seemed to him that his compositions were like exquisite paintings at which handfuls of mud had been thrown: the tender sound would suddenly become meaningless noise: muddy patches here and there stopped and choked the logical continuity of his work.
When he first noticed this, his instinct was to throw the blame on his conductor, Marcel Xystobam, but two or three minutes’ reflection disclosed to him that the fault was in the writing itself, and not in the manner of its interpretation. Only one work, “The Storm,” came out in sound precisely as he had heard it in his inner ear; his other compositions were palpably the work of an untried, though gifted, amateur.
Xavier Petrovski sat writhing at his own music.
The large audience was obviously bored; even Alice Gardner’s appearance did not lift them out of their apathy. During the interval many left the hall. The applause bestowed on each composition could only just be heard. All the critics were already congregated round the refreshment bar. Nothing but a miracle could prevent the concert from being the most conspicuous failure of the season.
There was nothing from which Xavier could derive consolation. The fault was his own. His music was the music of a man who had not learned the technique of his art; the sounds that reached him from the orchestra were not the sounds that had come to him in the silence of his room in Salonika; through lack of skill—through want of experience—he had failed to record what he had heard.