Conscientiously anxious to judge fairly, he would not have me by to distract him, but shut himself up with strangers at the back of a box.
The symphony over, I hurried round to hear his verdict, and found him, with flushed face, striding up and down a passage.
“Ouf!” he cried, “let me get out; I must have air! It’s incredible! Marvellous! It has so upset and bewildered me, that when I wanted to put on my hat I couldn’t find my head. Let me go by myself. I will see you to-morrow.”
I felt triumphant, and took care to go round next day. We spoke of nothing but the masterpiece we had heard; yet he seemed to reply to my ravings rather constrainedly. Still I persevered, until, after dragging out of him another acknowledgment of his heart-felt appreciation, he ended, with a curious smile:
“Yes, it’s all very well; but such music ought not to be written.”
“No fear, dear master,” I retorted; “there will never be too much of it!”
Poor human nature! Poor master! How much regret, envy, narrow-mindedness; what a dread of the unknown and confession of incapacity lay beneath your words! “Such music should not be written,” because the speaker knows instinctively that he himself could never write it.
Thus do all great men suffer from their contemporaries.
Haydn said much the same of Beethoven, whom he called a great pianist.
Grétry of Mozart, who, he said, had put the statue in the orchestra and the pedestal on the stage.