Paris was draped in flaming clouds—the blood-red smoke of mad torches. Tongues of fire twined about the towers of Notre Dame; where the Opéra once stood yawned a blackened hole. The air was shocked by fulminate blasts—the signals of the careless Scheff.
And the woman, her mouth filled with exultant laughter, screamed, "Thou hast conquered, O Pavel Illowski!"
AN EMOTIONAL ACROBAT
They were tears which he drummed.
—Heine.
Perhaps you think because I play upon an instrument of percussion I admire that other percussive machine of wood and wire, the piano, or consider the tympanum an inferior instrument?
You were never more mistaken, for I despise the piano as a shallow compromise between the harp, tympani and those Eastern tinkling instruments of crystal and glass, or dulcimers and cymbalum. It has no character, no individuality of its own. It is deplorable in conjunction with an orchestra, for its harsh, hard, unmalleable tone never blends with other instruments. It is a selfish instrument and it makes selfish artists of those who devote a lifetime to it.
Bah! I hate you and your pianos. Compare it to the tympani? Never, never! It is false, insincere, and smirks and simpers if even a silly school girl sits before it. It takes on the color of any composer's ideas, and submits like a slave to the whims of any virtuoso. I am disgusted. Here am I, an old kettle-drummer—as you say in your barbarous English—poor, unknown, forced to earn a beggarly living by strumming dance tunes in a variety hall on a hated piano, and often accompanying singers, acrobats, and all the riffraff of a vaudeville, where a mist of vulgarity hangs like a dirty pearl cloud over all. I don't look at my music any more. I know what is wanted. I have rhythmic talent. I conduct myself, although there is a butter-faced leader waving a silly stick at us while I sit in my den, half under the stage, and thrum and think, and blink and thrum.