Arthur pulled himself together and began. He was very modern in musical matters and I liked the dynamic power of his opening. The first subject was more massive than musical and was built on the architectonics of Liszt and Tschaïkowsky. There was blood in the idea, plenty of nervous fibre, and I dropped my brushes and palette as the unfolding of the work began with a logical severity and a sense of form unusual in so young a mind.
This first movement interested me; I almost conjured up the rich instrumentation and when it ended I was warm in my congratulations.
Arthur moodily wiped his brow and looked indifferent.
"And now for the second movement. My boy, you always had a marked gift for the lyrical. Give us your romanza—the romanza, I should say, born of your good lady!"
He answered me shortly: "There is no romance, I've substituted for it a scherzo. You know that's what Saint-Saëns and all the fellows are doing nowadays, Scharwenka too."
I fancied that there was a shade of eager anxiety in his explanation, but I said nothing and listened.
The scherzo—or what is called the scherzo since Beethoven and Schumann—was too heavy, inelastic in its tread, to dispel the blue-devils. It was conspicuous for its absence of upspringing delicacy, light, arch merriment. It was the sad, bitter joking of a man upon whose soul life has graven pain and remorse, and before the trio was reached I found myself watching the young composer's face. I knew that, like all modern music students, he had absorbed in Germany some of that scholastic pessimism we encounter in the Brahms music, but I had hoped that a mere fashion of the day would not poison the springs of this fresh personality.
Yet here I was confronted with a painful confession that life had brought the lad more than its quantum of spiritual and physical hardship; he was telling me all this in his music, for his was too subjective a talent to ape the artificial, grand, objective manner.
Without waiting for comment he plunged into his last movement which proved to be a series of ingenious variations—a prolonged passacaglia—in which the grace and dexterity of his melodic invention, contrapuntal skill and symmetrical sense were gratifyingly present.
I was in no flattering vein when I told him he had made a big jump in his work.