“Aber! aber!” cried Eugen. “That is too much! I call Frau Schmidt to witness that all my music is put in one place.”
“I never said it wasn’t. But you never can find it when you want it, and the confusion is delightfully increased by your constantly rushing off to buy a new partitur when you can’t find the old one; so you have three or four of each.”
“This is all to show off what he considers his own good qualities; a certain slow, methodical plodding and a good memory, which are natural gifts, but which he boasts of as if they were acquired virtues. He binds his music because he is a pedant and a prig, and can’t help it; a bad fellow to get on with. Now, mein bester, for the ‘Fruhling.’”
“But the Fräulein ought to have it explained,” expostulated Helfen, laughing. “Every one has not the misfortune to be so well acquainted with you as I am. He has rather insane fancies sometimes,” he added, turning to me, “without rhyme or reason that I am aware, and he chooses to assert that Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, or the chief motive of it, occurred to him on a spring day, when the master was, for a time, quite charmed from his bitter humor, and had, perhaps, some one by his side who put his heart in tune with the spring songs of the birds, the green of the grass, the scent of the flowers. So he calls it the ‘Fruhling Symphonie,’ and will persist in playing it as such. I call the idea rather far-fetched, but then that is nothing unusual with him.”
“Having said your remarkably stupid say, which Miss Wedderburn has far too much sense to heed in the least, suppose you allow us to begin,” said Courvoisier, giving the other a push toward his violin.
But we were destined to have yet another coadjutor in the shape of Karl Linders, who at that moment strolled in, and was hailed by his friends with jubilation.
“Come and help! Your ’cello will give just the mellowness that is wanted,” said Eugen.
“I must go and get it then,” said Karl, looking at me.
Eugen, with an indescribable expression as he intercepted the glance, introduced us to one another. Karl and Friedhelm Helfen went off to another part of the Tonhalle to fetch Karl’s violoncello, and we were left alone again.
“Perhaps I ought not to have introduced him. I forgot ‘Lohengrin,’” said Eugen.