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Updated: June 17, 2025
All this youthful, unrestrained enthusiasm was a revelation to Michael. Intentionally absurd as Falbe's rhapsody on the Fatherland had been, Michael knew that it sprang from a solid sincerity which was not ashamed of expressing itself.
He could see how utterly different was Falbe's general conception and practice of life from his own; to Michael it had always been a congregation of strangers Francis excepted who moved about, busy with each other and with affairs that had no allure for him, and were, though not uncivil, wholly alien to him.
Michael hitherto had gone on the painstaking and thorough plan of spelling out his notes with laborious care. Now Falbe's inexorable voice counted for him, until it was lost in inextinguishable laughter. "Go on, go on!" he shouted. "I thought it was Bach, and it is clearly Strauss's Don Quixote."
In a day or two England will be at war with Germany." Mrs. Falbe's book had slipped from her knee. She picked it up and flapped the cover once or twice to get rid of dust that might have settled there. "But what then?" she said. "It is very dreadful, no doubt, to think of dear Hermann being with the German army, but we are getting used to that, are we not?
But through these weeks, up to this foggy November afternoon, Michael's most conscious preoccupation was his music. Falbe's principles in teaching were entirely heretical according to the traditional school; he gave Michael no scale to play, no dismal finger-exercise to fill the hours. "What is the good of them?" he asked. "They can only give you nimbleness and strength.
But there was still, so Michael gathered, no great superabundance of money, and he guessed that Falbe's inability to go to Munich was due to the question of expense. All this came out by inference and allusion rather than by direct information, while Michael, naturally reticent and feeling that his own uneventful affairs could have no interest for anybody, was less communicative.
There was justice in Falbe's dictum about the temperament that lay behind the player, which would assert itself through any faultiness of instrument, and through, so he suspected, any faultiness of execution. He struck a chord, and heard it jangle dissonantly. "Oh, it's not fair," he said. "Get on!" said Falbe.
Michael sent a despairing glance at that gay face, suddenly grown grim, and took his seat. He felt a paralysing conviction that Falbe's judgment, whatever that might turn out to be, would be right, and the knowledge turned his fingers stiff.
Among these pieces which had to be properly learned was the 17th Prelude of Chopin, on hearing which at Baireuth on the tuneless and catarrhed piano Falbe had agreed to take Michael as a pupil. But when it was played again on Falbe's great Steinway, as a professed performance, a very different standard was required. Falbe stopped him at the end of the first two lines.
He engaged at once the best double suite of rooms that the hotel contained, two bedrooms with bathrooms, and an admirable sitting-room, looking spaciously out on to the square, and with brusque decision silenced Falbe's attempted remonstrance. "Don't interfere with my show, please," he had said, and proceeded to inquire about a piano to be sent in for the week. Then he turned to his friend again.
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