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Every member of the family was watching his every motion. Oh, I've been there! I know what it is! Some of the neighbors were there, too. Peter hardly ever plays on the big, old-fashioned grand-piano, but that night he was so bored he had to.
The grand-piano arrived in due course, and with the addition of various engravings after Raphael, which had fallen to my lot in the Biebrich division, my music-room was completely furnished in readiness for the 22nd of May, when celebrated my fiftieth birthday.
"Oh, he did or at least he thought he did," I replied, smiling broadly at the recollection. "On the way home in the cab he wept on my shoulder and said I was the best friend he ever had, and told me he loved me like a brother. There wasn't anything he wouldn't do for me, and if ever I wanted an automobile or a grand-piano all I had to do was to ask him for it. He was very genial."
A Steinway grand-piano was prominent in the chamber, and before the ebony instrument stood a mechanical pianoforte-player. 'I must have that hat. He paused reflectively, leaning on one elbow, as he made the tea which Simon Shawn had brought and left on the night-table. And again, at the third cup, he repeated to himself that he must possess the hat. He had a passion for tea.
The library was today rather a melancholy room: the great book-cases did not enliven it; the grand-piano, with its old dark polish, seemed like a coffin, the sarcophagus of unrisen music; the oak panelling had absorbed a richer hue with the years than once it wore; the portrait of his mother seemed farther withdrawn from sight and air; Antinoüs took a tawnier tint in his long reverie.
He introduced me to Peter Cornelius, who had also been drawn to Vienna, and whom I only knew from our meeting in Bale in 1853. They both raved about the recently published pianoforte arrangement of Tristan, which Bulow had prepared. In my room at the hotel, whither Tausig had transported a Bosendorff grand-piano, a musical orgy was soon in full swing.
I'd much rather know them through their books than through those awful Sunday evening soirees where poor old leonine M used to perspire reading those Socialist poems of his to the adoring ladies, and Sanguinary John used to wear the same flannel shirt that shielded him from the Polar blasts up in Alaska open at the throat, and all that sort of thing, just like a movie-actor cowboy, only John had grown a little stout and he kept spoiling the Strong-Man picture by so everlastingly posing at one end of the grand-piano!
The Free-and-easy is now every night choke full of wide-mouthed harmonists. The 'Concert this Evening' is no longer a mere mythic pretence, but a very substantial and vociferous fact. The old grand-piano, and the old, ragged player, have been cashiered, and sent about their business; and a bran-new Broadwood, presided over by a rattling performer, occupies their place.
Still weary from my exhausting labour on Oper und Drama, and worried by many things which had a depressing effect on my spirits, I seated myself for the first time for many months at my Hartel grand-piano, which had been rescued from the Dresden catastrophe, to see whether I could settle down to composing the music for my ponderous heroic drama.
There were lower extremities of the grand-piano type, and short, fat feet with a look of pincushions resolutely stuffed into shoes. Her own slender, well-shod feet would do more than pass muster here, she reflected with satisfaction. Indeed, although she was more plainly dressed than most of the women present, she rejoiced to feel she did not suffer too much by comparison. Esther was never dowdy.
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