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Updated: May 19, 2025
The late Henry Wolfsohn, one of the greatest managers America has ever produced, told the writer frequently that the task of introducing a new artist was one of the most thankless and uncertain undertakings imaginable. Does the work, the time, the expense frighten you, little miss at the keyboard? Do you fear the grind, the grueling disappoints, the unceasing sacrifices?
The organ was a new one then, and, by the same token, I saw it when I was young, and the keyboard was strangely made; for there were two black keys together everywhere where we have one, the first being for the sharp of the natural below it, and the second for the flat of the natural above; and this meant that the ingenious builder had thought he could get rid of the 'wolf' and produce an instrument with the combined advantages of the even temper and the uneven; and any one who does not know what that means may ask a tuner to explain it for him or not, just as he pleases; but the old organ had double black keys, for I saw and touched them myself, and that was the very instrument to which Stradella sang on the afternoon of Saint John's Eve so long ago.
He never looked up from the keyboard that he did not encounter her ironical gaze. She was undoubtedly interested. Her intensity of pose proved it; but there was no sympathy in her eyes. And she had a habit of suddenly appearing in door or window, and always behind her mistress. She ended by seriously annoying him, though he did not complain. It was too trivial.
Her stripling brought an armful of aged sheet-music from their room for this bride went "heeled," as you might say and bent himself lovingly over and got ready to turn the pages. The bride fetched a swoop with her fingers from one end of the keyboard to the other, just to get her bearings, as it were, and you could see the congregation set their teeth with the agony of it.
A chill stole upon Odo as he looked at the dust-shrouded furniture, the painted harpsichord with green mould creeping over its keyboard, the consoles set with empty wine flagons and goblets of Venice glass. The place was like the abandoned corpse of pleasure. But Maria Clementina laughed and clapped her hands.
This is a sort of keyboard with pedals played by hand and foot, fashioned like a rude piano. The work is very hard, one would think, but I have heard some remarkable results from it. In former times the office of "carilloneur" was a most important position, and, as in the case of the Van den Gheyn family of Louvain, it was hereditary.
I had read that the secret of playing Chopin had died with Chopin; but I felt sure that evening, as I have felt sure since, that Chopin himself, aristocrat of the soul as he was, would have received Diaz as an equal, might even have acknowledged in him a superior. For Diaz had a physique, and he had a mastery, a tyranny, of the keyboard that Chopin could not have possessed.
As immediate forerunner of our present-day pianoforte, the harpsichord was invented with a keyboard carried to four octaves and the chords of each note doubled or quadrupled to obtain prolonged tones. He is justly esteemed as the father of modern religious music and for four hundred years the Catholic Church has repeated his inspired accents.
Then we came on the stage together, and the applause increasing I sat down at the keyboard and played an accompaniment with my own interpolations upon "Old Folks At Home," which I had taught Adelina, and she sang the words. Then they fairly took the roof off. Once during a sojourn in Paris I was thrown with Christine Nilsson.
The man is a great critic, and, so far as I can make out, a good one; and how much criticism does it require to know that capitulation is not description, or that fingering on a dumb keyboard, with whatever show of sentiment and execution, is not at all the same thing as discoursing music?
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