Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 7, 2025
Timorously ignoring the signal she got herself into a little low chair in the shadow of the half-closed swing door and was spreading out her wool-work on her knee when the Vorspielen began. Emma Bergmann was playing. The single notes of the opening motif of Chopin's Fifteenth Nocturne fell pensively into the waiting room. Miriam, her fatigue forgotten, slid to a featureless freedom.
"Ah!" she said aloud, as this realisation came, "Women." "Of course you can only 'play when you can," said she to herself, "like a bird singing." She sang once or twice, very quietly, in those early weeks. But she gave that up. She had a whole sheaf of songs with her. But after that first Vorspielen they seemed to have lost their meaning. One by one she looked them through.
The Vorspielen was brought to an end by Gertrude Goldring's song. Clara Bergmann sat down to accompany her, and Miriam roused herself for a double listening. There would be Clara's' opening and Clara's accompaniment and some wonderful song. The Australian stood well away from the piano, her shoulders thrown back and her eyes upon the wall opposite her. There was no prelude.
She had caught the word "Vorspielen" being bandied about the long tea-table, and had gathered that there was to be an informal playing of "pieces" before Fraulein Pfaff. She welcomed the event. It relieved her from the burden of being in high focus the relief had come as soon as she took her place at the gaslit table. No eye seemed to notice her.
The "Chanson de Florian" might perhaps hold its own at a Vorspielen sung by Bertha Martin perhaps.... The remainder of her songs, excepting a little bound volume of Sterndale Bennett, she put away at the bottom of her Saratoga trunk. Meanwhile, there were songs being learned by Herr Bossenberger's pupils for which she listened hungrily; Schubert, Grieg, Brahms.
And then at the end of a few moments she had known she never wanted to hear anything more of Millie and her people. It seemed strange that this girl talking about her brothers' hobbies and the colour of her sister's hair was the Millie she had first seen the night of the Vorspielen with the "Madonna" face and no feet. Millie was smug.
You could hear her lilting away through her little high songs as serenely as she did at Vorspielen. Miriam was at once sure that he found his task of teaching these girls an extremely tiresome one. Probably most teachers found teaching tiresome. But there was something peculiar and new to her in Herr Bossenberger's attitude. She tried to account for it... German men despised women.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking