We sit at our tasks, poring over the music,
and we grow discouraged because we cannot play it. To think it a very
hard task is natural, and we cannot bear to hear such tones. Well, let
us not get discouraged for that; let us see!
First of all, the playing is more difficult to do than the music is to
understand. Once a great master of the piano played to a lady who had
never heard a great master before, and the playing was like beautiful
lace. When it was over and the master had gone away, some one asked
the lady how he had played, and she said:
"He played so that the music sounded as I thought it should."
And they asked her what she meant.
"Always I have been taught," she said, "to listen to music and to
think it. I have been taught this more than I have been taught to
play. And the music of the master-composers I always think of as
beautiful and simple but hard to make it sound as it should. Often I
have heard others say that the music of the masters is dull, and not
beautiful, but that is really not what the people feel. It is
difficult for them to play the music rightly. And again they cannot
understand this: that art is often simple in, its truth, while those
who look upon it are not! simple-hearted, as they regard it. This is
hard to understand, but it is the true reason."
Now, if we think of what this cultured lady said, we shall think her
wise.
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