MUSIC IN A MAGAZINE.

Lake Wakatip Mail, Issue 3121, 6 April 1915, Page 5

MUSIC IN A MAGAZINE.

A GROTESQUE STORY. Anything that stimulates gaiety in this drab world is a priceless boon. To any music-lover, for instance, suffering from melancholia we would strongly recommend as an infallible cure a short story which found its way lately into the pages of a magazine. Its heroine was a pianist of transcendental gifts. "She hadPaiis, London, Berlin, even Munich at her feet." Why '''even Munich" is left to the imagination. On a beautiful, cloudless, starry, spring night this idol of the public of the four cities (including Munich) gave a concert at Queen's Hall, London. In the audience were two men

"seated together in a box." Where, the astonished concert-goer asks himself, is that box at Queen's Hall ? But why bother about those trifles? Note, rather, the delectahte eecentricities of the fair concertgiver.

"With a rather strange glance towards the two men" (she was surprised, no doubt, at their having brought their own box with them)

"she sat down at the piano. At first her fingers seemed to stray over the keys, minor, haunting melodies." Incidentally, one observes that there was never yet, or hardly ever, a pianist in any novel who played in a minor key, or whose melodies were not "haunting." But now listen to this. "Then you could recognise, all of a sudden, one of Grieg's weird pieces. Just for a moment, then came, blended subtly, a Chopin prelude."

Who will fail to marvel at the termidity of the pianist who begins a recital with a "subtle blend" of Grieg and Chopin ? But this was nothing to what followed. After the Norwegian-Polish mixture, there was heard a succession of chords, augmenting, till, with a thunder of so.n'. came the "Eroica.'

Clearly tb" artist who can undertake the "Eroica" single-handed deserves to figure as a heroine of at least a short story.

But apparently sh? was repentant. For when she emerged from the "stage-door," looking pa'e "and even unusually ethereal," she confessed that *it was an awful thing to do before all those people. 1 simply played what was in my heart." Only to think that it might have been the "Choral" Symphony ! "Telegraph."