When You Want it to turn over the pages of my book of notes about the music, reading the advertisements with an interest which I found I could not devote to the composition itself. That, in fact, I scarcely listened to. This is not a unique experience; it is usual. The evenings on which I yearn to hear Boris Godunoff they sing L'Amore dei Tre Re at the Opera; the afternoons on which I have a deep longing to listen to Liszt's B minor Sonata, the Hofmanns and Bauers and Myra Hesses are all busy playing Chopin's.
This is both confusing and irritating, for taste in music changes, especially if you hear a good deal of it. I have worshipped at several altars. Some of them I return to when I can. The cool, sane, classic beauty of Gluck, the gay, sweet-sour, tragi-comedy of Mozart, the red blare and poster-like dash of American jazz, the pellucid harmonies of Debussy, so like the nocturnes of Whistler, the refreshing melodies of Arthur Sullivan, are seldom unwelcome, but the days in which I enjoy the empty orchestral orgies of Richard Strauss, the trumpet blasts of Richard Wagner, the fantastic but futile inventions of Hector Berlioz, and the thunderbolts of Beethoven come more rarely. Other intermittent humours find me hankering for the ironic acidity of the quaintly perverse l'Heure Espagnole, for the bombast of Handel, whom Samuel Butler
