should be raised high and the keys struck; others heatedly advocated the production of all effects through the graduated weight of the arm. Even methods of pedalling were discussed with an earnestness that would have done credit to state legislators.
The students seemed to Paul a collection of precocious babies; their masters mere coaches whose picturesque senility was mistaken for a sort of godhead. Virtuosity was the game, music merely a ball for athletic virtuosi to kick. For five, six, seven hours a day one was expected to engage in digital acrobatics; each composition was examined, phrase by phrase, like a strange machine; its soul, vaguely indicated by such marks as espressivo, andante doloroso, was reduced to terms of metronomics and pedal pressures; the objective of the whole process being to come upon a platform and evoke thunderous commendation from auditors who would judge the performance not by its success or failure in conveying the composer's sooth—of which the great majority of them would be as egregiously ignorant as the performer—but by its approximation to or divergence from the performance of some current "genius," whose title had been bestowed in accordance with similar standards of judgment. True, among masters and pupils there was endless talk concerning interpretation, but the point, more often than not, was lost in a haystack of pedantic quibbling.
In the composition classes a like spirit prevailed. Students were not encouraged to express, in musical terms, some heartfelt conviction; they were required to compose a hymn on Monday, a minuet or a canon on Thursday, in conformity with grammar—a certain margin being allowed for breaches "in good usage," which was to say, solecisms made by robust rebels like Wagner and Berlioz. Between exercises of this sort the lecturer struck intervals on a concealed keyboard and
