Part 10 (1/1)

The concerto was played in a dreary fashi+on, and only the strenuous efforts of the attendants on each side of the soloist kept hi every tutti The rest of the piano program was almost the same story The Steibelt selection, the old-fashi+oned _L'Orage_, was no stor up and down the keyboard The Czerny fugue was better and the performance of the sahtness and one ht almost say volubility In these etudes his wonderful stiff ar, in the real old-fashi+oned le notes he introduced octaves

The applause after this was so great and the flappers at the pianist's side plied hi the _Hexameron_, that remarkably difficult and old set of variations on the

These he played, it must be confessed, in a masterly ious as to difficulty, which I failed to recognize as ever having seen it in the printed copy of the co to anticipate my question on the subject, informed ered beyond control by the refusal of the publishers to print it with the rest, and had written a lengthy letter to Liszt on the subject, in which he told hi with Henselt, Chopin, Hiller, and Thalberg, and that he was the _only_ pianist worth speaking of, which inforht on our Asiatic virtuoso's character, and showed that he was made of about the same metal, after all, as most of your European e had been cleared of the piano and the litter, and a conductor's stand was brought forward, draped in black velvet trimmed hite, and appropriately wreathed with tuberoses, whose deathly-sweet odor diffused itself throughout the house and caused an unpleasant shudder to circulate through the audience, ere beginning to realize the mockery of this modern dance of death, but who remained to see the end of the sad comedy The orchestra, which was reinforced by several uncanny looking instrue even to Asiatic eyes, were seated, and then the dusky servants lifted with infinite care the aged Bundelcund into a standing posture, placed him at the stand, and while four held hi in their attentions that one ht suppose the old man's face would be sore, were it not for its al, thick hair, which fell far below his waist

Standing in an erect attitude he was an appalling figure to behold, and the two lighted tapers in hted up his face with an unholy and gruesohtened by the house being in total darkness, and though many women had fainted, oppressed by the charnel-house atmosphere that surrounded us, still the audience as a whole remained spellbound in their seats The medical man now plied the conductor-pianist with the contents of the , white ostrich pluin The conductor, despite his deafness, appeared to co on and feebly waved the pluloomy chords of the _Marche Funebre a la Tartare_ were heard Of all the funeral marches ever penned this cos and the gnashi+ng of teeth of damned souls

It was the funeral march of so their grief in a ner, Berlioz, and Meyerbeer to shame; for such a use of brass had never been even drea instruments I first spoke of now came to the fore and the din they raised was positively hellish

Those who could see the composer's face afterward declared it reathed in smiles, but this, of course, I could not see; but I did see, and we all saw, after the rather abrupt end of the -drawn-out suspension, _capo d'astro_, resolved by the use of the diseased chord of the minor thirteenth into a dissipated fifth), the venerable virtuoso suddenly collapse, and suddenly fall into the arhly Oriental, still smacked of anticipation of this very event Instantly the lights went out and a panic ensued, everyone getting into the street sohbor, who informed

Then an iered by the cruel exhibition which they had witnessed, searched high and low for the randchildren who had so ruthlessly sacrificed their talented progenitor for the sake of pelf, but they were nowhere to be found, and they doubtlessly had escaped with their booty to a safe place The doctor had also disappeared and with him all traces of the Gospadin Bundelcund, and soon after sinister ru was a _dead man_ (horrible idea!) that he had been dead for years, but by the aid of that new and yet undeveloped science, hypnotism, he had been revived and hastly mummery was planned to make money Certain it was that we never heard of any of the participants in the affair again, and I write to you knowing that American readers will be interested in this queer iven in a slightly altered quotation, ”Butchered to make a Laputian's holiday”