Educators from Poland

"I can still feel within me the strength and readiness for hardship and suffering, yet I would like to live long enough to see the day when I might freely work for Poland, and not wander aimlessly through God knows what land.[...] And if death finds me working on alien soil, this too will not be without profit for Poland, particularly if among some distant tribe, the farthest possible from our country, they will remember a Pole, will wish Poland well, and will be supportive toward her."

"Give me a kiss, dearest lover. I'm certain that you still love me, and I fear you always, like some tyrant over me. I don't know why, but I fear you. Upon my word, only you have power over me, you and... no one else."

"I'm glad that the secret is submerged in my heart, that in me is the end of what is for you the beginning. And be glad that you have in me an abyss into which you can cast everything without fear - as if into a second self - because your spirit has long lain there at the very bottom. I keep your letters like a ribbon from a mistress. I have the ribbon; write to me, I'll caress you again in a week."

"No one other than I has read your letter. As always, even now, I carry your letters with me. How blissful it will it be for me, having gone beyond the city walls in May, thinking about my approaching journey, to pull out a letter of yours and assure myself sincerely that you love me, or at least to gaze at the hand and the writing of him, whom only I am able to love!"

"Messieurs, I should like to be granted the favour of performing at one of your admirable concerts, and this I beg to ask of you. Trusting, since I lack other qualifications to obtain this, in your goodwill towards artists, I dare to hope that you will greet my request favourably, I have the honour to be, Messieurs, your very humble servant. Frédéric Chopin Cité Bergère, No. 4"

"My piano has not yet arrived. How did you send it? By Marseilles or by Perpignan? I dream music but I cannot make any because here there are not any pianos . . . in this respect this is a savage country."

"I'm a revolutionary, money means nothing to me."

"I wish I could throw off the thoughts which poison my happiness, but I take a kind of pleasure in indulging them."

"One needs only to study a certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys to obtain with ease the most beautiful sounds, to know how to play long notes and short notes and to [attain] certain unlimited dexterity... A well formed technique, it seems to me, [is one] that can control and vary a beautiful sound quality."

"Time is still the best critic, and patience the best teacher."

"Sometimes I can only groan, and suffer, and pour out my despair at the piano!"

"Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes and more notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art."

"How strange! This bed on which I shall lie has been slept on by more than one dying man, but today it does not repel me! Who knows what corpses have lain on it and for how long? But is a corpse any worse than I? A corpse too knows nothing of its father, mother or sisters or Titus. Nor has a corpse a sweetheart. A corpse, too, is pale, like me. A corpse is cold, just as I am cold and indifferent to everything. A corpse has ceased to live, and I too have had enough of life.... Why do we live on through this wretched life which only devours us and serves to turn us into corpses? The clocks in the Stuttgart belfries strike the midnight hour. Oh how many people have become corpses at this moment! Mothers have been torn from their children, children from their mothers - how many plans have come to nothing, how much sorrow has sprung from these depths, and how much relief!... Virtue and vice have come in the end to the same thing! It seems that to die is man's finest action - and what might be his worst? To be born, since that is the exact opposite of his best deed. It is therefore right of me to be angry that I was ever born into this world! Why was I not prevented from remaining in a world where I am utterly useless? What good can my existence bring to anyone? … But wait, wait! What's this? Tears? How long it is since they flowed! How is this, seeing that an arid melancholy has held me for so long in its grip? How good it feels - and sorrowful. Sad but kindly tears! What a strange emotion! Sad but blessed. It is not good for one to be sad, and yet how pleasant it is - a strange state..."

"Here you doubtless observe my tendency to do wrong against my will. As something has involuntarily crept into my head through my eyes, I love to indulge it, even though it may be all wrong."

"I could express my feelings more easily if they could be put into the notes of music, but as the very best concert would not cover my affection for you, dear daddy, I must use the simple words of my heart, to lay before you my utmost gratitude and filial affection"

"How great a joy I feel in my heart. That a day so pleasant, so dear and glorious begins, a day that I greet with the wish. That long years may pass in happiness. In health and vigour, peacefully, successfully. May the gift of heaven fall richly upon you"

"You already know when I'm writing, so don't be surprised if it's short and dry, because I'm too hungry to write anything fat"

"I have met Rossini, Cherubini, Baillot, etc.—also Kalkbrenner. You would not believe how curious I was about Herz, Liszt, Hiller, etc. — They are all zero beside Kalkbrenner. I confess that I have played like Herz, but would wish to play like Kalkbrenner. If Paganini is perfection, Kalkbrenner is his equal, but in quite another style."

"I astonished Kalkbrenner, who at once asked me, was I not a pupil of Field, because I have Cramer's method and Field's touch. (That delighted me.)"

"Play Mozart in memory of me— and I will hear you."

"Concerts are never real music, you have to give up the idea of hearing in them all the most beautiful things of art."

"I am cross and depressed, and people bore me with their excessive attentions. I can't breathe, I can't work; I feel alone, alone, alone, although I am surrounded. There are a whole lot of ladies, 70 to 80 year-old lords, but no young folk: they are all out shooting. One can't get out of doors because it has been raining and blowing for several days."

"Fingers of steel. Wrist of silk."

"[...] mam mój ideał, któremu wiernie, nie mówiąc z nim już pół roku, służę, który mi się śni, na którego pamiątkę stanęło adagio od mojego koncertu, który mi inspirował tego walczyka dziś rano, co ci posyłam."

"Idę się umywać, nie całuj mię teraz, bom się jeszcze nie umył. — Ty? chociażbym się olejkami wysmarował bizantyjskimi, nie pocałowałbyś, gdybym ja Ciebie magnetycznym sposobem do tego nie przymusił. Jest jakaś siła w naturze. Dziś Ci się śnić będzie, że mnie całujesz. Muszę Ci oddać za szkaradny sen, jakiś mi dziś w nocy sprowadził."

"Nothing is more beautiful than a good guitar, save perhaps two."

"Chopin‘s pianistic production is overall more voluminous and somewhat more consistent in emotional substance, however wonderful much of Schumann‘s work is."

"Chopin did not need to append words to music to make it songful; in fact it seems to me that he does better without them! Incidentally, their lack of popularity must largely be due to their being set to Polish words, and as far as I know, translating them would lessen their effect."

"Chopin is -- popularly, but not critically -- seen primarily as a great melodist, which reputation does him a great disservice."

"...Chopin rather made a habit out of gainsaying genre expectations: his Barcarolle isn’t a barcarolle, the Scherzi aren’t even remotely funny or even lighthearted, the Waltzes are completely undanceable, the Preludes aren’t prelude to anything, the Nocturnes render Field unlistenable…"

"Chopin wrote many small pieces – mazurkas, waltzes, préludes, nocturnes – many more than Schumann. That covers the needs of millions of amateurs who love music, but do not command the instrument well enough and who love Chopin’s music. It enters their hearts."

"Chopin is played much more than Schumann in China, both in concert halls and music schools. The reason, if I put it in a most simple and direct way, Chopin is more universal, appeals more to the masses. Schumann is more personal, appeals more to the elites."

"Being Chopin a pianist himself, his works are mainly conceived for the piano. When people use the word “pianistic“, it means that the pieces lay easily, naturally and smoothly under the fingers. This is true for Liszt and Debussy too."

"Music was his language, the divine tongue through which he expressed a whole realm of sentiments that only the select few can appreciate... The muse of his homeland dictates his songs, and the anguished cries of Poland lend to his art a mysterious, indefinable poetry which, for all those who have truly experienced it, cannot be compared to anything else... The piano alone was not sufficient to reveal all that lies within him. In short he is a most remarkable individual who commands our highest degree of devotion."

"According to a tradition—and, be it said, an erroneous one—Chopin’s playing was like that of one dreaming rather than awake—scarcely audible in its coninual pianissiomos and una cordoas, with feebly developed technique and quite lacking in confidence, or at least indistinct, and distorted out of all rhythmic form by an incessant tempo rubato! The effect of these notions could not be otherwise than very prejudicial to the interpretation of his works, even by the most able artists—in their very striving after truthfulness; besides, they are easily accounted for."

"In keeping time Chopin was inflexible, and many will be surprised to learn that the metronome never left his piano. Even in his oft-decried tempo rubato one hand—that having the accompaniment—always played on in strict time, while the other, singing the melody, either hesitating as if undecided, or, with increased animation, anticipating with a kind of impatient vehemence as if in passionate utterances, maintained the freedom of musical expression from the fetters of strict regularity."

"His creation was spontaneous, miraculous. He found it without searching for it, without foreseeing it. It came to his piano suddenly, complete, sublime, or it sang in his head during a walk, and he would hasten to hear it again by, tossing it off on his instrument. But then would begin the most heartbreaking labor I have ever witnessed. It was a series of efforts, indecision, and impatience to recapture certain details of the theme he had heard: what had come to him all of a piece, he now over-analyzed in his desire to write it down, and his regret at not finding it again "neat," as he said, would throw him into a kind of despair. He would shut himself up in his room for days at a time, weeping, pacing, breaking his pens, repeating and changing a single measure a hundred times, writing it and effacing it with equal frequency, and beginning again the next day with a meticulous and desperate perseverance. He would spend six weeks on one page, only to end up writing it just as he had traced it in his first outpouring."

"There is no weak piece by Chopin. Still, his music is played so poorly so often, and that does not do him any good. The Sonata in B flat minor and the ballad in G minor are played much very often. It does not mean I wouldn’t play them, but I wouldn’t do it so much."

"It was Chopin who properly set romantic pianism on its rails and gave it the impetus that shows no signs of deceleration. He did this all by himself, evolving from nowhere the most beautiful and original piano style of the century."

"Chopin was a romantic who hated romanticism. This is the paradox. It was Chopin who, of all the early romantics, has turned out the most popular. Virtually everything he composed has remained in the repertoire, and a piano recital without some Chopin on it is still the exception. […] In his day he was a revolutionary. To many his music was exotic, inexplicable, perhaps insane. Critics like Rellstab in Germany, Chorley and Davison in England, dismissed much of Chopin’s music as eccentricities full of earsplitting dissonance."

"Fortunately the picture as it stands is quite complete, and the figure of Chopin clearly emerges: that marvelously controlled, original, poetic, nuanced classic-romantic pianist and musician, whose physical resources may have been small but whose spirit and conception were epical."

"Hats off, gentlemen — a genius!"

"If the mighty autocrat of the north knew what a dangerous enemy threatened him in Chopin's works in the simple tunes of his mazurkas, he would forbid this music. Chopin's works are canons buried in flowers."

"After playing Chopin, I feel as if I had been weeping over sins that I had never committed, and mourning over tragedies that were not my own."

"We couldn’t do much outside. I found more details in my music."

"Chopin was the first piano composer who knew exactly how to make piano sound reach fullness, radiance and grandness. What to regard and what, by all means, to avoid. Chopin was keenly aware of the overtones and he did take care of them so artfully."

"Chopin has done for the piano what Schubert has done for the voice."

"I was brought up to believe that a person must be rescued when drowning, regardless of religion and nationality."

"I still carry the marks on my body of what those "German supermen" did to me then. I was sentenced to death."

"Let me stress most emphatically that we who were rescuing children are not some kind of heroes. Indeed, that term irritates me greatly. The opposite is true. I continue to have pangs of conscience that I did so little."

"I am the only person still alive of that rescuing group but I want everyone to know that, while I was coordinating our efforts, we were about twenty to twenty five people. I did not do it alone."

"Over a half-century has passed since the hell of the Holocaust, but its spectre still hangs over the world and doesn’t allow us to forget."

"Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory."

"Heroes do extraordinary things. What I did was not an extraordinary thing. It was normal."

"If being a saint is complete devotion to a cause, bravery and altruism, then I think Mrs Sendlerowa fulfils all the conditions. I think about her the way you think about someone you owe your life to."

"To me and many rescued children, Irena Sendlerowa is a third mother. Good, wise, kind, always accepting, she shares our happiness and worries. We drop in for Irena's advice when life presents us with difficulties."

"I have never seen the Old Testament prophets, but at the sight of that man floored by divine anger, widely straddling his enormous porcelain urinal and shielded by the tornado of his arms, a cloud of desperate contortions, above which his voice rose still higher, alien and hard—I came to understand the divine anger of holy men."

"He occasionally placed two chairs back-to-back, and, supporting himself with his hands on the backrests, swung his legs back and forth, his radiant eyes searching our faces for looks of admiration and encouragement. It seemed he had become entirely reconciled with God."

"Only today do I understand the lonely heroism with which he gave single-handed battle against the boundless element of boredom numbing the town. Bereft of all support, without acknowledgement on our part, that astonishing man defended the lost cause of poetry. He was a wondrous mill, into whose hoppers the bran of the empty hours was poured, bursting into bloom in its mechanism with all of the colours and aromas of oriental spices."

"“Were I to cast aside respect before the Creator and seek to make a jest in criticism of creation, then I should demand, ‘Less content and more form!’ Oh, how that loss of content would unburden the world! More modesty in purposes, more restraint in claims, gentlemen demiurges, and the world would be more exquisite!” cried my father as his hands were laying bare Paulina’s white calf from the fetters of her stocking."

"It is worth noting how, in coming into contact with that unusual man, all things withdrew, as it were, to the root of their being, rebuilt their phenomenon down to its metaphysical core. They returned to their primordial idea, only to betray it at that point and lurch into those dubious, daring, and equivocal regions which I shall here succinctly call, the Regions of the Great Heresy."

"Adela returned on luminous mornings, like Pomona from the fire of the enkindled day, tipping from her basket the colourful beauty of the sun: glistening wild cherries, full of water under their transparent skins, mysterious black cherries whose aroma surpassed that which would be realised in their taste, and apricots, in whose golden pulp lay the core of the long afternoons."

"An infernal storm-cloud of feathers, wings, and screeches flew up, in the midst of which, Adela, looking like a furious mænad, half-obscured by the spinning of her thyrsus, danced a dance of destruction."

"Mother held no influence over [my father]; though he bestowed much reverence and attention upon Adela. When she swept his chamber, it was to him a great and momentous ceremony, one that he never omitted to witness, following Adela’s every movement with a mixture of fear and a shudder of delight. He ascribed to her every action some deeper, symbolic meaning, and when the girl pushed a long-handled brush across the floor, with youthful and bold thrusts, it was almost beyond his endurance."

"Adela’s outstretched slipper shook slightly and shone like a snake’s tongue."

"">“Sadly, Adela,” said Father, “you have never been able to comprehend matters of a higher order. Always and everywhere, you have thwarted my actions with your outbursts of mindless animosity. But today, clad in armour, I mock your tickling, by which you once drove one helpless to despair.”"

"Ah! And in writing down these stories of mine, arranging these tales of my father in the used up margin of its text, do I not yield to the secret hope that, someday, they will strike root imperceptibly between the faded leaves of that most magnificent, scattering book; that they will fall into the great rustle of its pages, which will enfold them?"

"I call it simply the Book, with no qualifications or epithets, and in this abstinence and restraint there is a helpless sigh, silent capitulation to the immeasurableness of the transcendent; for no word, no allusion, could glisten, scent the air, or drift with such a shudder of terror, with any inkling of that unnameable thing, the very first taste of which, on the tip of the tongue, surpasses the capacity of our rapture."

"For ordinary books are like meteors; each has its moment, that instant when it flies shrieking into the air, like a phoenix, all of its pages ablaze. For that moment, that single instant, we love them; although they are mere ashes by then. Sometimes, late at night, we wander in bitter resignation through their congealed pages, whilst they go on insisting, with their wooden clattering, like a rosary, on their dead formulæ."

"Have you ever noticed flocks of swallows flying past between the lines of certain books, whole verses of trembling, pointed swallows? One must interpret the flights of those birds..."

"“Too long,” said my father, “have we lived under the terror of the matchless perfection of the Demiurge. Too long has the perfection of his handiwork paralysed our own creativity. We do not wish to compete with him. We have no ambition to rival him. We wish merely to be creators in our own, lower sphere. We crave creativity for ourselves. We crave the joy of creation. In a word, we crave Demiurgy.”"

"“Demiurgus [said my father] was enamoured of refined, perfect, and sophisticated materials. We give precedence to junk. We are simply rapt by it, entranced by the cheapness, the paltriness, the tawdriness of the material. Do you understand,” my father asked, “the profound meaning of that weakness, that passion for gaudy tissue-paper, papier-mâché, coloured lacquer, straw, and sawdust? It is,” he said with a pained smile, “our love for matter as such, for its downiness and porousness, its unique, mystical consistency. Demiurgus, that renowned master and artist, hides it away, causes it to vanish behind life’s make-believe. We, to the contrary, love its abrasiveness, its unruliness, its rag doll ungainliness. Behind each gesture, each movement, we like to see its exertion, its torpor, its sweet ursinality.”"

"We are at the very bottom, at the dark foundations—we are with the Mothers. Here are endless infernos, those hopeless Ossianic expanses, those lamentable Nibelungs. Here are the great incubators of stories, storyteller factories, misty kilns of fables and fairytales."

"Everybody knows that, in the course of mundane and ordinary years, whimsical time will occasionally bring forth from its womb other years, odd years, degenerate years, somewhere in which, like a little sixth finger upon a hand, a spurious thirteenth month sprouts up; spurious, we say; for seldom will it grow to full size. Like late begotten children, it lags behind in its development, a hunchback month, a half-wilted offshoot, and more conjectured than real."

"And then there is all this highly improper manipulation of time, these indecent dealings, sneaking into its mechanism at the back and tampering dangerously with its precarious secrets. Sometimes, one wants to bang on the table and shout at the top of one’s voice, “Enough of this! Keep your hands off time! Time is untouchable! It is not permissible to aggravate time! Space is for man. In space you may go where you please; you may turn somersaults, fall head over heels, leap from star to star... But for the love of God, leave time alone!”"

"Has our reader ever heard about the parallel strands of time, in two-track time? Yes, such branch stretches of time do exist, a little illegal, to be sure, and problematic, but when carrying such contraband as ours, such supernumerary, unclassifiable events, one cannot be too particular. And so, at some point in our story, we shall attempt to take such a branch turning, a siding, and shunt this illegal history into it."

"On those shoulders of the garden, August’s unkempt and harridan luxuriance had expanded into silent hollows of enormous burdocks, holding sway with their flaps of shaggy, leafy tin plate, straggling tongues of fleshy green. Those distended rag dolls of burdocks bulged there like peasant women sitting around half-devoured by their own crazy skirts."

"Ah, life, young and fragile life, sent forth from the dependable darkness, from the snug warmth of the maternal womb into a vast, unfamiliar and illuminated world! How it flinches and draws back, filled with aversion and discouragement! How it hesitates to accept the venture proposed to it!"

"And one of those plants, yellow and full of milky juice in pale stems, now puffed up with air, discharged only air from its hollow shoots, only fluff in the form of feathery, milky balls, strewn by the breeze and softly pervading the azure silence."

"Only now did the scales fall from my eyes. For how great is the force of credulity, how powerful the suggestion of terror! Such incomprehension! But this was a man! A chained-up man, whom I, by incomprehensible means, in a simplifying, metaphorical, and comprehensive elision, had taken for a dog."

"I came to understand why animals have horns. It was the incomprehensibility that could not be contained within their lives, a wild and obsessive caprice, their ill-judged and blind obstinacy. Some idée fixe—grown beyond the borders of their being and high above their heads, suddenly brought into the light—had solidified into palpable, hard matter. There, it had assumed its wild, incalculable, and incredible shape, twisted into a fantastical arabesque, invisible to their eyes, but dreadful nonetheless, the unknown numeral under whose menace they lived. I understood why those animals were disposed to ill-judged and wild panic, to startled frenzy. Herded into their mania, they could not extricate themselves from the knot of those horns, and so, lowering their heads, they looked out sadly and wildly from between them as if trying to find a pathway through their branches."

"But even further from the light were the cats. Their perfection was alarming. Wrapped up in the precision and meticulousness of their bodies, they knew neither deviation nor error. They sank for a moment, far into themselves, to the bottom of their being; they froze in their soft fur and grew menacingly and ceremoniously serious, and their eyes grew as round as moons, soaking up the view into their fiery craters. But a moment later, cast out to the edge, to the surface, they yawned in their nihility, disappointed and without illusions."

"All springs begin in this way, from those enormous and astounding horoscopes, each beyond the scale of a single season of the year. And in each one—be it nevermore said, let me say it here—there is everything: endless processions and demonstrations, revolutions and barricades. And through them all at a certain moment, the hot wind of remembrance blows, that boundlessness of sadness and intoxication seeking in vain its counterpart in reality."

"In July, my father left to take the waters; he left me with my mother and older brother at the mercy of the summer days, white from the heat and stunning. Stupefied by the light, we leafed through that great book of the holiday, in which the pages were ablaze with splendour, their sickly sweet pulp, deep within, made from golden pears."

"Autumn! Autumn! The Alexandrine epoch of the year, gathering into its enormous libraries all the sterile wisdom of the three hundred and sixty-five days of the solar cycle! Oh, those aged mornings, as yellow as parchment, sweet with wisdom, like late evenings. Oh, those cunningly smiling mornings, like shrewd palimpsests, many-layered like old, yellowed books. Oh, the autumnal day, that old jester-librarian clambering up ladders in his slipped-down dressing gown, sampling the preserves of all ages and cultures!"

"filled with boredom, the winter days were here. A threadbare and patchy, too-short mantle of snow was spread over the reddened earth. It was too meagre for the many roofs, which remained black or rust coloured, shingled roofs like arks and thatched cottages, concealing within them the smoke-blackened expanses of attics—charred-black cathedrals bristling with ribs of rafters, purlins and joists, dark lungs of the winter gales. Each dawn uncovered new vent pipes and chimney stacks, sprung up in the night, blown out by the nocturnal gale—black pipes of the Devil’s organs."

"The moon was still high. The sky’s transformations—the metamorphoses of its multitudinous vaults in ever more masterfully described configurations—were unending. Like a silver astrolabe, the sky had opened up that night its bewitching internal mechanism, exhibiting in endless cycles the gilded mathematics of its cogs and wheels."

"Sometimes, a whole bright day passes in explosions of the sun, in accumulations of clouds encircled by redness at their edges, luminously and chromatically, breaking off at every edge. People go about stupefied by the light, their eyes closed, exploding inwardly with rockets, Roman candles and powder-kegs. But later, toward evening, that hurricane fire of light softens. The horizon grows rotund, beautiful, and full of azure, like a glass ball in a garden with its miniature and illuminated panorama of the world, in a happily ordered composition, above which the clouds are arranged, its conclusive toppings, unfolding in a long row like rouleaux of golden medals, or peals of bells combining in rosy litanies."

"I never practice, I always play."

"You play Bach your way and I'll play him his way."

"Emil Sauer was also a good pianist, good technique, style. Very good fingers. He was a Liszt pupil. He was at his best in salon music — Chopin waltzes, things like that. But I heard him play a very good, very correct Op. 109. Some of the Liszt pupils were horrible. One I never could understand was Siloti. He played very badly. Another Liszt pupil was the famous Moriz Rosenthal, and I hated his playing. He couldn't make one nice phrase. I don't understand how he got his fame. Perhaps when I heard him he was too old to have any control. He had dexterity but he had no real technique, and I don't think he really knew how to play the piano. He didn't make music."

"His playing is stunning, with absolutely no smudging."

"His style on it was one of the phenomena of twentieth-century pianism. Above all he had tone: a magical tone, never hard even at moments of greatest stress; a shimmering, tinted, pellucid tone. His playing had a degree of spontaneity, of "lift," of dash, daring and subtle rhythm, that was unparalleled. Perhaps only his close friend Rachmaninoff was titan enough to stand by his side as an equal. But even Rachmaninoff never had Hofmann's poetry, color and vitality. Nobody so made the piano sing. When he played, there was the feeling of a tremendous and original musical personality. His rubato was carefully measured, yet it flowed freely and naturally. His playing always had breathing space, and his basses exceptional clarity. (Hofmann used to despise what he scornfully called "right-hand pianists.") Never did the playing sag, never were there dead spots, never did the tensile quality slacken. A strong classic element was represented in the purity of his pianistic approach. And his interpretations, romantic but not exaggerated, had a measure of classicism."

"In my student days, when Leschetizky was dissatisfied with the way we turned a phrase, he would bid us leave the piano and walk about the room with our eyes shut until a new phrasing suggested itself. Then we were allowed to play for him. I still follow this procedure, leaving the piano to think about a phrase which needs better shaping. How do you know if your thinking leads you to the right interpretive result? Well, you don’t! Except in the sense that no sincerely planned and logically motivated interpretation is wholly wrong. What you think about music (that is, your interpretation) depends upon talent, intelligence, and general makeup- I might also add maturity, always taking into account that some people mature at an earlier age than others. The natural vigor of these qualities, together with their development, will ultimately lead to some valid train of musical thought."