your pianos. Compare it to the tympani? Never,
never! It is false, insincere, and smirks and simpers if even a silly
school girl sits before it. It takes on the color of any composer's
ideas, and submits like a slave to the whims of any virtuoso. I am
disgusted. Here am I, an old kettle-drummer--as you say in your
barbarous English--poor, unknown, forced to earn a beggarly living by
strumming dance tunes in a variety hall on a hated piano, and often
accompanying singers, acrobats, and all the riffraff of a vaudeville,
where a mist of vulgarity hangs like a dirty pearl cloud over all. I
don't look at my music any more. I know what is wanted. I have rhythmic
talent. I conduct myself, although there is a butter-faced leader waving
a silly stick at us while I sit in my den, half under the stage, and
thrum and think, and blink and thrum.

And what do you suppose I do with my mornings--for I have to rehearse
every afternoon with odious people who splash their draggled lives with
feeble, sick music--? I stay in my attic room and play upon my tympani,
my beloved children. I have three of them, and I play all sorts of
scores, from the wonderful first measures of Beethoven's Fifth, to
Saint-Saens' Arabian music. Ah! those men understand my instrument. It
is no instrument of percussion to them. It has a soul. It is the heart
of the orchestra. Its rhythmic throb is the pulse of musical life. What
are your strings, your scratching, rasping strings! What signifies the
blare of your brass, or the bilious bleating of your wood-wind! I am the
centre, the life giver. From me the circulation of warm, musical blood
emanates. I stand at the back of the orchestra as high as the
conductor. Ah! he knows it; he looks at me first. How about the Fifth
Symphony? You now sneer no longer. It is I who outline with mystic taps
the framework of the story. Wagner, great, glorious, glowing Wagner!--I
kiss his memory--he appreciated the tympani and their noble mission in
music....

Yes, I am an educated man, but music snared me away from a worldly
career. Music and--a woman; but never mind that part of it. Do you know
Hunding's motif in "Die Walkuere"? Ha! ha! I will give it to you. Listen!
Is it not beautiful? The stern, acrid warrior approaches. And Wagner
gave it to me, to the tympani. Am I crazy, am I arrogant, to feel as I
do about my darling dwarf children? Look at their beloved bellies, so
smooth, so elastic, so resonant! A tiny tap and I set vib