practise one particular etude or fugue or sonata; you may
choose anything you like, and learn your nimbleness and strength that
way. Read, too; read for a couple of hours every day. The written
language of music must become so familiar to you that it is to you
precisely what a book or a newspaper is, so that whether you read it
aloud--which is playing--or sit in your arm-chair with your feet on the
fender, reading it not aloud on the piano, but to yourself, it conveys
its definite meaning to you. At your lessons you will have to read aloud
to me. But when you are reading to yourself, never pass over a bar that
you don't understand. It has got to sound in your head, just as the
words you read in a printed book really sound in your head if you read
carefully and listen for them. You know exactly what they would be like
if you said them aloud. Can you read, by the way? Have a try."

Falbe got down a volume of Bach and opened it at random.

"There," he said, "begin at the top of the page."

"But I can't," said Michael. "I shall have to spell it out."

"That's just what you mustn't do. Go ahead, and don't pause till you get
to the bottom of the page. Count; start each bar when it comes to its
turn, and play as many notes as you can in it."

This was a dismal experience. Michael hitherto had gone on the
painstaking and thorough plan of spelling out his notes with laborious
care. Now Falbe's inexorable voice counted for him, until it was lost in
inextinguishable laughter.

"Go on, go on!" he shouted. "I thought it was Bach, and it is clearly
Strauss's Don Quixote."

Michael, flushed and determined, with grave, set mouth, ploughed his way
through amazing dissonances, and at the end joined Falbe's laughter.

"Oh dear," he said. "Very funny. But don't laugh so at me, Hermann."

Falbe dried his eyes.

"And what was it?" he said. "I declare it was the fourth fugue. An
entirely different conception of it! A thoroughly original view! Now,
what you've got to do, is to repeat that--not the same murder I mean,
but other murders--for a couple of hours a day. . . . By degrees--you
won't believe it--you will find you are not murdering any longer, but
only mortally wounding. After six months I dare say you won't even be
hurting your victims. All the same, you can begin with less muscular
ones."

In this way Michael's musical horizons were infinitely extended. Not
only did this system of Falbe's of flying at new music, and going