musicians shows, as he never could show otherwise, the distance at which his lively spectre stands from life.  When I heard the “Don Juan,” which I had heard twice before, and liked less the second time than the first, I realised finally the whole strain, pretence, and emptiness of the thing.  Played with this earnest attention to the meaning of every note, it was like a trivial drama when Duse acts it; it went to pieces through being taken at its own word.  It was as if a threadbare piece of stuff were held up to the full sunlight; you saw every stitch that was wanting.

The “Don Juan” was followed by the Entr’acte and Ballet music from “Rosamunde,” and here the same sunlight was no longer criticism, but rather an illumination.  I have never heard any music more beautifully played.  I could only think of the piano playing of Pachmann.  The faint, delicate music just came into existence, breathed a little, and was gone.  Here for once was an orchestra which could literally be overheard.  The overture to the “Meistersinger” followed, and here, for the first time, I got, quite flawless and uncontradictory, the two impressions which that piece presents to one simultaneously.  I heard the unimpeded march forward, and I distinguished at the same time every delicate impediment thronging the way.  Some renderings give you a sense of solidity and straightforward movement; others of the elaborate and various life which informs this so solid structure.  Here one got the complete thing, completely rendered.

I could not say the same of the rendering of the overture to “Tristan.”  Here the notes, all that was so to speak merely musical in the music, were given their just expression; but the something more, the vast heave and throb of the music, was not there.  It was “classical” rendering of what is certainly not “classical” music.  Hear that overture as Richter gives it, and you will realise just where the Meiningen orchestra is lacking.  It has the kind of energy which is required to render Beethoven’s multitudinous energy, or the energy which can be heavy and cloudy in Brahms, or like overpowering light in Bach, or, in Wagner himself, an energy which works within known limits, as in the overture to the “Meistersinger.”  But that wholly new, and somewhat feverish, overwhelming quality which we find in the music of “Tristan” meets with something less than the due response.  It is a quality which people used to say was not musical at all, a quality which does not appeal certainly to the musical sense alone:  for the rendering of that we must go to Richter.

Otherwise, in that third concert it would he difficult to say whether Schumann, Brahms, Mozart, or Beethoven was the better rendered.  Perhaps one might choose Mozart for pure pleasure.  It was the “Serenade” for wind instruments, and it seemed, played thus perfectly, the most delightful music in the world.  The music of Mozart is, no doubt, the most beautiful music in the world.  When I heard the serenade I thought of Coventry Patmore’s epithet, actually used, I think, about Mozart:  “glittering peace.”  Schumann, Brahms, Wagner, and Beethoven all seemed for the moment to lose a little of their light under this pure and tranquil and unwavering “glitter.”  I hope I shall never hear the “Serenade” again, for I shall never hear it played as these particular players played it.