very prodigious correctness, the “Dutchman” overture seemed bare and comparatively lifeless:  the roar and the hiss of the storm were absent, and the shrill discordant wail of wind in the cordage; one heard, not the wail or the hiss or the roar, but the notes which—­in our crude scale with its arbitrary division into tones and half-tones—­Wagner had perforce to use to suggest them.  There was even something of flippancy in it after Mottl’s gigantic rendering:  one longed for the dramatic hanging back of the time at the phrase, “Doch ach! den Tod, ich fand ihn nicht!” which is of such importance in the overture.  On the other hand, a more splendid reading of the first movement of the Fifth symphony I have never heard; but the rest of the movements were hardly to be called readings at all.  The most devoted admirers of Lamoureux—­and I was his fairly devoted admirer myself—­will not deny that the slow movement is full of poetry, the scherzo of a remote, mystical emotion, and the Finale of a wondrous combination of sadness, regret and high triumphant joy; and anyone who claims that Lamoureux gave us the slightest hint of those qualities must be more than his admirer—­must be his infatuated slave.  The last movement even wanted richness; for that excessive clearness which prevented the tones blending into masses, and forced one to distinguish the separate notes of the flutes, the oboes, the clarinets, and so forth, seemed to rob the music of all its body, its solidity.  But, when all is said, Lamoureux was, in his special way, a noble master of the orchestra; and, even if I could not regard him as a great interpreter of the greatest music, I admit that the side of the great music which he revealed was well worth knowing, and should indeed be known to all who would understand the great music.

When I wrote the preceding paragraphs on Lamoureux, some of my colleagues were good enough to neglect their own proper business while they put me right about orchestral playing in general and that of Lamoureux in particular.  These gentlemen told me that, when Beethoven (whom they knew personally) wrote certain notes, he intended them and no others to be played; that the more accurate a rendering, the closer it approaches to the work as it existed in Beethoven’s mind; that, ergo, Lamoureux’s playing of Beethoven, being the most accurate yet heard in England, was the best, the truest, the most Beethovenish yet heard in England.  All which I flatly deny, and describe as the foolish ravings of uninformed theorists.  Only unpractical dreamers fancy that a composer thinks of “notes” when he composes.  He hears music with his mental ear in the first place, and he afterwards sets down such notes as experience has taught him will reproduce approximately what he has heard when they are played upon the instrument for which his composition is intended, whether the instrument is piano, violin, the human voice, or orchestra.  And just as he counts on the harmonics and sympathetic