Then they searched the old masters, in Haydn and Mozart, for things sufficiently easy for me to handle.  At five I was playing small sonatas correctly, with good interpretation and excellent precision.  But I consented to play them only before listeners capable of appreciating them.  I have read in a biographical sketch that I was threatened with whippings to make me play.  That is absolutely false; but it was necessary to tell me that there was a lady in the audience who was an excellent musician and had fastidious tastes.  I would not play for those who did not know.

As for the threat of whippings, that must be relegated to the realm of legends with the one that Garcia punished his daughters to make them learn to sing.  Madame Viardot expressly told me that neither she nor her sister was abused by their father and that they learned music without realizing it, just as they learned to talk.

But in spite of my surprising progress my teacher did not foresee what my future was to be.  “When he is fifteen,” she said, “if he can write a dance, I shall be satisfied.”  It was just at this time, however, that I began to write music.  I wrote waltzes and galops—­the galop was fashionable at that period; it ran to rather ordinary musical motives and mine were no exception to the rule.  Liszt had to show by his Galop Chromatique the distinction that genius can give to the most commonplace themes.  My waltzes were better.  As has always been the case with me, I was already composing the music directly on paper without working it out on the piano.  The waltzes were too difficult for my hands, so a friend of the family, a sister of the singer Geraldy, was kind enough to play them for me.

I have looked over these little compositions lately.  They are insignificant, but it is impossible to find a technical error in them.  Such precision was remarkable for a child who had no idea of the science of harmony.  About that time some one had the notion that I should hear an orchestra.  So they took me to a symphony concert and my mother held me in her arms near the door.  Until then I had only heard single violins and their tone had not pleased me.  But the impression of the orchestra was entirely different and I listened with delight to a passage played by a quartet, when, suddenly, came a blast from the brass instruments—­the trumpets, trombones and cymbals.  I broke into loud cries, “Make them stop.  They prevent my hearing the music.”  They had to take me out.

When I was seven, I passed out of my great-aunt’s hands into Stamaty’s.  He was surprised at the way my education in music had been directed and he expressed this in a small work in which he discussed the necessity of making a correct start.  In my case, he said, there was nothing to do but to perfect.