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209 Instrumental Illusions One autumn, a young pianist came from France. He stayed through winter and performed a whole range of pieces with great skill in the tradition of his country. The works included some from the classical German repertoire, but he brought along many pieces of French origin that we’d known only by hearsay until then and hardly ever got to see performed. I attended a series of six concerts spread over several weeks. Since the location was a hall in a hotel, the audience was small, so it was possible to listen in a mood of quiet luxuriance. The more times I went, the more familiar I became with the place itself, as well as with the faces and profiles of the surrounding audience. I felt the same intimacy as if I were attending a class. The concerts were organized in a really agreeable way. It was one of the last of those evening events. That day, I entered the concert hall feeling exceptionally calm and clearheaded. I gave the music my full attention, determined not to miss a single bar from the long sonata in the first part. When the sonata was over, I felt I’d been able to immerse myself in its full emotion. I had a premonition that I wouldn’t be able to sleep when I went to bed that night, and that, in my sleeplessness, I would suffer double the anguish of my present happiness. But that had no effect on the sense of being deeply moved that overwhelmed me just then. 210 Kajii Motojirō When the interval came, I gave a wink to a friend seated some distance away, and wove my way between people’s shoulders out to the open air. At the time, my friend and I made no comment on the music but simply smoked our cigarettes together in silence. The mutual solitude to which we’d both unconsciously grown accustomed seemed entirely appropriate for the event that evening. But as my mood settled in the silence, I felt that the powerful emotion gripping me had merged into a feeling akin to indifference. I take out a cigarette. I hold it in my mouth. And then I smoke it quietly. Really nothing unusual about that, I thought. Just like the lamplight glowing red in the night sky, or the blue sparks arcing from time to time inside the light . . . But, when I heard someone nearby carelessly whistling the motif of the sonata that had been repeated so many times, I watched my mind shift into a state of intense loathing. I returned to my seat with some time of the interval remaining. I looked vacantly at the face of a woman who stayed in the empty hall, aware that my feelings had gradually relaxed at last. But when the bell eventually rang and people returned to their seats, with the same heads lined up in the same places, I just couldn’t work out what was happening. Somehow my brain seemed frozen, and I felt strangely oppressed by the next piece that was about to begin. This time it was mainly a series of short modern and contemporary French works that were being played. Sometimes the performer’s ten white fingers wrestled with the keyboard like waves surging into foamy crests, sometimes like domestic animals that frisked together. At times, they moved as if they had slipped free from the performer’s will, and from the music that rang out. This thought suddenly redirected my attention from the sounds of the music to the atmosphere of the hall, where everyone listened with bated breath. This happens a lot to me so I wasn’t conscious of it at first, but it became more pronounced as the program approached the end. Tonight is definitely strange, I thought. Was I tired? No. My mind was so tense I couldn’t bear it. Normally, when a piece ended and everyone clapped, it was my habit just to sit there quietly. But this evening, I remained absolutely motionless as if I were being constrained. Dramatic shifts in the hall, from seething commotion to utter tranquillity, found their way to my heart like moods that arise in the course of a long piece of music. Dear readers, when you were very young, didn’t you ever play this trick? When surrounded by the din of other people, you use your fingers [18.223.0.53] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 09:19...

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