to realize the composer’s intention, lessons somehow terminated.
There were no other musical gods in the households which the Professor had visited. His instruction was a personal dispensation from a melodic deity. He had a rigid curriculum of exercises and display pieces which he set before every student. Every Abendschein pupil could perform his current “piece’”—as distinguished from the works of Czerny, Clementi and Kullak—to the satisfaction of his parents, who usually were summoned by the Professor when the pupil had acquired control of the “piece.” There was nothing beyond the “piece” save the next “piece.” Tommy Borge, who once had taken a few lessons from the Professor, but whose reluctance to practise scales and such matters had led to an amicable rupture, used to delight in describing Carl Abendschein as a “piece worker.” The Professor frowned on public performances of music which he had not taught.
“Play your piece,” he would say, “and play it well—as I have taught you. That is enough.”
The Professor never appeared in public as a virtuoso, although he carried with him a battered program of a concert of thirty years ago when he performed on the same platform with several men whose names now meant sold-out houses at Carnegie Hall. He did not pretend to be a great pianist, yet he managed somehow always to play a bit better than his most advanced pupil. His musical sphere was determined entirely by his routine of teaching material. When beginners asked about Debussy or Ravel, Abendschein would smile vaguely and say “we will come to that when you have mastered Kullak.” He was a paternal dictator in a tiny monarchy.
And when a wife of whose existence the Professor’s pupils had hardly been aware sent out little black-bordered
[5]
