Hard by, on your right, are the craggy heights of Capranica. Tradition has it that Michael Angelo was in exile up there, after doing something rather risky. What had he done? He crucified his model, desirous, like a true artist, to observe and reproduce faithfully in marble the muscular contractions and facial agony of such a sufferer. To crucify a man: this was going almost too far, even for the Pope of that period, who seems to have been an unusually sensitive pontiff--or perhaps the victim was a particular friend of his. However that may be, he waxed wroth and banished the conscientious sculptor in disgrace to this lonely mountain village, there to expiate his sins, for a day or two.... One sleeps badly here. Those nightingales--they are worse than the tram-cars in town. They begin earlier. They make more noise. Surely there is a time for everything? Will certain birds never learn to sing at reasonable hours? A word as to these nightingales. One of them elects to warble, in deplorably full-throated ease, immediately below my bedroom window. When this particular fowl sets up its din at about 3.45 a.m. it is a veritable explosion; an ear-rending, nerve-shattering explosion of noise. I use that word "noise" deliberately. For it is not music--not until your ears are grown accustomed to it. I know a little something about music, having studied the art with considerable diligence for a number of years. Impossible to enumerate all the composers and executants on various instruments, the conductors and opera-singers and ballet-girls with whom I was on terms of familiarity during that incarnation. Perhaps I am the only person now alive who has shaken hands with a man (Lachner) who shook hands with Beethoven and heard his voice; all of which may appear when I come to indite my musical memoirs. I have written a sonata in four movements, opus 643, hitherto unpublished, and played the organ during divine service to a crowded congregation. Furthermore I performed, not at my own suggestion, his insipid Valse Caprice to the great Antoine Rubinstein, who was kind enough to observe: "Yes, yes. Quite good. But I rather doubt whether you could yet risk playing that in a concert." And in the matter of sheer noise I am also something of an expert, having once, as an infant prodigy, broken five notes in a single masterly rendering of Liszt's polonaise in E Major--I think it is E Major--whereupon my teacher, himself a pupil of Liszt, genially remarked: "Now don't cry, and don't apologize. A polonaise like yours is worth a piano." I set these things down with modest diffidence, solely in order to establish my locus standi as a person who might be expected to know the difference between sound and noise. As such, I have no hesitation in saying that the first three bars of that nightingale performance are, to sleeping ears, not music. They break upon the stillness with the crash of Judgment Day.