“I cannot play that, my dear lady! I am your most devoted servant--but I cannot. That is not music--believe me! I have always flattered myself I knew something about music--but this is chaos! This is demagogy, blasphemy, insanity, madness! It is a perfumed-fog, shot through with lightning! It is the end of all honesty in art. I will not play it!” And with the words he had thrown himself again on the stool, and with his Adam’s apple working furiously up and down, with coughs and sighs, had accomplished another twenty-five beats. But then he shut the piano and cried out: “Oh, fie, fie! No, this is going too far. Forgive me, dear lady, if I speak frankly what I feel. You have honoured me for years, and paid me for my services; and I am a man of modest means. But I must lay down my office, I assure you, if you drive me to it by asking me to play these atrocities! Look, the child sits there listening--would you then utterly corrupt his soul?” But let him gesture as furiously as he would, she brought him over--slowly, by easy stages, by persistent playing and persuasion. “Pfühl,” she would say, “be reasonable, take the thing calmly. You are put off by his original use of harmony. Beethoven seems to you so pure, clear, and natural, by contrast. But remember how Beethoven himself affronted his contemporaries, who were brought up in the old way. And Bach--why, good Heavens, you know how he was reproached for his want of melody and clearness! You talk about honesty--but what do you mean by honesty in art? Is it not the antithesis of hedonism? And, if so, then that is what you have here. Just as much as in Bach. I tell you, Pfühl, this music is less foreign to your inner self than you think!” “It is all juggling and sophistry--begging your pardon,” he grumbled. But she was right, after all: the music was not so impossible as he thought at first. He never, it is true, quite reconciled himself to _Tristan_, though he eventually carried out Gerda’s wish and made a very clever arrangement of the Liebestod for violin and piano. He was first won over by certain parts of _Die Meistersinger_; and slowly a love for this new art began to stir within him. He would not confess it--he was himself aghast at the fact, and would pettishly deny it when the subject was mentioned. But after the old masters had had their due, Gerda no longer needed to urge him to respond to a more complex demand upon his virtuosity; with an expression of shame-faced pleasure, he would glide into the weaving harmonies of the _Leit-motiv_. After the music, however, there would be a long explanation of the relation of this style of music to that of the _Strenge Satz_; and one day Herr Pfühl admitted that, while not personally interested in the theme, he saw himself obliged to add a chapter to his book on Church Music, the subject of which would be the application of the old key-system to the church- and folk-music of Richard Wagner.