The programme of the music included the _Egmont_ overture, a valse of Waldteufel, _Tannhäuser's Pilgrimage to Rome_, the overture to the _Merry Wives_ of Nicolai, the religious march of _Athalie_, and a fantasy on the _North Star_. The orchestra played the Beethoven overture correctly, and the valse deliciously. During the _Pilgrimage of Tannhäuser_, the uncorking of bottles was heard. A big man sitting at the table next to Christophe beat time to the _Merry Wives_ by imitating Falstaff. A stout old lady, in a pale blue dress, with a white belt, golden pince-nez on her flat nose, red arms, and an enormous waist, sang in a loud voice _Lieder_ of Schumann and Brahms. She raised her eyebrows, made eyes at the wings, smiled with a smile that seemed to curdle on her moon-face, made exaggerated gestures which must certainly have called to mind the _café-concert_ but for the majestic honesty which shone in her: this mother of a family played the part of the giddy girl, youth, passion: and Schumann's poetry had a faint smack of the nursery. The audience was in ecstasies.--But they grew solemn and attentive when there appeared the Choral Society of the Germans of the South (_Süddeutschen Männer Liedertafel_), who alternately cooed and roared part songs full of feeling. There were forty and they sang four parts: it seemed as though they had set themselves to free their execution of every trace of style that could properly be called choral: a hotch-potch of little melodious effects, little timid puling shades of sound, dying _pianissimos_, with sudden swelling, roaring _crescendos_, like some one heating on an empty box: no breadth or balance, a mawkish style: it was like Bottom: "Let me play the lion. I will roar you as gently as any sucking dove. I will roar you as it were a nightingale." Christophe listened: foam the beginning with growing amazement. There was nothing new in it all to him. He knew these concerts, the orchestra, the audience. But suddenly it all seemed to him false. All of it: even to what he most loved, the _Egmont_ overture, in which the pompous disorder and correct agitation hurt him in that hour like a want of frankness. No doubt it was not Beethoven or Schumann that he heard, but their absurd interpreters, their cud-chewing audience whose crass stupidity was spread about their works like a heavy mist.--No matter, there was in the works, even the most beautiful of them, a disturbing quality which Christophe had never before felt.--What was it? He dared not analyze it, deeming it a sacrilege to question his beloved masters. But in vain did he shut his eyes to it: he had seen it. And, in spite of himself, he went on seeing it: like the _Vergognosa_ at Pisa he looked: between his fingers.