1st Excerpt: Chopin?s excellence only got fuller as he played. His fingers and hands were slender, tapered, but expanded over the keyboard when necessary like the jaws of a snake for its prey. Yet, despite the success of his Parisian debut just days earlier, he preferred the venue of salons and soirees to concert halls, and Wieck understood why. Chopin was more poetic than powerful; Clara, at twelve, could have matched his fortissimos, but there were so many gradations within his pianissimos that fortissimos seemed extraneous ? and as fine as were Clara?s pianissimos, as seamless as were her runs, they could not match Chopin?s glissandos, a method he had developed, fingers and feet on keys and pedals, so songful it was the apotheosis of Wieck?s own Method. 2nd Excerpt: Beethoven had been the first thunderer, sweeping arms like windmills, preferring the catharsis of expression over the taste of the moment, but he differed from Liszt in one important aspect: the accuracy of his notes may sometimes have been in doubt, but never his emotion; Liszt?s notes were never in doubt, but his emotion was always suspect. His hands appeared to multiply, now above the piano, now to one side, now to the other; his fingers multiplied no less, separating from his hands like so many lizard tails, scurrying across the keyboard. 3rd Excerpt: The Baroness sipped champagne. ?I am often told, Doktor Brahms, that I resemble Emilia Rontgen.

Do you not find that it is so?? Emilia Rontgen was an actress, renowned for her roles onstage and off, also for her beauty. Brahms gripped his champagne glass in his left hand, his third refill, a cigar wedged between the fingers of his right. ?Hah! Yes, I find it so ? indeed, I do.? The Baroness smiled, standing closer. ?Do you really?? Brahms laughed again. ?Yes, really. I simply cannot tell the two of you apart. When I am next to one of you, I invariably wish it were the other.

? 4th Excerpt: Brahms was playing the intermezzo again, lullaby of his sorrows, but now appeared so spectral I could see through him; the piano might have been playing itself, keys moving of their own volition. The opus sounded now like a waltz, now a slow march, now a lullaby, now a dirge, depending on the listener?s mood, all in the space of a few minutes, a bundle of contradictions, as was much of his music, symphonies criticized for being inflated chamberworks, chamberworks for being symphonies in the egg ? as was the man, criticized for taking no chances and for deviating from the models, for being unprogressive and modern, for being too much like Beethoven and not enough ? but the contradictions clarify rather than confuse our understanding: he looked constantly to the future, never forgetting the past, fashioning holograms from palimpsests. What remained ? the residue, the essence, distillate of his life, gold from straw ? remains impervious to fang and claw, at once the heart of the riddle of life and medicine for the heart.