Observations placeholder

… as all these experiments were done, time passed and the date of my entry into the school for which I was working was fast approaching. We had thus arrived around July 1891.…….

One fine evening, we were gathered, quiet and with our families, around the table, busy talking with Emile T... when, by knocking, he warned us that Méhul's spirit wanted to talk to us.

Immediately, my father began to write the alphabetic letters, as usual; the communication thus obtained told us:

- I ask Georges to play the piano, he will play under my influence.

- But how? cried my father, stunned, having never heard of such a thing.

- Like everyone else, Méhul continued, with his hands on the keyboard, and let him wait.

Amazed, my father, mother, grandmother and I all got up and entered the living room.

I headed towards the piano whose lamps we had turned on and settled down as Méhul had said, I waited.

After a quarter of an hour, as no phenomena occurred, my father told us: " It is not possible, there must be a communication error, let's go back to the dining room."

So here we are again around the table. Immediately, it starts to turn again and Méhul reproduces his message verbatim, but adds this sentence on which I cannot rely too much: "You must turn off the lamps, because the light rays are an obstacle to the demonstration".

Quickly, we rush back to the living room; we turn everything off and here I am in the deepest darkness, in front of an instrument, completely exposed to the influence of the underworld.

.......... I would like to point out immediately that the darkness that was necessary at the beginning to obtain a piece only remained a rule for about a year.  At the end of this time, little by little, the light was restored and now I can play in the bright sun or, as you will read later, in the bright lights of a concert hall.

Perhaps you will ask me what were my impressions at that moment?

I will confess that a certain apprehension had taken hold of me; and despite all the physical phenomena I had been given to witness, a vague fear overwhelmed me.

Indeed, if everything I had seen before had been obtained through me, I had not personally experienced any particular sensation. It was not the same for this piano experiment. I realized that it was my own body that was going to come into play.

What was going to happen?

My God, it was very simple, although strange for me.

Suddenly I felt my hands go numb.

More and more the feeling of the keyboard disappeared under my fingers, and I was surprised to hear a magnificent chord resounding with force, because I could no longer feel the keys at all.

I immediately realized that my hands were absolutely anesthetized, because my arms were moving following the notes, but manual touching was abolished.

I was very happy to understand that I was going to attend, as a real listener, this concert of a new kind.

I felt my brain completely free and without any concern for false notes, I completely surrendered to the influence of Méhul.

Nevertheless, this feeling of playing the piano, without feeling the keyboard and without knowing what was being played under my fingers, was rather strange.

But while I was happy, the surprise, the joy especially were complete for my father, my mother and my grandmother.

So I'm a medium musician!