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RICHARD CHURCH. From Over the Bridge (London, 1955)

Then one day a gaunt young man with long hair and a nervous cough came to tune the piano.  I noticed his thin, dirty hands, with finger-nails like claws that rattled on the keys and scratched the faceboard behind them. He smoked cigarettes the whole time he was at work: and that was an unusual habit in 1900.

During a pause, after the tuning was done, my brother produced this Beethoven sonata, and asked the tuner to give him an inkling how it should be attacked.

The result was like that of opening a weir. The thin, bow-backed figure of the piano-tuner shook with latent energy. He tossed his hair back, cracked his bony knuckles, and began to play the sonata in G major, Opus 32 No.1, (published in 1803), which, as music-lovers will recollect, opens with a startling statement, a running gesture, and then the assertion of a theme whose dogma is beyond all doubt.

The tuner emphasized that dogma with the vehemence of a Savonarola castigating the pleasure-loving Florentines. Jack and I swayed like water-weeds in the flood, making the same mesmeric movements under the invisible punches of the music. Then, after the violent assertion and running to and fro, the second part of the sonata, heard by us both for the first time in our lives, came but with a long, rapid melody that tore us up by the roots and flung us downstream; the main stream of the art of music.

The musician was equally touched by his own magic, for as he played this melody, he leaned over it, watering it with his flowing hair, which almost touched the ivories. I was deeply impressed, as much by the spectacle as by the music. All was new to me: the performer, his odd manners and appearance, the nature of the music and the fluidity of the performance. That is why I have never forgotten that half-hour, as long as one of the half-hours spent by Adam and Eve in the Garden, before their Disobedience set the clocks ticking.