Musical notation caresses the eye no less than music itself soothes the ear. The blacks of the piano scale climb up and down like lamplighters. Each measure is a little boat loaded with raisins and black grapes.
A page of music is, firstly, the deployment in battle of sailing flotillas and, secondly, the plan according to which night, arranged in plum pits, sinks.
The colossal descents of Chopin's mazurkas in concert, the wide staircases festooned with bells of the Liszt etudes, Mozart's hanging gardens with parterres, trembling on five wires-these have nothing in common with the undersized shrubbery of the Beethoven sonatas.
The mirage cities of musical signs stand like starling houses in boiling pitch.
Schubert's vineyard of notes is always pecked right down to the seeds and lashed by storms.
When hundreds of lamplighters rush about the streets with their little ladders hanging flats on rusty hooks, strengthening the weathervane of sharps, taking down entire placards of stringy measures--that, of course, is Beethoven; but when the cavalry of eights and sixteenths in their paper plumes with horse insignia and little standards throw themselves into the attack--that, too, is Beethoven.