The Manitowoc pilot. [volume] (Manitowoc, Wis.) 1859-1932, 1902-05-08
A MUSICAL PRODIGY.
The Pltifal pLaint of u Man Flat
Dweller Who Is Annoyed by
Youthful Piano Founder.

Zone of the members of the sedate
and highly-respectable family that
| lives IN the fiat right beneath mine,
| said the man with the haunted, wor-
ried look and the nervous, jerky man
ner, relates the Washington Star, lis
little girl about IL years of age. She
is a nice, tidy, pleasant-mannered lit
tie girl, too-but l wish, sometimes,
that her father hadn't secured the
government job that brought him to
Washington. Otherwise, he would
probably have remained in northern
Missouri with his family, including
that nice, tidy, pleasant-mannered lit
tie girl.
"Why? Well, the little girl is tax
ing lessons as they say, on the piano
forte. She goes to school, of course.
and therefore she has to do a lot OF
her practicing in the morning. She
begins about seven o'clock in the morn
ing, an hour at which before that fam
lily moved into their fiat was usually
employed in dreaming of money and
gilt-edged securities and other glori-
Gus, if impossible, things. The little
girl has arrived at that stage of her
musical instruction at which she is
permitted by her teacher to take ur
pieces She has quite a list of pieces
on her little list now, and the things
that she does to 'em during the early
morning hour or so would never, never
do to print.
"She begins the morning with
about ten minutes of Duvernay scales
She always wha@ks two side-by-side
keys with each finger in doing this. but
that doesn't seem to bother her at all,
her main idea being, it would seem. to
get through with the scale business
just as quickly as possible, in order to
reach her 'piece'-playing performance.
"Duvernay having been butchered
quartered, sliced into sections, sailed
and put away. this nice little girl with
the pleasant manners puts 'Silvery
Waves on the rack-in more ways
than one-and proceeds to make that
immemOrial bore of composition
sound like-well. like as if mule
were playing a Xylophone solo on a
pair of Venetian blinds, if such a
thing could be. 1t is in the variations
that the nice little girl makes every
moment Of 'Silvery Waves an incred-
IDLY long-drawn-out agony.
"'Silvery Waves having been played
off the boards, to employ slangism of
the race course, the nice little girl gets
the thumbscrews on Nerdi's immOrta al
'Miserere' from III Trovatore' Now. |
don't yield to anybody in my reverence
for the ,Miserere.' | don't suppose
there could be more noble and inspir-
ing melody than that. But it was as
suredly never designed to be played as
a rag-time composition. That's how
the nice little girl below me plays it,
She works in all the syncopation of rag
time very skillfully. She makes the
'Miserere' sound like something that
ought to have words fitted to it about
NAH coal-tar lady or NAH crap
siootin' baby and l am always, oh
so glad when she gets through execut-
ing that composition-yes, executing
is the word.
Being by this time in a lightsome
frolicsome mood, the nice little girl
hungers for something light and airy,
so she takes down The Frolic of the
Frogs Waltz She's got this one down
so pat, it having been her first piece,
that she can play the VIII ole thing from
beginning to end in something less
than AZ seconds, and that's the way she
plays it. If grasshoppers could waltz
to the dead gallop that she makes of
that three-quarter time composition,
they'd never get caught by small boys
and be made to spit tobacco juice
"She follows this up with The Little
Fisher Maiden which by some strange
trick of fancy she seems to imagine is
rollicking jig or buck dance. She
seems to entertain the same notion
with respect to MY Queen Waltz,
which is her next performance. 1t
takes her all of IA seconds-I timed her
to play My Queen Waltz from be-
ginning to end, and, at that she APP
pears to think she has wasted time, for
she scarcely gets through with that
before she sprints into Pure AS Snow,
which she renders as if it were dance
for marionettes. Then she gets back
to the waves mood by going at Waves
of the Ocean, which she performs as if
it had been written in reel time. After
she has performed 'Everybody's Oar
ling with great slowness and delibera-
ton, exactly the way it hadn't ought
to be PLAYED, she launches into The
Maiden's Prayer which sounds like a
runaway photograph. If any maiden
ever tried to pray to the pace set by
this little girl she'd establish worlds
record for the greatest number of ut
tered words within the space of one
minute.
"She is just winding up gloriously
with her first old love, the vindictive
and deyilish 'chopstcks,' when her
mother calls her to breakfast. Along
about six o'clock in the evening, when
I'm just settling down to read my Star
paper, she goes through the whole
thing again, only doing it backward
Il