There and Back with the 1816 Broadwood  

 

    In his The End of ‘Early’ Music, Bruce Haynes shares Yo-Yo Ma’s observation after having his 1712 Stradivarius cello adapted for a recording with the Amsterdam Baroque Orchestra and then having it returned to its previous condition:

          Whenever you have gone beyond the world that you know, and then go

            back to the familiar world, you find it changed. Whenever you move into

            a different world like that, it’s not with the sense of losing something from

            our traditional music.  You end up with greater freedom, not less. 

 

In a conversation with Emmanuel Ax having to do with the Beethoven A major cello sonata he again mentions freedom. I transcribed his words:

            Beethoven uses a certain technique to get to a certain point. We recognize

            that technique. So by really owning that technique, that gives us the freedom

            to be able to express and say we know the guy. The idea that used to be

            not ours becomes ours. And it’s our music, so therefore feel free to share it.

            Otherwise, we’re just trying to get it right.

 

   You and I well understand Yo-Yo Ma’s words about returning to the familiar world from the unfamiliar. After playing a Beethoven sonata on a period piano such as this 1816 Broadwood the piece is never the same. The notes become character and we begin anew with basics of sound and touch, articulation and touch, speech-like pacing, and what Bruce Haynes calls the essence of the piece. It is not that we do not already think about these matters, but because this piano is a surviving contemporary of the composer, and especially because it is a problematic contemporary, it can be a living witness for how Beethoven must have treated the pianos he knew.

   To set the stage, if Napoleon had not been defeated at Waterloo, Beethoven might never have owned a Broadwood. As David Wainwright writes in Broadwood by Appointment, the end of the Napoleonic wars saw “a flood of wealthy Britons travelling to those parts of Europe that had been closed to them for a quarter of a century.” Among these was Thomas Broadwood, age 29 and son of the late founder of the company. Years later he wrote – and I am reading from the Wainwright Broadwood by Appointment –

           It was in August 1817 I had the pleasure of seeing Beethoven at Vienna.

             I was introduced to him by his friend Mr Bridi, a Banker at Vienna. He

            was then so unwell, his table supported as many vials of medicine

            and gollipots as it did sheets of music paper & his cloaths so scattered

            about the room in the manner of an Invalid that I was not surprised

            when I called on him by appointment to take him out to Dine with us

            at the Prater to find him declare after he had one foot in the carriage

            that he found himself too unwell to dine out – & retreated upstairs

            again.

            I saw him several times after that at his own house and he was kind enough

            to play to me, but he was so deaf and unwell. 

   I think Thomas was a self-assured young man who may have been acquainted with his contact, Mr. Bridi, through company financial transactions. Considering how averse Beethoven was to playing for visitors, this already indicates a warm reception for this new acquaintance. Back in London, Thomas invited five pianists to pick the grandest of the House of Broadwood’s grand pianos to send to Beethoven: Kalkbrenner, Ries, Cramer, and two unfamiliar names, J. G. Ferrari, and C. Knyvett. These signed the pinblock, Kalkbrenner’s name later crossed out.

   Beethoven’s Broadwood, serial number 7362, arrived in Vienna the following June. Viennese pianists admired its warm, nuanced sound but missed the bright sound of Viennese pianos to which they were accustomed. The ‘waste’ motion in the key descent, permitting the jack to slide back under the hammer butt, and the slow damping may have made the English pushing action seem heavier and unresponsive. There are conflicting references to the piano during the remaining nine years of Beethoven’s life, Ludwig Rellstab’s visit for one, quoting Beethoven saying,

          That is a beautiful piano! I received it from London as a gift. Look at the names!

            It is a beautiful gift, and it has such a beautiful tone.

 this quoted from Das Klavier Beethovens und Liszts by Gy. Gábry in the Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae Tomus 8, pp. 383-384 (1866). On another occasion, complaining to the instrument builder, Johann Andreas Stumpff, about the incompleteness of pianos in general on which “one can play nothing with strength and effect,” Beethoven added, “I myself own a London instrument that cannot produce what one should expect.” (footnote 13, pp. 382)

      One can imagine that Beethoven gave his Broadwood hard use. There is the strange third person address when he asks Ignaz Schuppanzigh, “Does he believe I think of a wretched fiddle when the spirit speaks to me?” In his memoirs Stumpff recalled Beethoven showing him the Broadwood: “The upper range had no sound, and broken strings were tangled like a thorn bush whipped by the wind in a storm.” (footnote 13, pp. 382-383) When Moscheles played the Broadwood and a Viennese piano in a concert in 1824, his Viennese audience preferred the sound of their piano. Nevertheless, we read in the Wainwright book that Beethoven, according to Moscheles, preferred the Broadwood “of all his pianos.” Moscheles was there. We weren’t. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine Beethoven’s preferences being consistent.

   At the sale of Beethoven’s effects after his death, current piano building had passed it by, and its limited volume discouraged interest. The Broadwood, like the man without a country, had been a piano without a stage and now was an orphan without a home. As you probably know, it was purchased by a Viennese music dealer who presented it to Liszt who willed it to the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. The piano now stands on a white platform in a sunlit alcove off a hallway in the Museum, the 1847 portrait of Liszt on the wall behind it.   

      According to the Broadwood ‘porter’s book’ the present piano, serial number 7005, was purchased on Tuesday, August 6, 1816, by a Miss Slow in Kingston for £100 13 shillings, this amount three to four times the yearly earnings of an independent small business owner in 1816. If you were a maid or a butler, your would have earned even less. £500 being the approximate yearly income separating the well to do and the wealthy, Miss Slow had to have been a person of considerable means to afford this piano even though she was to receive 10% discount if the balance was paid within twelve months. She kept the piano until Friday, October 25, 1816, when she exchanged it for the same model, No. 7004, described in the porter’s book as ‘orn[amented].’ Over the weekend she changed her mind once more, and on Wednesday, October 30, No. 7004 was exchanged again for No. 7005.

   This piano was restored by Alistair Laurence whose ancestors, incidentally, were employed by Broadwood beginning in 1787. Unfortunately, the original leather hammer coverings had been replaced with felt. Strung with lighter gauge wire, it cannot be expected to sound as sonorous as it did standing on the factory floor. Nor can the twist in the case, having an effect on downbearing in the top treble, be remedied. Because we cannot avoid hearing the historic piano through the sound of the modern piano, we can never hear the period piano as the cutting edge in piano building. However, the combination of Stephen Birkett’s historical piano wire and leathers from John Lyon may approximate the original tone except for loudness. The 1806 Broadwood in this room retains all but five of its original leathers, and the sound is sensuous, in no way ‘tinny.’

      How can this sibling of Beethoven’s Broadwood, limited in loudness and brightness to our ears, have credibility interpreting Beethoven? Doesn’t it represent a dissonance between the romance of history and fulfillment of interpretation? There is dissonance in the equation of 1) history, 2) Beethoven’s tenacious grip on our musical senses, and 3) playing his music on this 1816 Broadwood or your historic piano for the uninitiated listener – the catalyst that summons one’s skill to persuade that listener that this piano is for real and Beethoven played on it is to be brushed by his spirit. On this piano, one learns to be involved – mentally, physically, emotionally – taking each of the basics mentioned previously to an expressive extreme: listening for life within sound not measured in decibels, discerning meaning in articulation, experimenting with rhetorical pacing, and having an idea of the essence of the piece. The attention of these listeners will not be held by our erudition, and this piano is not a vehicle for virtuosity. They will not comprehend the role of fugal writing in the first movement of Op. 111. They may not even know what fugal writing is. But, depending upon our personal involvement, they will hear the struggle, and that they will understand because it is part of life.

   It is on an instrument such as the 1816 Broadwood that this expressive of the extreme can more readily be recognized. One may derive an image of the extreme from Wilhelmine Schrōder-Devrient’s recollection of Beethoven’s conducting a rehearsal of the revival of Fidelio in November 1822. She was 17 at the time.

            At that time the master’s physical ear was already closed to all sounds. With a

            bewildered face and unearthly inspired eyes, waving his baton back and forth

            with violent motions, he stood in the midst of the performing musicians and

            didn’t hear a note! If he thought it should be piano he crouched down almost

            under the conductor’s desk and if he wanted forte he jumped up with the

            strangest gestures, uttering the weirdest sounds. (Thayer, Vol. II, p. 811)

   Accepting this piano on its own terms leads to a deeper reason even for why one wants to play. Of course, we have an ingrained love of the music, and we want to sound one with the piano and the turn of a phrase. But this piano fosters a deeper motivation based on need between the like-minded who understand. On occasion I drew for a student two circles, one for the student and one for me. Each represented a closed library of one’s every thought or word or deed – the “I am” that is unlike anyone who has ever lived or is living now. One feels estranged and compelled to reach out with an Op. 110 to tell the “I am” in the neighboring circle what it is like to be me. I remember asking a student playing the Chopin G minor Ballade when he would be most likely to reach out to a friend or call home – of course, when something has gone terribly wrong. The theme of the Ballade is an authentic cadence answer under one slur followed by a I – II7 half cadence question under a separate slur. Which will prevail? In the coda, Chopin expands the interval of a major second to a minor ninth – the question is now a scream – like Chopin looking for a friend or calling home.

   Involvement begins with finding a level of sound that is new to the listener. Beginning a recital with the Sonata Op. 78 offers an unfamiliar dynamic range, within which the critical forte of the cadence in C# major in m. 36-38 and the rude intrusion of the theme of the second movement (m. 31-32) impatiently interrupting the lyricism of the first movement are credible. Involvement makes sure that the intrusion sounds rudely intrusive enough that the listener’s attention is jolted. [play]

   With respect to the first chord, do you hear the effect of beginning on the fifth of the triad differing from beginning on the third? To me, the third of the triad determining major or minor is more personal, while the beginning on the fifth in this sonata has the sound of mutual understanding and empathy. It is perhaps a bit idealistic to believe that the listener can be made to remember the structural pitch c# in the opening line and principal theme, but the quality of that pitch within the F# major tonality may be subconsciously heard. In playing Beethoven, the well of idealism and involvement cannot be capped, this much and no more.

   Op. 110 seems to me the most personal of all the 32 sonatas. The beginning measures sound so alone in the widely spaced writing. The nearness of sound on the modern piano encourages pianists to project ‘singing tone’ as though to the furthest seat in the hall. Instead, the first phrase is movingly intimate and, one hopes, will draw the listener on to the stage to the source of the sound. [play] Beethoven wrote con amabilità, with ‘lovingness,’ in the space between the clefs, as though confined between prison bars, this as real as the aloneness in his being. It is this image that I now associate, after some 25 years, with the remark of a very insightful student that the Arietta theme of Op. 111 was like “crying on the inside about something one cannot cry about on the outside.”  The two-note slur is a lift figure, an inflection that beckons us into this innermost space in the three variations that follow, each more remote and elevated. The 1816 piano dares the interpreter to arouse the reflective in the listener’s mind.

      The voice parts of the B flat minor triad in the third movement are separated by two octaves and a minor third. Traditional pianists may never have heard the thin, distant sound of this widely spaced minor triad. I hear its timbre as the aloneness of remorse after the wanton Allegro molto quoting a Viennese street song: Ich bin lüdelich, Du bist lüdelich, wir sind alle lüdelich.  Lüdelich sounds much like a cognate, lewd, and the crossed-hand play of the middle section like laughter. Of course, playing on the modern piano, one can also dynamically cleave these two movements, but Beethoven’s unbounded fantasy beyond taste in the Allegro molto is lost in the unbounded sonority of our present day piano. [play]

      Some might ask why is it important to talk about lovingness within a shell or remorse after bawdiness. My teacher at Eastman, Jose Echaniz – of blessed memory I am wont to say – once admonished me that life is more important than playing the piano, but one might also say that life in all its mystery makes playing the piano important. The late Joseph Flummerfelt, who I subsequently learned was an eminent choral conductor, gave a commencement address at the U of I School of Music, in which he said that we are experiencing a disconnect between the center, meaning the self, and the source that is “perhaps beyond human experience, call it what you will.” “...beyond human experience...” This is what Albert Einstein had to say about the mysterious in My Credo:

            The most beautiful and deepest experience a person can have is a sense

              of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all

              serious endeavor in art and science. He who never had this experience

              seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. The sense that behind

              anything that can be experienced there is something our mind cannot

              grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and

              as a feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious.

              To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly

              to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is. 

   Joseph Flummerfelt’s source described in four words: “...all that there is.” And Alfred Einstein writing in “Music of the Romantic Period,”

              Music became the medium through which the ineffable could be made palpable

              to sense, through which the mysterious, magical, and exciting could be created.

Perhaps the merciless demands of curricula and grades and auditions and degree requirements and competitions have tended to deaden the sense of the mysterious and the unpredictable ineffable.

   Czerny, also, describing the “determinate character of dynamic levels” in the third volume of his Piano School, wrote:

             a.  The Pianissimo (pp) ... bears the character of secrecy, mystery, and when

               executed with the utmost perfection, it is capable of producing on the hearer

               the pleasing effect of music at a great distance, or of an echo.

 

   “... the character of secrecy, mystery ... music at a great distance...”  The effect of ppp or lower on the 1816 Broadwood depends upon an always more discriminating touch. This piano would teach us that touch is the ultimate in technique, not the number of notes one can play in the shortest span of time. With touch we comprehend the music through our fingertips. Helen Keller, who lost both sight and hearing as an infant of 19 months, met Mark Twain at the age of 14 and the two became lifelong friends. In an issue of Imprimis, a publication of Hillsdale College, Christopher Flannery quotes Helen Keller’s account of her last visit with Mr. Clemmons, as she called him by his given name. She was able to understand what he was saying by placing her fingers on his lips. I am suggesting that we touch the keys, the lips of the piano, to understand what the piano, either past or present, is saying to us.

   This is more than a fanciful analogy. Touch searches for character in sound in feeling the key resistance and the smack of hammers on the strings and associating this with a desired sonority. If this were a conversation, we could share how we individually teach touch, because whatever historical knowledge we have accumulated will be for naught without fingertip control of the ¼ inch key dip of the Broadwood. One might ask the student where the finger begins – obviously the hand knuckle – then point out that an x-ray shows it beginning at the wrist. But does it go back the elbow in shaping and phrasing? How can we connect our sensory nerves to theirs? Having a student hold a not-too-thick book on which I will “play” can give an idea of this expressive changing balance between fingertip and arm or the press and release through the wrist and arm in a two-note slur.

   Sometime, Google the book, The Heart’s Code, by Paul Persall, PhD, a physiologist. His thesis is that the cells of the heart have memory, making the heart a thinking organ. This he documents with his experience of heart transplant recipients subsequently having the likes and dislikes of the deceased donor. If you accept this – even in imagination – the finger begins in the heart. Have you ever mused that the shapes of chords and melodic lines and dynamics and rhythms that Beethoven physically felt and notated are donated to us through our fingertips to become our own ‘heart’s code’? Remember, Yo-Yo Ma said that once we recognize Beethoven’s technique to get to a particular point, the idea becomes ours.

   One might protest that this to-do about intimate dynamic levels is all very well, but what about fortissimo? Tovey refers to this in his notes to a passage in the finale of the Sonata Op. 2/2:

            ... few players without special information have any idea of the weight of

            Beethoven’s staccato fortissimos. They belong to the resources in which the

            early pianoforte sounded formidable because it was obviously displaying its

            full strength, whereas the modern pianoforte sounds weak in them because

            it can make much more noise in other ways.

Hitting the keys of the 1816 piano will only break hammer shanks, but exerting the same energy touching the key surface will not, the mystery of touch. Playing fortissimo chords on this piano, the pinch of the fingertip on the key seems to transmit the intensity while controlling the speed of the attack. Conversely, in the forte fugal writing of Op. 111, a high finger ‘whack’ seems to produce the desired dynamic level more than an increase of arm weight.

   Czerny, in his Über den richtigen Vortrag der sämtlichen Beethoven’schen Klavierwerke, wrote that the first movement of Op. 111

           must be played with all the strength, bravura, and passionate excitement

           that the tragic character, as well as the difficulty of the passages requires.  

   Roberto Poli, in his “The Secret Life of Musical Notation,” would associate the sforzandos in passages such as these with the Italian infinitive sforzare, meaning with effort and that the verb “does not necessarily suggest force or loudness.” Thus, whatever stress you or I choose to place on the sforzando, these passages should sound encumbered by effort. Isn’t it interesting that each of these passages presses upward? [play]

   Writing to the publisher Steiner about the difficulty of the Sonata Op. 101 (quoted from Emily Anderson’s The Letters of Beethoven, Vol. II, p. 661) Beethoven explained that the term

          has a very precise meaning, for what is difficult is also beautiful,

           good, great... the most lavish praise that can be bestowed, since

           what is difficult makes one sweat.

Czerny and Beethoven are saying the same thing – that the music is inextricably enmeshed with life. Alan Pryce-Jones calls this Beethoven compensating “for a deepening sense of disappointment with the realities of life.” Or, it is Beethoven coping with insolvable problems and afflictions of everyday life on the level of art where he was in control. In a sense, Op. 111 cannot be performed, only lived on the keyboard. The passion to which Czerny alluded cannot be pretended. We may play his music best when we are emotionally ‘torn up.’ Beethoven is to have said that to play without passion is inexcusable, and Paul Cezanne, “Art that does not begin in emotion is not art.”

   The 1816 Broadwood is a piano in passage, too late for Mozart and too early for Schumann. Classic singleness of detail in articulation is out of focus in the slow damping, ghosting effect that clouds the difference between legato, non legato, and lengths of staccato and violates the silence of rests. Therefore, these details of articulation in Beethoven require a clarity of musical diction that will ensure their being understood.

   The two-note slur to the Minuetto of Op. 49/2 is often played like this... without hearing a lift figure... The g natural is lifted onto the f sharp. One must ‘hear’ an increase of sound within the egg-shape notation of g natural. A student who had moved away wrote to me about his new teacher, “Mr. Savage is teaching me how to get inside the notes.” The Broadwood, were it were able to speak, might say that the piano-player, if to become a musician, must believe in the possible in what is not there. And isn’t that the same imperative of which C.P.E. Bach wrote in the Essay that – paraphrased – that much of what is not there must be imagined?

   Although Op. 81a cannot be played on the Broadwood without adaptation in compass, the two-note slurs in the theme of the allegro are linked to the emotional state of ‘Les Adieux.” The Allegro begins on the subdominant, already a postponement, and the quarter note following the two-note slurs Beethoven marked tenuto. [play] The two-note slurs on the following page also delay the Lebewohl in separating the two-note slur dotted figure from the sforzando and with particular effort. [play] Each figure is realized by lifting the arm, and for the sforzando on g flat you drop your baseball bat arm and elbow. If you don’t involve the elbow, the finger will never connect with the heart.

   The eighth notes in the beginning measures of the Prestissimo of Op. 109 should not sound like grace notes. Within the tempo, it is hearing the effortful lifting and reaching and the diverging lines that communicate the tension, whether on this piano or the modern one. [play]

    To me, the dipping and turning of the A♭minor theme in Op. 57 heard as single notes is as the darting of flame if arm movement follows the contours of the sixteenths. [play] In Beethoven’s first sketch, the opening rhythm was a dotted eighth and sixteenth. The hesitation of a quarter tied to the first of two sixteenths in 12/8 is an indication of the essence of the movement, a Hamlet-like backing off climaxes until the Piu Allegro of the coda. The pedaled diminished seventh preceding the reprise, marked fortissimo in that range of the piano yet, and the frustrating waiting between shortened broken chords create a tantrum of helplessness. As Hubert Kessler defined a diminished seventh chord for our class, “When singing no longer suffices, the singer screams.”

   Again, with the purpose of holding the listener’s attention on the 1816 Broadwood, caesuras separate speech-like ideas within the 1816 sound. The first measures of Op. 49/2 are a headline – caesura – then the story, a lyrical phrase that Beethoven used for the second theme and the theme of the second movement. In Op. 2/2, lengthening the rest between the leap and the 32nds just enough to be noticeable [play] gives the theme a shock of life. In the opening measures of Op. 90 the integrity of rests and short slurs exposes the fragments Beethoven develops throughout the movement. In each, the listener hears silence, from which sound emerges. This piano tells us it is not exact counting that makes the point, but rhetorical delay. As Yo-Yo Ma said, upon returning, everything is changed.

   Bruce Haynes lists “five traditional elements of the ‘process of creation’ in Rhetorical thinking,” here paraphrased:

          The essence of the piece

            How it is organized

            The technique of playing it

            Memory

            Declamation

      A propos the essence of the famous “Moonlight” Sonata and its organization, sometime listen to the parallels between the Adagio sostenuto and Presto agitato, making the first and last movements interpretations of a single pattern. I am proposing that the essence of the Sonata – forget the moonlight – is the emotional breaking out of the agitato broken chords in the Presto from the triplets in the Adagio that turn in upon themselves. This may explain Czerny’s advice that the ascending broken chords in the development of the Adagio should increase in tempo and loudness, perhaps foreshadowing the surge in each brace of 16ths in the Presto that each time is stopped by the sforzando chord. This piano, or a fortepiano, is telling us that agitato is not heard in untrammeled speed but in dynamic resurgence within each brace of 16ths.  

   The tempo marking Allegro di molto e con brio in the first movement of the Grande Sonate Pathétique may be taken so fast that the essence of the movement is hidden. In the melodic fragment e-flat – d/e natural – f the opposing resolutions have the character of indecision, brought to a peak of intensity in the development in the weak uppermost treble of Beethoven’s piano of the time. The e flat – e natural tipping point is encapsulated in the theme of the Allegro that begins in the wrong key, F minor, then resolves in C minor harmony for an instant and changes to C major before the descent in C minor. As Ludmila Lazar, my dear friend and virtual colleague over the years, explains, it is not Allegro molto, but Allegro di molto, to the utmost molto, which is to say utmost to the extent that the character is not obscured. Add to this the noise-making devices – the repeated chords and tremolo basses – and the movement becomes the essence of adolescence searching for identity.

   This 1816 Broadwood turns the world of professional performance upside down, freeing us from the traditional mores of the conservatory and comparisons in the competition. Playing this piano, we may aspire to perfection without being judged by it, and we can think anew with the composer. Returning from Yo-Yo Ma’s unfamiliar world, the ink on the score is never dry and always being smudged by our human fingers.

   Playing a Beethoven sonata on the 1816 Broadwood – or any piano – is defying the impossible, because the narrative is too human to fit on any concert stage. Involvement is therapeutic in alleviating the hurt of the incompleteness of imperfection. Sacrificing pride when being swept up by the music is to know both ecstasy and shame. The forgiveness one begs for an accident of passion was essentially the meaning of Lili Kraus when she said in an interview, “An audience that has been moved by a Beethoven sonata has experienced grace.” This exchange between interpreter and listener resembles kintsugi, the Japanese art of restoring broken pottery by filling the cracks with gold or another precious metal.

   The 200-year-old Broadwood, as also your piano, much more than our modern piano discloses Beethoven’s compulsion to reach beyond his grasp when writing for the instrument – to quote Hubert Kessler once more. It is Beethoven going far beyond the seemingly secure bounds of our traditional training. Strangely enough, it is at that far point outside academe that the uninitiated listener bonds with the Beethoven of Op. 111, not in analyzing sonata allegro form, but identifying the apparent travail with personal inner storms.  Perhaps the professional music world has brought the cancer of cancel culture on itself by prioritizing membership in the elite to the disregard of the shared human component. Maybe our highest motivation should be a missionary impulse not just to show the young where to put the thumb but to take them to a new field of thought in which how we play can express the finest of who we are and what we value, and where integrity is its own reward. As the Psalmist wrote, “I will solve my riddle to the music of the lyre.”

   I would like to relate a conversation in memory of Alexander Ringer, an esteemed professor on the musicology faculty at the U of I and a survivor of the Holocaust. I doubt that anything thereafter frightened him or deterred him from speaking his mind, regardless of accepted opinion. One day I asked him about Bettina von Arnim’s letter to Goethe in which she quoted Beethoven as saying, “The one to whom my music makes itself understood will be freed from all the misery that others drag around with them.” Did he think these were the actual words of Beethoven or a figment of Bettina’s imagination? He replied, “It doesn’t matter. She had it right.” And he would have known whereof he spoke.

 

   With respect to the human component, mention of the Thomas Mann short novel, “Tonio Kröger,” was omitted due to length. Should you be interested, it can also be found in translation. The plot is the story of the son of a Latin mother and a German businessman who doesn’t fit with his peers because he writes poetry and plays the violin and as an author doesn’t fit with the profession because he is too much the wordsmith and not sufficiently bohemian. In the concluding segment, he writes to his painter friend, Lisaweta, that he stands between two worlds and is at home in neither, but if anything will make of him a poet it will be the love of the everyday. In the fog that rolls in from the sea he sees figures to whom he has always wanted to relate now seeming to beckon him to enchant them, and to these he is now dedicated.