The Atom Station by Halldór Laxness

The organist and the self-conscious policeman were sitting at the battered old harmonium with some barely legible scrawled notation in front of them, so engrossed that they neither saw nor heard me when I came in; and for half an hour they were unaware that I was sitting behind them. For a long time they struggled their way through some sort of tunelessness, full of weird sounds that recalled the light over the countryside early in the morning before anyone is afoot. In the end, however, I seemed to perceive a melody emerging, but it came from such a distant place, in addition to which its wonders revealed themselves to me in so sudden a flash, that perception struck rather than touched me. And just as I was beginning to get palpitations over a new world, a fantastic and undiscovered world, on the other side of usual form, the two had stopped and were on their feet, animated and exalted, with a light in their eyes as if they had composed the music themselves, and they greeted me.

When I began to ask questions, the organist said he did not know if it was safe to trust me with one of the more important secrets in the world, the name of a new genius: was I stupid enough to come face to face with such a problem without missing my foothold in life? And if I were not stupid, was I then intelligent enough to obey this new maestro's call to each individual to deny the world in which we live and take part in creating a new one for the unborn? But when my organist saw how grieved I was at not having his confidence he was sorry for me, patted me on the cheek and kissed me on the forehead: "It was a violin concerto by Roberto Gerhard," he said, and asked me not to be angry, saying that he had just been joking. "He is a Spanish boy in Cambridge, who does not even know music; if there were any vigor left in the Esterhazy family they would beat him. Let us hope he does not get a bigger funeral than Mozart."