From Memory's Shrine by Carmen Sylva — Read

It is but fitting and natural that I should open with this revered name the series of my reminiscences, as my childish recollections hardly go further back than the date of the first time I heard her, when I was only eight years old, at my very first concert in Bonn. That was so great an event in my life, and I was so impatient for the evening to come, that I hardly know how I got through the whole day that preceded it. Seldom has any day since appeared so interminably long. Still, the evening did come at last, and I remember accompanying my mother to the concert-room, into which she was wheeled in her invalid-chair, for, although still quite young, she had been for many years in ill-health and unable to walk. But whether I walked by her side, or how I got there, I no longer know, for I have only a sort of confused recollection of having been brought there without any effort on my own part, as though I had been borne thither on wings! My first concert! My heart still beats loud when I think of it.

It was a big, crowded room we entered. But I did not see the people. I paid no attention to anybody. I saw nothing but the estrade on which the piano was placed. Our seats were so far to the right that, small as I was, I should not have seen the pianist at all had I not obtained my mother's permission to establish my diminutive person in the passage left between the two rows of seats, where I had a full view of the keyboard. I was all eyes, all ears, quivering from head to foot with intense nervous expectation. At last Madame Schumann came in, and, advancing swiftly to the instrument, sat down before it. She was dressed in black velvet, with a single deep-red rose stuck low behind one ear in her dark hair, which was very thick and inclined to curl, and which she wore plainly parted and flat to the head, instead of having it according to the fashion of those days twisted to stand out on each side of the face. What struck me at once was something harmonious in her whole appearance; it always seemed to me afterwards as if her dress must have been crimson too, to match the rose in her hair. Her hands were small, firm and plump, the touch full, healthy and vigorous, almost of virile strength. I carried the rich, clear tones away with me, to ring in my ears for long afterwards. But that which went straight to my heart, and haunted me longer still, was the pathetic look in her eyes.