Liszt's Concerto Pathétique

It was in the winter of 1906 that the following remarkable incidents were communicated to me, and truly in a most remarkable manner. But who may say what shall be the intermediary link, the invisible tie to connect us with the facts of a vanished past? Who may say what vague but mentally potent beings dwell on the border line separating the real from the unreal, floating up perhaps from unthinkable depths of time and space, there to await the propitious moment for tapping some nerve of consciousness in us and establishing telegraphic communication with the soul? Over these spirit wires of thought and feeling they flash faint messages. They set the nerves a-tingle with the consciousness of an infinity of unknown lives surrounding our own, of invisible electric bodies that shock us into the recovery of forgotten memories, of the realization of a limitless land that spreads beside us and upon the verge of which we live precariously poised.

On an afternoon in the winter of 1906 I attended a concert given by two well-known pianists. The _pièce de résistance_ of the concert -- it was for this that I had come -- was a two-piano number, the _Concerto Pathétique_ of Liszt, that sonorous tone tragedy with its wildly dramatic incidents, interrupted from time to time by a melody of more than mortal sweetness. As I listened, annoyed by the movements of seat companions, the bobbing black heads in front, or the dry winter light that filtered through a window to the right, striking sharply a corsage ornament or a jewel, and projecting into my eyes daggered light as from a crystal ball, suddenly my surroundings vanished, and I found myself alone looking out across a land that I had never seen.