I took it down and found it in tune, the servant probably having used it
during my absence. As I drew the bow over the strings it seemed to me,
sir, as though God's finger had touched me. The tone penetrated into my
heart, and from my heart it found its way out again. The air about me
was pregnant with intoxicating madness. The song in the courtyard below
and the tones produced by my fingers had become sharers of my solitude.
I fell upon my knees and prayed aloud, and could not understand that I
had ever held this exquisite, divine instrument in small esteem, that I
had even hated it in my childhood, and I kissed the violin and pressed
it to my heart and played on and on.

"The song in the yard--it was a woman who was singing--continued in the
meantime uninterruptedly. But it was not so easy to play it after her,
for I didn't have a copy of the notes. I also noticed that I had pretty
nearly forgotten whatever I had once acquired of the art of playing the
violin; consequently I couldn't play anything in particular, but could
play only in a general way. With the exception of that song the musical
compositions themselves have always been a matter of indifference to me,
an attitude in which I have persisted to this day. The musicians play
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Sebastian Bach, but not one plays God
Himself. No one can play the eternal comfort and blessing of tone and
sound, its magic correlation with the eager, straining ear; so that"--he
continued in a lower voice and blushing with confusion--"so that the
third tone forms a harmonic interval with the first, as does the fifth,
and the leading tone rises like a fulfilled hope, while the dissonance
is bowed down like conscious wickedness or arrogant pride.

"And then there are the mysteries of suspension and inversion, by means
of which even the second is received into favor in the bosom of harmony.
A musician once explained all these things to me, but that was later.
And then there are still other marvels which I do not understand, as the
fugue, counterpoint, the canon for two and three voices, and so on--an
entire heavenly structure, one part joined to the other without mortar
and all held together by God's own hand. With a few exceptions, nobody
wants to know anything about these things. They would rather disturb
this breathing of souls by the addition of words to be spoken to the
music, just as the children of God united with the daughters of the
Earth. And by means