by the hardest kind of practice in after life that I was able
to regain the natural facility that had marked my playing in childhood.
In fact I owe everything to the kind persistence and wonderful
inspiration of M. Paderewski.

THE RIGHT TEMPO

"The right tempo is a very important matter for the student. First of
all, he must be absolutely positive that his time is correct. There is
nothing so barbarous in all piano-playing as a bad conception of time.
Even the inexperienced and unmusical listener detects bad time. The
student should consider this matter one of greatest importance and
demand perfect time from himself. With some students this can only be
cultivated after much painful effort. The metronome is of assistance, as
is counting, but these are not enough. The pupil must create a sense of
time, he must have a sort of internal metronome which he must feel
throbbing within all the time.

"Always begin your practice slowly and gradually advance the tempo. The
worst possible thing is to start practicing too fast. It invariably
leads to bad results and to lengthy delays. The right tempo will come
with time and you must have patience until you can develop it. In the
matter of 'tempo rubato' passages, which always invite disaster upon the
part of the student, the general idea is that the right hand must be out
of time with the left. This is not always the case, as they sometimes
play in unison. The word simply implies 'robbing the time,' but it is
robbed after the same manner in which one 'robs Peter to pay Paul,' that
is, a ritard in one part of the measure must be compensated for by an
acceleration in another part of the measure. If the right hand is to
play at variance with the left hand the latter remains as a kind of
anchor upon which the tempo of the entire measure must depend. Chopin
called the left hand the _chef d'orchestre_ and a very good appellation
this is. Take, for instance, his _B flat minor Prelude_. In the latter
part of this wonderful composition the regular rhythmic repetition in
octaves in the bass makes a rhythmic foundation which the most erratic
and nervous right hand cannot shake.

RHYTHMIC PECULIARITIES

"Rhythm is the basis of everything. Even the silent mountain boulders
are but the monuments of some terrible rhythmic convulsion of the earth
in past ages. There is a rhythm in the humming bird and there is a
rhythm in the movements of a giant locomotive. We are all rhythmic in
our s