hated this family artistic center but loved the Steinway, which I had blackmailed my father into having delivered from Paris under the most frightful circumstances. I had to enroll in the Mozarteum to show them, I didn’t have the faintest idea about music and playing the piano had never exactly been one of my passions, but I used it as a means to an end against my parents and my entire family, I exploited it against them and I began to master it against them, better from day to day, with increasing virtuosity from year to year. I enrolled in the Mozarteum against them, I thought in the inn. Our Ehrbar stood in the so-called music room and was the artistic center where they showed off on Saturday afternoons. They avoided the Steinway, people stayed away, the Steinway put an end to the Ehrbar epoch. From the day I played the Steinway the artistic center in my parents’ house was kaput. The Steinway, I thought while standing in the inn and looking about, was aimed against my family. I enrolled in the Mozarteum to take my revenge on them, for no other reason, to punish them for their crimes against me. Now they had an artist for a son, an abominable species from their point of view. And I misused the Mozarteum against them, put all its means into play against them. Had I taken over their brickyards and played their old Ehrbar all my life they would have been satisfied, but I cut myself off from them by setting up the Steinway in the music room, which cost a fortune and did indeed have to be delivered from Paris to our house. At first I had insisted on the Steinway, then, as was only proper for the Steinway, on the Mozarteum. I brooked, as I must now say, no opposition. I had decided to become an artist overnight and demanded everything. I caught them unawares, I thought as I looked around in the inn. The Steinway was my barricade against them, against their world, against family and world cretinism. I was not a born piano virtuoso, as Glenn was, perhaps even Wertheimer, although I can’t claim that with absolute certainty, but I quite simply forced myself to become one, talked and played myself into it, I must say, with absolute ruthlessness in their regard. With the Steinway I could suddenly appear on stage against them. I made myself into an artist out of desperation, into the most obvious sort available, a piano virtuoso, if possible into a world-class piano virtuoso, the hated Ehrbar in our music room had given me the idea and I developed this idea as a weapon against them, exploiting it to the highest and absolutely highest degree of perfection against them. Glenn’s case was no different, nor was Wertheimer’s, who had studied art and therefore music only to insult his father, as I know, I thought in the inn. The fact that I’m studying the piano is a catastrophe for my father, Wertheimer said to me. Glenn said it even more radically: they hate me and my piano. I say Bach and they’re ready to throw up, said Glenn. He was already world famous and his parents still hadn’t changed their point of view. But whereas he stayed true to his principles and in the last and final analysis was able, if only two or three years before his death, to convince them of his genius, Wertheimer and I proved our parents right by failing to become virtuosos, failing indeed very quickly, in the most shameful manner, as I often was privileged to hear my father say. But my failure to become a piano virtuoso never bothered me, unlike Wertheimer, who suffered right to the end of his life for having given up, given himself over to the human sciences, which until the end he could never define, just as even today I still don’t know what philosophy, what philosophical matters generally, might be. Glenn is the victor, we are the failures, I thought in the inn. Glenn put an end to his existence at the only true moment, I thought. And he didn’t finish it off himself, that is by his own hand, as did Wertheimer, who had no other choice, who had to hang himself, I thought. Just as one could predict Glenn’s end well in advance, so one could predict Wertheimer’s end long in advance, I thought. Glenn is said to have suffered a fatal stroke in the middle of the Goldberg Variations. Wertheimer couldn’t take Glenn’s death. After Glenn’s death he was ashamed to still be alive, to have outlived the genius so to speak, that fact martyred him his entire last year, as I know. Two days after reading in the newspaper that Glenn had died we received telegrams from Glenn’s father announcing his son’s death. The second he sat down at the piano he sank into himself, I thought, he looked like an animal then, on closer inspection like a cripple, on even closer inspection like the sharp-witted, beautiful man that he was. He, Glenn, had learned German from his maternal grandmother, which he spoke fluently, as I’ve already indicated. With his pronunciation he put our German and Austrian fellow students to shame, since they spoke a completely barbaric German and speak this completely barbaric German all their lives because they have no sense for their own language. But how can an artist have no feeling for his native language? Glenn often asked. Year in, year out he wore the same kind of pants, if not the same pants, his step was light, or as my father would have said, noble. He loved things with sharp contours, detested approximation. One of his favorite words was self-discipline, he said it over and over, even in class with Horowitz, as I remember. He loved best to run out on the street shortly after midnight, or at least out of the house, I’d already noticed that in Leopoldskron. We must always fill our lungs with a good dose of fresh air, he said, otherwise we won’t go forward, we’ll be paralyzed in our efforts to reach the highest. He was the most ruthless person toward himself. He never allowed himself to be imprecise. He spoke only after thinking his way through a problem. He abhorred people who said things that hadn’t been thought through, thus he abhorred almost all mankind. And more than twenty years ago he finally withdrew from this abhorred mankind. He was the only world-famous piano virtuoso who abhorred his public and also actually withdrew definitively from this abhorred public. He didn’t need them. He bought himself a house in the woods and settled into this house and went about perfecting himself. He and Bach lived in this house in America until his death. He was a fanatic about order. Everything in his house was order. When I first walked through the door with Wertheimer, I had to think of his