This was the third week of his vacation, one enforced
by a nerve specialist in the Austrian capital, and for the first time
Davos felt almost cheerful. Perhaps the absolute hush of the country and
the purity of the atmosphere, with its suggestion of recent rain,--the
skies weep at least once a day in the Salzkammergut region,--proved a
welcome foil to fashionable Ischl, with its crowds, its stiffness, its
court ceremonial--for the emperor enjoys his _villegiatura_ there. And
Davos was sick and irritable after a prolonged musical season. He had
studied the pianoforte with Rosenthal, and his success, from his debut,
had been so unequivocal that he played too much in public. There was a
fiery particle in his interpretations of Chopin, Schumann, and Liszt
that proclaimed the temperament, if not the actual possession, of
genius. Still in his early manhood--he was only twenty--the maturity of
his musical intelligence and the poetry of his style created havoc in
impressionable hearts. With his mixed blood, Hungarian and Italian,
Marco Davos' performance of romantic composers was irresistible; in it
there was something of Pachmann's wayward grace and Paderewski's
plangency, but with an added infusion of gypsy wildness which evoked for
old concert-goers memories of Liszt the brilliant rhapsodist.
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