His was a history which would have been tragic if it had happened to
any but Reinhardt, who cared for nothing but an easy life, beer, and
the divine tones which he alone could draw from his violin. He had
offered, fifty years ago in Vienna, the most brilliant promise of a
most brilliant career, a promise which had come to naught because
of his monstrous lack of ambition, and his endless yielding to
circumstance, which had finally, by a series of inconceivable
migrations, landed him in the German colony of La Chance, impecunious
and obscure and invincibly convinced that he had everything worth
having in life. "Of vat use?" he would say, even now, when asked to
play in public--"de moosic ist all--and dat is eben so goodt here mit
friends." Or, "Dere goes a thousand peoples to a goncert--maybe fife
from dat thousand lofes de moosic--let dose fife gome to me--and
I play dem all day for noding!" or again, more iconoclastically
still,--when told of golden harvests to be reaped, "And for vat den? I
can't play on more dan von fioleen at a time--is it? I got a good one
now. And if I drink more beer dan now, I might make myself seeck!"
This with a prodigiously sly wink of one heavy eyelid.
He gave enough music lessons to pay his small expenses, although after
one or two stormy passages in which he treated with outrageous and
unjustifiable violence the dawdling pupils coming from well-to-do
families, he made it a rule to take no pupils whose parents employed a
servant, and confined himself to children of the poorer classes, among
whom he kept up a small orchestra which played together twice a week
and never gave any concerts.
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