A Sixth Sense

The pianist, Arthur Rubinstein, who returns to America in the Fall, recently played a program of new piano works in Paris. The music, all of the most modern variety, included a sonata, Petrouschka, by Strawinsky. The piece is founded on the ballet, Petrouschka. Rubinstein, who is a subtle minded student in addition to his musicianship, has ideas to expound as well as music to play. He tells you, for instance, and with ardent seriousness, that musicians have a sixth sense.

You often find the belief among concert performers that they are in some peculiar rapport with their audiences, that they can sense instinctively the state of mind of their audiences toward them and that they draw inspiration in a more or less mystical manner from sympathy and discouragement from coldness. Orators and actors hold similar notions. With most these beliefs are vague. Not so with Rubinstein. He has quite a definite theory of telepathy between himself and his audiences. He always selects some person or several persons in the audience to play to. He does not need to see these chosen auditors. Second sight tells him that they are there. The quality of his playing depends largely upon whether or not he can find several of these select and sympathetic spirits in the audience, with whom he can get into telepathic rapport. Many practitioners of the public arts will tell you much the same thing, but dimly. Rubinstein illustrates his thesis with quite dramatic episodes.

Once, he relates, he was playing at a music festival in England. He felt a chill, a sinking of heart coming over him. He realized that he was attacked, was attacked by hostile souls in the audience. Someone out there was antagonistic to him, and was sending him waves of hatred. There were two of these enemy persons. He felt that clearly. Their chilling influence was making him play badly. During the intermission he learned that there was in the house a fellow pianist who had expected to play in the festival. Rubinstein had supplanted him. It was the envious malice of the disappointed musician and the similar emotion of his father (also present) that Rubinstein had felt. Rubinstein tells you this with the deepest earnestness.