"No piano," he adds,
"was touched on these occasions, for his ears spontaneously heard a
full orchestra, played by good spirits, while he wrote down his neat
little notes." And Weber himself remarks in one of his essays that,
"the tone poet who gets his ideas at the piano is almost always born
poor, or in a fair way of delivering his faculties into the hands of
the common and commonplace. For these very hands, which, thanks to
constant practice and training, finally acquire a sort of independence
and will of their own, are unconscious tyrants and masters over the
creative power. How very differently does _he_ create whose _inner_
ear is judge of the ideas which he simultaneously conceives and
criticises. This mental ear grasps and holds fast the musical visions,
and is a divine secret belonging to music alone, incomprehensible to
the layman."
Mozart had already learned to compose without a piano when he was only
six years old; and, as Mr. E. Holmes remarks, "having commenced
composition without recourse to the clavier, his powers in mental
music constantly increased, and he soon imagined effects of which the
original types existed only in his brain.
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