instead and watched people of my own kind. Again and again we try to escape ourselves, but we fail in our efforts, constantly run our heads into the wall because we don’t want to recognize that we can’t escape ourselves, except in death. Now he’s escaped himself, I thought, and in a more or less unappetizing manner. To stop at fifty, fifty-one at the latest, he once said. In the end he took himself seriously , I thought. We observe a fellow student walking in the corridor, I thought, and address him and have started a so-called lifelong friendship. Naturally we don’t know right away that it is a so-called lifelong friendship because at first we experience it only as an interested friendship, one that we have to have at that moment to get ahead, but then again it’s not just any person we’ve addressed but the only possible one at that moment, I thought, for I had hundreds of opportunities to address other students, who all studied at the Mozarteum and many of whom had taken Horowitz’s course back then, but I addressed Wertheimer and no one else, reminding him that we had once met and spoken with each other in Vienna, I thought, which he remembered. Wertheimer studied primarily in Vienna, not like me at the Mozarteum, but at the Vienna Academy, which the Mozarteum has always considered the better music conservatory, just as the Vienna Academy has always considered the Mozarteum the more useful school, I thought. Students always judge their own school to be something less than it is and cast an envious glance at their rival school, above all music students are known for always giving much higher marks to their rival schools than to their own, and the Viennese music students always thought and believed the Mozarteum to be better, just as the Mozarteum students thought the Vienna Academy was better. Basically the Vienna Academy and the Mozarteum had and have always had equally good or equally bad teachers, I thought, it has always been up to the students to exploit these teachers with extreme ruthlessness for their own purposes. It doesn’t even depend on the quality of our teachers, I thought, it’s up to us, for even bad teachers have always produced geniuses in the end, just as good teachers have destroyed geniuses, I thought. Horowitz had a sterling reputation, we had answered the call of this sterling reputation, I thought. But we had no idea of Glenn Gould, what he meant for us. Glenn Gould was a student like everyone else, initially endowed with remarkable promise, finally with the greatest talent that has ever existed in this century, I thought. For me taking Horowitz’s course wasn’t the catastrophe it was for Wertheimer, Wertheimer was too weak for Glenn. Seen that way, Wertheimer, by enrolling in Horowitz’s course, walked into a trap for life , I thought. The trap snapped shut the first time he heard Glenn play, I thought. Wertheimer never got out of this trap for life. Wertheimer should have stayed in Vienna and continued studying at the Vienna Academy, the word Horowitz destroyed him, I thought, indirectly the concept Horowitz , even if Glenn actually destroyed him. When we were in America I told Glenn that he had destroyed Wertheimer, but Glenn had no idea what I meant. Never again did I bother him with this thought. Wertheimer had gone to America only against his will, during the trip he continually let me know that he basically detested artists who, in Wertheimer’s own words, had taken their art as far as Glenn had, who destroyed their personalities to be geniuses, as Wertheimer expressed himself then. In the end people like Glenn had turned themselves into art machines , had nothing in common with human beings anymore, only seldom reminded you of human beings, I thought. But Wertheimer continually envied Glenn this art, he wasn’t capable of marveling at it without envy, even if not admiring it, for which I also lacked and still lack all capacity, I’ve never admired anything but have
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