The Loser Read Online Free

had said. Wertheimer and I played Brahms with Glenn from two in the afternoon till one in the morning. Glenn had stationed three bodyguards around his house to keep his fans off his back. At first we hadn’t wanted to bother him and planned to stay only one night, but we wound up staying two and a half weeks, and both Wertheimer and I realized once again how right we were to have given up our piano virtuosity. My dear loser , Glenn greeted Wertheimer, with his Canadian-American cold-bloodedness he always called him the loser , he called me quite dryly the philosopher , which didn’t bother me. Wertheimer, the loser , was for Glenn always busy losing, constantly losing out, whereas Glenn noticed I had the word philosopher in my mouth at all times and probably with sickening regularity, and so quite naturally we were for him the loser and the philosopher , I said to myself upon entering the inn. The loser and the philosopher went to America to see Glenn the piano virtuoso again, for no other reason. And to spend four and a half months in New York. For the most part together with Glenn. He didn’t miss Europe, Glenn said right off as he greeted us. Europe was out of the question. He had barricaded himself in his house. For life. All our lives the three of us have shared the desire to barricade ourselves from the world. All three of us were born barricade fanatics. But Glenn had carried his barricade fanaticism furthest. In New York we lived next to the Taft Hotel, there wasn’t a better location for our purposes. Glenn had a Steinway set up in one of the back rooms at the Taft and played there every day for eight to ten hours, often at night as well. He didn’t go a day without playing the piano. Wertheimer and I loved New York right from the start. It’s the most beautiful city in the world and it also has the best air, we repeated again and again, nowhere in the world have we breathed better air. Glenn confirmed what we sensed: New York is the only city in the world where a thinking person can breathe freely the minute he sets foot in it. Glenn visited us every three weeks, showing us the hidden corners of Manhattan. The Mozarteum was a bad school, I thought as I entered the inn, on the other hand for us it was the best because it opened our eyes. All schools are bad and the one we attend is always the worst if it doesn’t open our eyes. What lousy teachers we had to put up with, teachers who screwed up our heads. Art destroyers all of them, art liquidators, culture assassins, murderers of students. Horowitz was an exception, Markevitch, Végh, I thought. But a Horowitz doesn’t make a first-rate conservatory by himself, I thought. The plodders ruled the building, which was more famous than any other in the world and still is today; if I say I studied at the Mozarteum people get all weepy-eyed. Wertheimer, like Glenn, was the son of wealthy parents, not merely well-to-do. I myself was also free of all material worries. It’s always an advantage to have friends from the same social sphere and the same economic background, I thought as I entered the inn. Since basically we had no financial worries we could devote ourselves exclusively to our studies, carry them out in the most radical way possible, we also had nothing else on our minds, we simply had to keep removing the roadblocks in our way, our professors in all their mediocrity and hideousness. The Mozarteum is world famous even today, but it is absolutely the worst music conservatory imaginable, I thought. But if I hadn’t gone to the Mozarteum I would never have met Wertheimer and Glenn, I thought, my friends for life. Today I can no longer say how I came to music, everyone in my family was unmusical, against art, had never hated anything more than art and culture their entire lives, but that probably was what motivated me to fall in love one day with the piano I had initially hated, and trade in my family’s old Ehrbar for a truly wonderful Steinway in order to