Now comes along the temperamental student, burning with ardour for the beauty of the music, longing to make the noble chords of some fine melody speak out its message! What special pitfall lies ready to entrap his zealous endeavours? Why, in his enthusiasm that the melody in both hands should be properly brought out, he gets one hand playing after the other! Only a fraction of a second after the left hand does the right hand strike, but in that loss of simultaneousness of sound the whole grandeur after which the performer is striving will be dispelled in the irritating effect of one part of the harmony always reaching the ear at a slight interval after the other. This is a most frequent failing amongst very musical people who enjoy tremendously what they are playing; and especially does it occur with them in slow movements, when they will arpeggio the chords between the two hands so much that it sounds to me like drawling in speech, or even like stuttering. These enthusiasts lose their sense of the symmetry of the sound in their intense pleasure over its component parts, and it is hard that the very virtue that lies in their love of the music can thus lead them into danger.
Dragging the time, another tiresome error of judgment, proceeds generally from the same cause of over-fervour. The player who suffers from this blemish mostly owes it to a lack of sense of proportion and taste, and to a certain want 01 artistic perception of the guiding line between true sentiment and sentimentality.