Old Fogy: His Musical Opinions and Grotesques

"Let me hasten to negative the report that I was ever a pupil of Old Fogy. To be sure, I did play for him once a paraphrase of _The Maiden's Prayer_ (in double tenths by Dogowsky), but he laughed so heartily that I feared apoplexy, and soon stopped. The man really existed. There are a score of persons alive in Philadelphia today who still remember him and could call him by his name--formerly an impossible Hungarian one, with two or three syllables lopped off at the end, and for family reasons not divulged here. He assented that he was a fellow-pupil of Liszt's under the beneficent, iron rule of Carl Czerny. But he never looked his age. Seemingly seventy, a very vital threescore-and-ten, by the way, he was as light on his feet as were his fingers on the keyboard. A linguist, speaking without a trace of foreign accent three or four tongues, he was equally fluent in all. Once launched in an argument there was no stopping him. Nor was he an agreeable opponent. Torrents and cataracts of words poured from his mouth."