One April day I came across some unfamiliar terminology on a blood-red poster rallying all proletarians (an unknown word to me then) to make a worthy showing on May Day, a poster full of exclamation marks, of figures of speech brimming with pathos, about the clanging chains of slavery, and so on. All of which – confused though the issues were to me as I walked on to the Conservatory – I forthwith proceeded to adapt to the opening recitativo bars of some romantic-virtuoso music that I had lately heard in class for the first time: Vieuxtemps’s D Minor Concerto. I have to smile nowadays when I think of the socialist May Day poster this romantic-pathetic Victorian music seemed to my childish imagination. I thought I could see “the awakening of the driven slaves” in that long opening crescendo “D”; in the recitativo eighth-notes that follow I sensed their tentative stumbling efforts at straightening up, at tensing their abused backs and limbs; I thought I heard the “clanging of chains” in the boldly mounting chords that climax these first few bars! / Though quite aware of the puerility of such arbitrary programmatic interpretation, I still, whenever I hear this concerto, see that little boy, fiddle case in hand, reading the poster during long minutes – reading most of it uncomprehendingly and yet setting it to what seemed to him appropriate music. << less