in grand style, but no one noticed it because they had never let anyone notice it, one couldn’t see how wealthy they were, at least not at first glance. Basically the Wertheimer children hadn’t had the slightest interest in their inheritance, and when their parents’ will was opened neither Wertheimer nor his sister had had the slightest notion of the dimensions of the property that suddenly fell into their hands, the list of properties that a lawyer from Vienna’s First District had drawn up hardly interested either of them, although they were surprised by the actual wealth that was suddenly theirs but that they considered a cumbersome burden. Except for the Kohlmarkt apartment and the hunting lodge in Traich they had everything sold and had the money deposited in banks throughout the world by a lawyer who belonged to the family, as Wertheimer put it, for once breaking his habit of never speaking about his financial situation. Three fourths of the parents’ property went to Wertheimer, a fourth to his sister, she too had her inheritance deposited in various banking establishments in Austria, Germany and Switzerland, I thought. The Wertheimer children were financially secure, I thought, as I also am by the way, although my own financial situation could not be compared with that of Wertheimer and his sister. Wertheimer’s great-grandparents had been dirt poor, I thought, farmers who twisted goose necks in the villages outside Lvov. But like me he came from a family of merchants, I thought. For one of his birthdays his father had the idea of giving him a castle in the Marchfeld that once belonged to the Harrachs, but his son wasn’t even willing to take a look at the castle that he already owned, at which point his father, naturally enraged by his son’s indifference, sold it, I thought. Basically the Wertheimer children led a modest life, unpretentious, unostentatious, more or less in the background, although everyone else in their circle was always putting on airs. At the Mozarteum people didn’t notice Wertheimer’s wealth either. Nor did they notice Glenn’s wealth by the way, and Glenn was wealthy. Retrospectively it was clear that the wealthy had found each other, I thought, they had a sixth sense for their mutual background. Glenn’s genius was then so to speak just a welcome extra, I thought. Friendships, I thought, as experience shows, are finally only possible when they are based on mutual backgrounds, I thought, all other conclusions are false. I was suddenly astonished by the cold-bloodedness with which I got off the train in Attnang-Puchheim to go to Wankham and then Traich, to Wertheimer’s hunting lodge, without even thinking of visiting my own house in Desselbrunn, which for five years has been standing empty and which I assume, since I pay the appropriate people, gets aired out every four or five days; astonished by my cold-blooded wish to spend the night here in Wankham in the most disgusting inn I know, when not twelve kilometers away I have my own house, but which I won’t visit under any circumstances, as I immediately thought, for I vowed to myself five years ago not to go to Desselbrunn for at least ten years, and until now I hadn’t had any difficulty in keeping this vow, that is in controlling myself. Through constant self-sacrifice I had thoroughly ruined life in Desselbrunn for myself, one day it suddenly became completely unbearable, I thought. The beginning of this self-sacrifice had been the rejection of my Steinway, the triggering moment so to speak for my subsequent inability to tolerate life in Desselbrunn. All at once I could no longer breathe the Desselbrunn air and the walls in Desselbrunn made me sick and the rooms threatened to choke me, one has to remember how cavernous the rooms are there, nine-by-six-meter or eight-by-eight-meter rooms, I thought. I hated those rooms and I hated what was in those rooms and when I left my house I hated the people outside my house, all at once I was being unjust to all those people, who only wanted the best for me, but precisely that drove me crazy after a while, their constant willingness to be helpful, which I suddenly found profoundly revolting. I barricaded myself in my study and stared out the window, without seeing anything but my own unhappiness. I ran outdoors and cursed at everybody. I ran into the woods and huddled beneath a tree, exhausted. To avoid actually going insane, I turned my back on Desselbrunn, for at least ten years, for at least ten years, for at least ten years, I repeated to myself without interruption as I left the house and went to Vienna to go to Portugal, where I had relatives in Sintra, in the most beautiful region of Portugal, where the eucalyptus trees grow thirty meters high and you can breathe the best air. In Sintra I’ll find my way back to music, which in Desselbrunn I had driven out of myself thoroughly and so to speak for all time, I thought then, I thought, and I will regenerate myself by breathing the Atlantic air at mathematically calculated intervals. At that time I had also thought I could resume playing my Sintra uncle’s Steinway where I’d left off in Desselbrunn, but that was a ridiculous thought, I thought, in Sintra I ran six kilometers down the Atlantic coast every day and for eight months didn’t think about touching a piano, while my uncle and all the others in his house kept saying I should play something for them, in Sintra I never even touched a key, of course in Sintra during this admittedly wonderful inactivity in the fresh air and, as I have to say, in one of the most beautiful areas of the world, I came upon the idea of writing something about Glenn, something, I couldn’t know what, something about him and his art. With this thought I walked up and down in Sintra and the surroundings and finally spent a whole year there without getting beyond this something about Glenn. To start to write is the hardest thing of all and for months and even years I ran around with this thought of writing something without being able to begin, something about Glenn who, as I thought then, had to be described, described of course by a competent witness of his existence, not just of his piano playing, by a competent witness of his thoroughly extraordinary intellect. One day I dared to begin this work, in the Inglaterra where I had wanted to stay only two days but where I spent six weeks in uninterrupted writing about Glenn. In the end however, when I moved to Madrid, I had only sketches for this work in my pocket and I destroyed these sketches because they suddenly became an obstacle to my work rather than a help, I had made too many sketches, this tendency has already ruined many of my works; we have to make sketches for a work, but if we make too many sketches we ruin everything, I thought, and so it was then in the Inglaterra, I sat in my room without interruption and made so many sketches that I thought I’d gone crazy and recognized that these Glenn-sketches were the cause of my insanity and I had the strength to destroy these Glenn-sketches. I simply put them in the wastepaper basket and watched the maid pick up the wastepaper basket and take it out of the room and make them disappear with the garbage. That was a pleasant sight, I thought, to see the maid pick up my Glenn-sketches, not only hundreds but thousands of them, and make them disappear. What a relief, I thought. I sat at my chair in front of the window for the entire afternoon, at dusk I was finally able to leave the