Beyond the Temples of Science - continued...

Brain Experiments on the Steinway

The members of the Berlin avant-garde, who met regularly in Schleich's private salon, not only appreciated Przybyszewski's writings but also valued his abilities as a piano player. Recollections of encounters with Przybyszewski acknowledged his "passionate and deeply moving and wistful" way of playing and speak of him as the "incarnation of music" (see Matuszek 1996, p. 103-106). Przybyszewski himself describes his performances and their nearly hypnotic effect on his audience in his Erinnerungen an Berlin (Memories of Berlin):

"And all of this [was] played by a person who fell into a kind of eerie trance while playing and infected the others with it! Had I been a virtuoso, I would certainly have dazzled them with my technique and they would have been unable to pay attention to anything else, but thus during the performance of someone 'inspired,' an amateur lost in ardent rapture, only the 'spirit' of the music had any effect" (Przybyszewski 1985 [1926-30], p. 166).

'The Virtuoso – finale furioso' by the German painter and cartoonist Wilhelm Busch. In the 1860s Busch caricatured the contemporary enthusiasm for solo pianists in the Munich satirical magazine 'Fliegende Blätter'. From Busch 1959, vol. 1, pp. 286-291.

Such romantic notions may also be recognized as a highly plausible plan of experimentation. In this perspective, Przybyszewski undertook practiced experimental psychology by means of the piano. Rather than testing hypotheses about the sensation of hearing with laboratory methods, Przybyszewski intended to investigate the Psychology of the Individual experimentally through a suggestive piano performance. With the aid of Chopin, as Przybyszewski declares in Memories of Berlin, tones sank into the unconscious while he played, loosened the constraint on the specific sense energies, and opened up new conduction pathways, along which waves of excitation enabled the stored creative potential energy to flow freely. Thus, Schleich's musical salon became Przybyszewski's experimental laboratory, and Schleich's Steinway his laboratory instrument.