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The serene progress of the Andante was undisturbed by any sound from those in front. Ormarr felt as if his listeners were turned to stone, and his playing was caressing them like a gentle breeze.

Then suddenly there came over him an irresistible desire to jerk them back to life—to startle them, set them fluttering and cackling like a pack of frightened fowls. To tear at their sense, to render their innermost souls, to fling at them, like a fiery volcanic eruption, something unexpected and terrible—something unheard of.

In a fraction of a second it had come. A bursting of all bonds that chained his ungovernable mind: reason, duty, ambition, the fear of consequences. It was as if in a moment he flung from him the prejudices and traditions in which men are wont to dress, and stood there before them in primeval nakedness.

He saw Grahl trying to rise: trying to prevent something he knew was coming....

And half unconsciously, as if it had been the most natural thing in the world, he plunged blasphemously from Beethoven’s Andante into Waldteufel’s “Valse d’Espagne.”