My next session in the orchestra was out of this world. My colleagues immediately pricked up their ears and tried to watch me without being noticed. Something they could not understand had happened. Not that I had played badly before, but this was unreal. Our conductor soon noticed too.
As for myself, I underwent a radical change. Self-confident now, I became calm, generous and tolerant with my colleagues in the section. After a few weeks I became so well known that I started to receive invitations to join some of the best orchestras and soon my name started to appear as soloist on the posters of some of the most prestigious concerts in the world. How can I describe what I felt? I was experiencing an incredible adventure, fabulous in the literal sense. I learned to play on my audience’s emotions, to make them tremble, cry, and smile. Being able to express and communicate my feelings fully to these thousands of people gave me enormous pleasure.
There had obviously been a spectacular improvement in my financial situation and I now had everything I could wish for.
But — on Monday 18th October...
I arrived in Brussels at 10.30 on a Singapore Airlines flight to give a concert that evening. The rehearsal was at 2.30 in the afternoon. I was to give the first performance of a concerto by Claude Debussy which the musicologist Claude Ansi had just discovered among unpublished papers belonging to the publisher Leduc in Paris. This was a very important musical event especially as it involved a major — and difficult — work for my instrument (for the brass repertoire is not as full as that of most other instruments).
That evening I arrived ten minutes before the concert, just to get ready. With this mouthpiece I no longer needed to warm up. Everything was right from the word go. Mechanically I opened my case, took out the instrument and checked it over. Then with my right hand I reached for the mouthpiece in its case. There was nothing there. The mouthpiece had gone.
The concert was cancelled on the grounds of indisposition. My desperate attempts to find the mouthpiece were in vain. All my concerts were cancelled and state of health cited as the reason. I tried to go back to my previous mouthpiece but my playing fell back to its previous level too. In six months I was almost completely forgotten, apart from my recordings.
About this time another name started to appear on the concert porters, an outstanding young prodigy, according to the critics. One morning, while I was shaving, I suddenly remembered that I had met him in my dressing room on the night of the last concert before the Brussels concert. He had introduced himself, paid me some extravagant compliments and above all wanted to touch my instrument and — my mouthpiece.
I felt no resentment towards him. But my reflection in the mirror donned a strange smile, surprisingly similar to that of the old lady in the second-hand shop in London.