The first three shivering, descending tones hit the audience like a wave, leaving stillness in their wake. What moves in their hearts is written not only in their faces - gaping mouths, eyes round and vacant - but in their entire bodies. Half turned away in just forgotten conversations of this and that, slender silver lorgnettes lowered before gleaming pearl colliers, monocles glinting of gold or brass next to white starched shirt fronts. Hands frozen at mouths, cheeks, breasts. Caught in the moment.

Just like I saw it in my mind's eye when I insisted on this - no introduction, no polite applause. The stage lift pushing me up in silence, while the soft babble of the audience covered the muted, distant puffing of the steam engine, the whine of the belts and the whirr of the well greased axles that transferred the force of the machine to the lift and to me.

They have sent a few puffs of steam through the pipes to hover about my appearance, a thin mist on which they project eerie images from backstage as I commence. Pictures of dreamlike characters sway as if dancing in the languid swirls, a wan imitation of them... well, let them have their little phantasmagoria, the professor swallowing the idea despite my objections. If my lips had still been able to, they would have twisted in disdain - those people have no idea how close they come to the truth, and yet how bleak a mockery they have made of it.

The professor had his doubts about my arrangement, but then he didn't know what I do. An ordinary solo violinist unannounced in this way wouldn't have caught their attention for many minutes yet, if ever. But these tones, from this violin, in these hands in this auditorium, will not remain unheard. They do not merely suggest themselves - they descend, they smite. The living proof is before my eyes.

I allow myself to lower the eyelids, shutting the sight out, immersing myself in the music and looking back at the moment when I myself was first smitten by these very tones.

We have all lost something crucial, something indispensable. Perhaps amongst the gentry filling the rows before me, few have lost anything more vital than a childlike faith in human goodness - grievous enough. Whereas I - I had lost everything.