The Diary Of Pamela D.

'What? Oh . . .'

'Come now, you've hardly said two words since you got home. If I didn't know better, I'd say you sent your body home and left your mind in Berlin by mistake. How was Berlin, by the way?'

'I don't know. We didn't see much of anything except a bunch of ugly, depressing-looking old buildings. The hotel was nice enough I suppose but I was too busy to pay any attention to what was going on around me to absorb any real details.'

'Theo said he thought you did very well.'

'He would! It was a complete mess. I was so scared at first that all I could get out was this shaky sort of squawk. Mr. Müller was absolutely incredible, though, and so were the people in the choir and the orchestra. I can't believe how patient they were- did Theo tell you I threw up? Well I did. It was so humiliating! I ran to the back stage and barfed. Theo and Mr. Müller had to come get me because I was afraid to go back out and face all those people. Mr. Müller told me that he'd seen it all before, that some of the world's greatest performers went through what I was going through every time they had to go out on stage. He said not to worry, that Deutsche Gramophone had done its fair share of recordings that were an absolute disaster. He played one for me later- it was a trumpet player named Hans . . . something like Schermer; he's one of those who play really high all the time; they play these cute little trumpets that look more like toys than the real thing. Well, this recording was done 'way back in the 1970's and it really was awful. The poor man! But he was already legendary and did lots of other recordings that were absolutely incredible, so I guess that kind of made up for it. The long and short of it is, he was able to take it all in stride because it happened late in his career. In my case, however, I'm afraid I'm done because it happened to me right at the beginning, and I don't have any sort of reputation to fall back on.' She sighed, toying idly with her food. 'Several people there told me that quite a number of the first chair musicians are people who had the same sort of experience I did, who gave up their dream of becoming a world-class soloist and settled for security instead. They said that a lot of people were left traumatised for life by the experience, and spent the rest of their lives wishing that they could somehow find it in themselves to "overcome their personal failure."'