When Branhardt came home in the evening, he could hear music as he approached the house.

He was happy every time he was greeted that way, and for this he knew many a reason. Before they were married, in her eighteenth year, his wife had wanted to study to become a concert pianist, and her husband knew very well that their early marriage had held her back from a brilliant future. Of course, he never asked her to do that. She demanded it of herself, denying her own desires —. Perhaps out of fear her soul might stray too far away — too far from the demands of the very straitened material circumstances to which they were relegated in those early years.

So when Anneliese, hesitantly at first but then ever longer and with greater ardor, turned to the baby grand piano they owned then — when, as the years went by, she would ever more blithely and openly give musical expression to the undercurrent of her inner life — Branhardt took it as a sweet feeling of love, a conclusive affirmation of the bond between them, an expression in sound of all that tied her and Branhardt together. Anneliese's music was once again Anneliese's marriage to him.

Entering the house each evening, he would make his way at once to the still-unlit sitting room; with his ever-quiet tread he would arrive almost unnoticed, and sink deep, barely visible, into one of the armchairs — the most restful place he knew.

Unmusical himself and too pressed for time to attend concerts, he came to know music almost exclusively through Anneliese. That's why, little by little, it seemed to express so much about Anneliese herself. The fact that music, in a sense, revealed as much about his wife as she revealed about music — that for him was music's true allure.

And Anneliese learned ever more astutely how to use that fact in a way different than he was aware. With her music, she shared with him much that he would have called “exuberance.” She drew upon powerful depths of emotion, and, fresh and fair in her deft mastery, she let the piano speak.