Source, in full
The sweat—great slithering streams of it—pours down you. It runs down your legs, down the leg that is pedalling the sostenuto pedal, down the other leg. It oozes out all over your chest, flows down the binding around your middle where your full-dress pants soak it up. It flows everywhere, down your arms, down your hands.
Notes from Wikiquote
You become afraid lest too much perspiration will wet your hands too much, make them slide on the black keys, which are too narrow; you are playing at about a hundred miles a minute. But somehow they don't. As long as they don't you know you're all right. You're going good, well-oiled like an engine. Not too much sweat, not too little. | It's only when you suddenly stop perspiring that your forearms go dull. | This is the one thing that every concert pianist dreads, has nightmares about. You never can tell when it's going to happen; it happens once in a hundred concerts, but it happens. When it happens it starts with a stiffness in the upper forearm. Then it travels down the forearm to your wrist, your hand, your fingers. The Bach fugue or the Chopin sonata beneath those fingers commences developing faults—little ones, then big ones. You feel the sudden surprise of the audience, its unfavourable reaction. The sweat all over your body, inside of that heavy woollen black suit with a stiff shirt and collar beneath it, freezes. | You crawl over the onrushing piano passages in slow motion. Your fingers are in ten little steel strait-jackets.... | But to-night, thank God, you are sweating, sweating "like a hog". As you turn the corner on the Bach fugue and near the home stretch, you think, "What a way to make a living!" Later, when the piece is finished and you've gotten up and bowed and sat down again and mopped up your brow and your all-important hands, you think, "I wish I were a prize-fighter. This next round with the Steinway would be a lot more comfortable in fighting trunks...." | In the intermission, between group one and group two, you go to your dressing-room and change every stitch you have on you: underwear, shirt, tie, socks, pants and tails. Your other clothes are soaking wet. | You are twenty-two years old, trained down to the last pound like a boxer. You do not over-eat, smoke or drink and you work six to eight hours a day at a piano with a special keyboar