I
It seems to me that Pachmann is the only pianist who plays the piano as
it ought to be played. I admit his limitations, I admit that he can play
only certain things, but I contend that he is the greatest living
pianist because he can play those things better than any other pianist
can play anything. Pachmann is the Verlaine of pianists, and when I hear
him I think of Verlaine reading his own verse, in a faint, reluctant
voice, which you overheard. Other players have mastered the piano,
Pachmann absorbs its soul, and it is only when he touches it that it
really speaks its own voice.
The art of the pianist, after all, lies mainly in one thing, touch. It
is by the skill, precision, and beauty of his touch that he makes music
at all; it is by the quality of his touch that he evokes a more or less
miraculous vision of sound for us. Touch gives him his only means of
expression; it is to him what relief is to the sculptor or what values
are to the painter. To "understand," as it is called, a piece of music,
is not so much as the beginning of good playing; if you do not
understand it with your fingers, what shall your brain profit you? In
the interpretation of music all action of the brain which does not
translate itself perfectly in touch is useless. You may as well not
think at all as not think in terms of your instrument, and the piano
responds to one thing only, touch. Now Pachmann, beyond all other
pianists, has this magic. When he plays it, the piano ceases to be a
compromise. He makes it as living and penetrating as the violin, as
responsive and elusive as the clavichord.
Chopin wrote for the piano with a more perfect sense of his instrument
than any other composer, and Pachmann plays Chopin with an infallible
sense of what Chopin meant to express in his mind. He seems to touch the
notes with a kind of agony of delight; his face twitches with the actual
muscular contraction of the fingers as they suspend themselves in the
very act of touch. I am told that Pachmann plays Chopin in a morbid
way. Well, Chopin was morbid; there are fevers and cold sweats in his
music; it is not healthy music, and it is not to be interpreted in a
robust way. It must be played, as Pachmann plays it, somnambulistically,
with a tremulous delicacy of intensity, as if it were a living thing on
whose nerves one were operating, and as if every touch might mean life
or death.
I have heard pianists who played Chopin in what they called a healthy
way. The notes swung, spun, and clattered, with a heroic repercussion of
sound, a hurrying reiteration of fury, signifying nothing. The piano
stormed through the applause; the pianist sat imperturbably, hammering.
Well, I do not think any music should be played like that, not Liszt
even. Liszt connives at the suicide, but with Chopin it is a murder.
When Pachmann plays Chopin the music sings itself, as if without the
intervention of an executant, of one who stands between the music and
our hearing. The music has to intoxicate him before he can play with it;
then he becomes its comrade, in a kind of very serious game; himself,
in short, that is to say inhuman. His fingers have in them a cold magic,
as of soulless elves who have sold their souls for beauty. And this
beauty, which is not of the soul, is not of the flesh; it is a
sea-change, the life of the foam on the edge of the depths. Or it
transports him into some mid-region of the air, between hell and heaven,
where he hangs listening. He listens at all his senses. The dew, as well
as the raindrop, has a sound for him.
In Pachmann's playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments,
the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or a
diamond. Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman. To him, and
rightly, it is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household cat
with our hearth. When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us,
has nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks a
language which we do not know. It comes to us a divine hallucination,
chills us a little with its "airs from heaven" or elsewhere, and breaks
down for an instant the too solid walls of the world, showing us the
gulf. When d'Albert plays Chopin's Berceuse, beautifully, it is a
lullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle.
Pachmann's is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul,
but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing he
finds a kind of humour.
In the attempt to humanise music, that attempt which almost every
executant makes, knowing that he will be judged by his success or
failure in it, what is most fatally lost is that sense of mystery which,
to music, is atmosphere. In this atmosphere alone music breathes
tranquilly. So remote is it from us that it can only be reached through
some not quite healthy nervous tension, and Pachmann's physical
disquietude when he plays is but a sign of what it has cost him to
venture outside humanity, into music. Yet in music this mystery is a
simple thing, its native air; and the art of the musician has less
difficulty in its evocation than the art of the poet or the painter.
With what an effort do we persuade words or colours back from their
vulgar articulateness into at least some recollection of that mystery
which is deeper than sight or speech. Music can never wholly be detached
from mystery, can never wholly become articulate, and it is in our
ignorance of its true nature that we would tame it to humanity and teach
it to express human emotions, not its own.
Pachmann gives you pure music, not states of soul or of temperament, not
interpretations, but echoes. He gives you the notes in their own
atmosphere, where they live for him an individual life, which has
nothing to do with emotions or ideas. Thus he does not need to translate
out of two languages: first, from sound to emotion, temperament, what
you will; then from that back again to sound. The notes exist; it is
enough that they exist. They mean for him just the sound and nothing
else. You see his fingers feeling after it, his face calling to it, his
whole body imploring it. Sometimes it comes upon him in such a burst of
light that he has to cry aloud, in order that he may endure the ecstasy.
You see him speaking to the music; he lifts his finger, that you may
listen for it not less attentively. But it is always the thing itself
that he evokes for you, as it rises flower-like out of silence, and
comes to exist in the world. Every note lives, with the whole vitality
of its existence. To Swinburne every word lives, just in the same way;
when he says "light," he sees the sunrise; when he says "fire," he is
warmed through all his blood. And so Pachmann calls up, with this
ghostly magic of his, the innermost life of music. I do not think he has
ever put an intention into Chopin. Chopin had no intentions. He was a
man, and he suffered; and he was a musician, and he wrote music; and
very likely George Sand, and Majorca, and his disease, and Scotland, and
the woman who sang to him when he died, are all in the music; but that
is not the question. The notes sob and shiver, stab you like a knife,
caress you like the fur of a cat; and are beautiful sound, the most
beautiful sound that has been called out of the piano. Pachmann calls it
out for you, disinterestedly, easily, with ecstasy, inevitably; you do
not realise that he has had difficulties to conquer, that music is a
thing for acrobats and athletes. He smiles to you, that you may realise
how beautiful the notes are, when they trickle out of his fingers like
singing water; he adores them and his own playing, as you do, and as if
he had nothing to do with them but to pour them out of his hands.
Pachmann is less showy with his fingers than any other pianist; his
hands are stealthy acrobats, going quietly about their difficult
business. They talk with the piano and the piano answers them. All that
violence cannot do with the notes of the instrument, he does. His art
begins where violence leaves off; that is why he can give you fortissimo
without hurting the nerves of a single string; that is why he can play a
run as if every note had its meaning. To the others a run is a flourish,
a tassel hung on for display, a thing extra; when Pachmann plays a run
you realise that it may have its own legitimate sparkle of gay life.
With him every note lives, has its own body and its own soul, and that
is why it is worth hearing him play even trivial music like
Mendelssohn's "Spring Song" or meaningless music like Taubert's Waltz:
he creates a beauty out of sound itself and a beauty which is at the
root of music. There are moments when a single chord seems to say in
itself everything that music has to say. That is the moment in which
everything but sound is annihilated, the moment of ecstasy; and it is of
such moments that Pachmann is the poet.
And so his playing of Bach, as in the Italian Concerto in F, reveals
Bach as if the dust had suddenly been brushed off his music. All that in
the playing of others had seemed hard or dry becomes suddenly luminous,
alive, and, above all, a miracle of sound. Through a delicacy of
shading, like the art of Bach himself for purity, poignancy, and
clarity, he envelops us with the thrilling atmosphere of the most
absolutely musical music in the world. The playing of this concerto is
the greatest thing I have ever heard Pachmann do, but when he went on to
play Mozart I heard another only less beautiful world of sound rise
softly about me. There was the "glittering peace" undimmed, and there
was the nervous spring, the diamond hardness, as well as the glowing
light and ardent sweetness. Yet another manner of playing, not less
appropriate to its subject, brought before me the bubbling flow, the
romantic moonlight, of Weber; this music that is a little showy, a
little luscious, but with a gracious feminine beauty of its own. Chopin
followed, and when Pachmann plays Chopin it is as if the soul of Chopin
had returned to its divine body, the notes of this sinewy and feverish
music, in which beauty becomes a torture and energy pierces to the
centre and becomes grace, and languor swoons and is reborn a winged
energy. The great third Scherzo was played with grandeur, and it is in
the Scherzos, perhaps, that Chopin has built his most enduring work. The
Barcarolle, which I have heard played as if it were Niagara and not
Venice, was given with perfect quietude, and the second Mazurka of Op.
50 had that boldness of attack, with an almost stealthy intimacy in its
secret rhythms, which in Pachmann's playing, and in his playing alone,
gives you the dance and the reverie together. But I am not sure that the
Etudes are not, in a very personal sense, what is most essential in
Chopin, and I am not sure that Pachmann is not at his best in the
playing of the Etudes.
Other pianists think, perhaps, but Pachmann plays. As he plays he is
like one hypnotised by the music; he sees it beckoning, smiles to it,
lifts his finger on a pause that you may listen to the note which is
coming. This apparent hypnotism is really a fixed and continuous act of
creation; there is not a note which he does not create for himself, to
which he does not give his own vitality, the sensitive and yet
controlling vitality of the medium. In playing the Bach he had the music
before him that he might be wholly free from even the slight strain
which comes from the almost unconscious act of remembering. It was for a
precisely similar reason that Coleridge, in whose verse inspiration and
art are more perfectly balanced than in any other English verse, often
wrote down his poems first in prose that he might be unhampered by the
conscious act of thought while listening for the music.
"There is no exquisite beauty," said Bacon in a subtle definition,
"which has not some strangeness in its proportions." The playing of
Pachmann escapes the insipidity of that beauty which is without
strangeness; it has in it something fantastically inhuman, like fiery
ice, and it is for this reason that it remains a thing uncapturable, a
thing whose secret he himself could never reveal. It is like the secret
of the rhythms of Verlaine, and no prosodist will ever tell us why a
line like:
Dans un palais, soie et or, dans Ecbatane,
can communicate a new shiver to the most languid or the most experienced
nerves. Like the art of Verlaine, the art of Pachmann is one wholly of
suggestion; his fingers state nothing, they evoke. I said like the art
of Verlaine, because there is a singular likeness between the two
methods. But is not all art a suggestion, an evocation, never a
statement? Many of the great forces of the present day have set
themselves to the task of building up a large, positive art in which
everything shall be said with emphasis: the art of Zola, the art of Mr.
Kipling, in literature; the art of Mr. Sargent in painting; the art of
Richard Strauss in music. In all these remarkable men there is some
small, essential thing lacking; and it is in men like Verlaine, like
Whistler, like Pachmann, that we find the small, essential thing, and
nothing else.