Pachmann has the head of a monk who has had commerce with the Devil, and
it is whispered that he has sold his soul to the diabolical instrument,
which, since buying it, can speak in a human voice. The sounds torture
him, as a wizard is tortured by the shapes he has evoked. He makes them
dance for his pleasure, and you hear their breath come and go, in the
swell and subsiding of those marvellous crescendoes and diminuendoes
which set the strings pulsating like a sea. He listens for the sound,
listens for the last echo of it after it is gone, and is caught away
from us visibly into that unholy company.
Pachmann is the greatest player of the piano now living. He cannot
interpret every kind of music, though his actual power is more varied
than he has led the public to suppose. I have heard him play in private
a show-piece of Liszt, a thunderous thing of immense difficulty,
requiring a technique quite different from the technique which alone he
cares to reveal to us; he had not played it for twenty years, and he
played it with exactly the right crackling splendour that it demanded.
On the rare occasions when he plays Bach, something that no one of our
time has ever perceived or rendered in that composer seems to be evoked,
and Bach lives again, with something of that forgotten life which only
the harpsichord can help us to remember under the fingers of other
players. Mozart and Weber are two of the composers whom he plays with
the most natural instinct, for in both he finds and unweaves that dainty
web of bright melody which Mozart made out of sunlight and Weber out of
moonlight. There is nothing between him and them, as there is in
Beethoven, for instance, who hides himself in the depths of a cloud, in
the depths of wisdom, in the depths of the heart. And to Pachmann all
this is as strange as mortal firesides to a fairy. He wanders round it,
wondering at the great walls and bars that have been set about the
faint, escaping spirit of flame. There is nothing human in him, and as
music turns towards humanity it slips from between his hands. What he
seeks and finds in music is the inarticulate, ultimate thing in sound:
the music, in fact.
It has been complained that Pachmann's readings are not intellectual,
that he does not interpret. It is true that he does not interpret
between the brain and music, but he is able to disimprison sound, as no
one has ever done with mortal hands, and the piano, when he touches it,
becomes a joyous, disembodied thing, a voice and nothing more, but a
voice which is music itself. To reduce music to terms of human
intelligence or even of human emotion is to lower it from its own
region, where it is Ariel. There is something in music, which we can
apprehend only as sound, that comes to us out of heaven or hell, mocking
the human agency that gives it speech, and taking flight beyond it. When
Pachmann plays a Prelude of Chopin, all that Chopin was conscious of
saying in it will, no doubt, be there; it is all there, if Godowsky
plays it; every note, every shade of expression, every heightening and
quickening, everything that the notes actually say. But under Pachmann's
miraculous hands a miracle takes place; mystery comes about it like an
atmosphere, an icy thrill traverses it, the terror and ecstasy of a
beauty that is not in the world envelop it; we hear sounds that are
awful and exquisite, crying outside time and space. Is it through
Pachmann's nerves, or through ours, that this communion takes place? Is
it technique, temperament, touch, that reveals to us what we have never
dreamed was hidden in sounds? Could Pachmann himself explain to us his
own magic?
He would tell us that he had practised the piano with more patience than
others, that he had taken more trouble to acquire a certain touch which
is really the only way to the secret of his instrument. He could tell
you little more; but, if you saw his hands settle on the keys, and fly
and poise there, as if they had nothing to do with the perturbed,
listening face that smiles away from them, you would know how little he
had told you. Now let us ask Godowsky, whom Pachmann himself sets above
all other pianists, what he has to tell us about the way in which he
plays.
When Godowsky plays he sits bent and motionless, as if picking out a
pattern with his fingers. He seems to keep surreptitious watch upon
them, as they run swiftly on their appointed errands. There is no errand
they are not nimble enough to carry without a stumble to the journey's
end. They obey him as if in fear; they dare not turn aside from the
straight path; for their whole aim is to get to the end of the journey,
having done their task faultlessly. Sometimes, but without relaxing his
learned gravity, he plays a difficult game, as in the Paganini
variations of Brahms, which were done with a skill as sure and as
soulless as Paganini's may have been. Sometimes he forgets that the
notes are living things, and tosses them about a little cruelly, as if
they were a juggler's balls. They drop like stones; you are sorry for
them, because they are alive. How Chopin suffers, when he plays the
Preludes! He plays them without a throb; the scholar has driven out the
magic; Chopin becomes a mathematician. In Brahms, in the G Minor
Rhapsody, you hear much more of what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms has
set strange shapes dancing, like the skeletons "in the ghosts'
moonshine" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these bodiless things take shape
in the music, as Godowsky plays it unflinchingly, giving it to you
exactly as it is, without comment. Here his fidelity to every outline of
form becomes an interpretation. But Chopin is so much more than form
that to follow every outline of it may be to leave Chopin out of the
outline.
Pachmann, of all the interpreters of Chopin, is the most subtle, the one
most likely to do for the most part what Chopin wanted. The test, I
think, is in the Third Scherzo. That great composition, one of the
greatest among Chopin's works, for it contains all his qualities in an
intense measure, might have been thought less likely to be done
perfectly by Pachmann than such Coleridge in music, such murmurings out
of paradise, as the Etude in F Minor (Op. 25, No. 2) or one of those
Mazurkas in which Chopin is more poignantly fantastic in substance, more
wild and whimsical in rhythm, than elsewhere in his music; and indeed,
as Pachmann played them, they were strange and lovely gambols of
unchristened elves. But in the Scherzo he mastered this great, violent,
heroic thing as he had mastered the little freakish things and the
trickling and whispering things. He gave meaning to every part of its
decoration, yet lost none of the splendour and wave-like motion of the
whole tossing and eager sea of sound.
Pachmann's art, like Chopin's, which it perpetuates, is of that
peculiarly modern kind which aims at giving the essence of things in
their fine shades: "la nuance encor!" Is there, it may be asked, any
essential thing left out in the process; do we have attenuation in what
is certainly a way of sharpening one's steel to a very fine point? The
sharpened steel gains in what is most vital in its purpose by this very
paring away of its substance; and why should not a form of art strike
deeper for the same reason? Our only answer to Whistler and Verlaine is
the existence of Rodin and Wagner. There we have weight as well as
sharpness; these giants fly. It was curious to hear, in the vast
luminous music of the "Rheingold," flowing like water about the earth,
bare to its roots, not only an amplitude but a delicacy of fine shades
not less realised than in Chopin. Wagner, it is true, welds the lyric
into drama, without losing its lyrical quality. Yet there is no perfect
lyric which is made less by the greatness of even a perfect drama.
Chopin was once thought to be a drawing-room composer; Pachmann was once
thought to be no "serious artist." Both have triumphed, not because the
taste of any public has improved, but because a few people who knew have
whispered the truth to one another, and at last it has leaked out like a
secret.