I shall never cease to associate Paderewski with the night of the
Jubilee. I had gone on foot from the Temple through those packed, gaudy,
noisy, and vulgarised streets, through which no vehicles could pass, to
a rare and fantastic house at the other end of London, a famous house
hospitable to all the arts; and Paderewski sat with closed eyes and
played the piano, there in his friend's house, as if he were in his own
home. After the music was over, someone said to me, "I feel as if I had
been in hell," so profound was the emotion she had experienced from the
playing. I would have said heaven rather than hell, for there seemed to
be nothing but pure beauty, beauty half asleep and dreaming of itself,
in the marvellous playing. A spell, certainly, was over everyone, and
then the exorciser became human, and jested deliciously till the early
morning, when, as I went home through the still garrulous and peopled
streets, I saw the last flutter of flags and streamers between night and
dawn. All the world had been rioting for pleasure in the gross way of
popular demonstrations; and in the very heart of this up-roar there had
been, for a few people, this divine escape.
No less magical, soothing, enchanting was the apparition, in Queen's
Hall, ten years later, of this unchanged creature with the tortured
Burne-Jones face, level and bewildering eyes, the web of gold hair still
poised like a halo. Beauty grew up around him like a sudden, exuberant
growth, more vigorous and from a deeper root than before. I realised,
more than ever, how the musician had always been the foundation of the
virtuoso. I have used the word apparition advisedly. There is something,
not only in the aspect of Paderewski, which seems to come mysteriously,
but full of light, from a great distance. He startles music into a
surprised awakening.
The art of Paderewski recalls to me the art of the most skilled and the
most distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli.
People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski's skill as acrobatic. The
word conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate.
But there is much in common between two forms of an art in which
physical dexterity counts for so much, and that passionate precision to
which error must be impossible. It is the same kind of joy that you get
from Cinquevalli when he juggles with cannon-balls and from Paderewski
when he brings a continuous thunder out of the piano. Other people do
the same things, but no else can handle thunder or a cannon-ball
delicately. And Paderewski, in his absolute mastery of his instrument,
seems to do the most difficult things without difficulty, with a
scornful ease, an almost accidental quality which, found in perfection,
marvellously decorates it. It is difficult to imagine that anyone since
Liszt has had so complete a mastery of every capacity of the piano, and
Liszt, though probably even more brilliant, can hardly be imagined with
this particular kind of charm. His playing is in the true sense an
inspiration; he plays nothing as if he had learned it with toil, but as
if it had come to him out of a kind of fiery meditation. Even his
thunder is not so much a thing specially cultivated for its own sake as
a single prominent detail in a vast accomplishment. When he plays, the
piano seems to become thrillingly and tempestuously alive, as if brother
met brother in some joyous triumph. He collaborates with it, urging it
to battle like a war-horse. And the quality of the sonority which he
gets out of it is unlike that which is teased or provoked from the
instrument by any other player. Fierce exuberant delight wakens under
his fingers, in which there is a sensitiveness almost impatient, and
under his feet, which are as busy as an organist's with the pedals. The
music leaps like pouring water, flood after flood of sound, caught
together and flung onward by a central energy. The separate notes are
never picked out and made into ornaments; all the expression goes to
passage after passage, realised acutely in their sequence. Where others
give you hammering on an anvil, he gives you thunder as if heard through
clouds. And he is full of leisure and meditation, brooding thoughtfully
over certain exquisite things as if loth to let them pass over and be
gone. And he seems to play out of a dream, in which the fingers are
secondary to the meaning, but report that meaning with entire felicity.
In the playing of the "Moonlight" sonata there was no Paderewski, there
was nothing but Beethoven. The finale, of course, was done with the due
brilliance, the executant's share in a composition not written for
modern players. But what was wonderful, for its reverence, its
perfection of fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of the
little sharp movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of a
bird. The ear waited, and was satisfied in every shade of anticipation;
nothing was missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were a
faithful and obedient shadow. As you listened you forgot technique, or
that it was anybody in particular who was playing: the sonata was
there, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had known
that it existed.
Before the Beethoven there had been a "Variation and Fugue on an
original theme," in which Paderewski played his own music, really as if
he were improvising it there and then. I am not sure that that feeling
is altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the
first time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large
contrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods. Sound was
evoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and
die out in a white rain of stinging foam. Pauses, surprises, all were
delicately calculated and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemed
to watch over them like a Loge of celestial ingenuity.
When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in which
the sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if Paderewski
were still playing his own music. If ever there was a show piece for
the piano, this was it, and if ever there was a divine showman for it,
it was Paderewski. You felt at once the personal sympathy of the great
pianist for the great pianist. He was no longer reverential, as with
Beethoven, not doing homage but taking part, sharing almost in a
creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky. Nothing in the bravura
disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness
in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he
tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was
luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth
by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more
astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could
hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more
spectacularly magnificent?
Liszt's music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do
anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is
not so wholly satisfactory as in the ease of Chopin, who, with a
smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music. Chopin never
dazzles, Liszt blinds. It is a question if he ever did full justice to
his own genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are
only now beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in
his work. How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless
transfiguring triumphant way! The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for
instance, in "Parsifal," is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt
in which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the
mysterious fascination that Wagner put into it. But in writing for the
piano Liszt certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknown
person, who was to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which there
are no depths, though there are splendours. That is why Liszt is the
test rather of the virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, it
was so infinitely more important that Paderewski should have played the
Beethoven sonata as impersonally as he did than that he should have
played the Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment. Between those
limits there seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, and
Paderewski has attained both limits.
After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midst
of an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert.
What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with the
same intoxicating effect? Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, or
is it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music in
America, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, "the Raphael
of the piano," which, "suspended above him, like a coat of many colors,"
mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching the
notes?
Is Paderewski after all a Belus? Is it his many coloured soul that
"magnetises our poor vertebras," in Verlaine's phrase, and not the mere
skill of his fingers? Art, it has been said, is contagious, and to
compel universal sympathy is to succeed in the last requirements of an
art. Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he perpetuates his
personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds it, like a
perfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever given to
the creator of beautiful sounds?