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Updated: May 8, 2025
An Ysaye and a Busoni are the same to us, and it is to our credit if we are even aware that Ysaye is the equal of Busoni. It seems to me that Pachmann is the only pianist who plays the piano as it ought to be played.
The primary attraction would be the gymnasium. It must, of course, contain a piano, not necessarily one on which Pachmann would play, but a piano nevertheless. There is also required a pianist, not necessarily a Pachmann. Two girls are better than one to run such a club. They will not find it difficult to obtain material to work upon.
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.
Sherwood has this touch; Tausig had it, and de Pachmann and Rubinstein most of all. It is not taught in Germany as it should be. The best American teachers are far ahead in this respect; in a few years the Europeans will come to us to learn these things." The first composition played to Dr. Mason was the G minor Rhapsodie of Brahms, with which, as it happened, he was unfamiliar.
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 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.
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.
Witness Liszt the magnificent, Rubinstein a passionate genius, Tausig who united in his person all the elements of greatness, Essipowa fascinating and feminine, the poetic Paderewski, de Pachmann the fantastic, subtle Joseffy, and Rosenthal a phenomenon. A world-great pianist was this Frderic Francois Chopin. He played as he composed: uniquely. All testimony is emphatic as to this.
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.
As an interpreter of the works of Chopin no one in recent times has ever excelled de Pachmann, but he also gave numerous recitals showing a great breadth of style in the performances of works of the other great masters particularly Brahms and Liszt. "Originality in pianoforte playing, what does it really mean?
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