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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 crescendos and diminuendos 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 [turn of the century]. 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 showpiece 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 who 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.

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* Pachmann recorded the following Liszt -
Polonaise No 2 [incomplete, second part only] Columbia, London, 1915: L 1010 [acoustic]
Liebestraum No 3 Columbia, London, 1916: L 1102 [acoustic]
Rigoletto Paraphrase [Verdi-Liszt] four versions -
(1) Welte Mignon: C 7201 [piano roll]
(2) Gramophone Company (pre-Dog), London, 1909: 05516 [acoustic, abrreviated]
(3) Victor, Camden New Jersey, November 7th 1911: US single 74261 [acoustic, omitting bars 1-45]
(4) Columbia, London, 1916: L 1103 [acoustic, omitting bars 1-45]
** Italian Concerto Welte Mignon: C 7244-46 [piano roll]
*** Sonata in A, K331 (Alla turca) Welte Mignon: C 1204-06 [piano roll]

AO