<< Continued from page 8

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 different 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 Étude 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.

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***** Welte Mignon: 1215 [piano roll]
****** Pachmann recorded eight of the Mazurkas -
Op 24 No 4 English HMV, London 1925: DB 861 [electric]
Op 33 No 3 Columbia, London 1916: L 1112 [acoustic]
Op 33 No 4 Columbia, London 1916: L 1102 [acoustic]
Op 50 No 2 four versions -
(1) Welte Mignon: C 7206 [piano roll]
(2) G & T, c 1907: 05500 [acoustic]
(3) Victor, Camden New Jersey, November 7th 1911: US single 64263, UK double E 80 [acoustic]
(4) English HMV, London 1925: DB 861 [electric]
Op 59 No 3 Victor, Camden New Jersey, April 26th 1912: US single 64224, UK double E 80 [acoustic]
Op 63 No 3 English HMV, London c 1928: DB 1106
Op 67 No 1 two versions -
(1) English HMV, London 1925: [Methuen-Campbell: DA 1302?]
Matrix Bb 6258-1 [electric]
(2) English HMV, London c 1928: DA 1302 Matrix Bb 11 763-1 [electric]
Op 67 No 4 two versions -
(1) Columbia, London, 1915: L 1014 [acoustic]
(2) English HMV, London c 1928: DB 1106 [electric]

AO