ter all, lies mainly in one thing, touch. It
is by the skill, precision, and beauty of his touch that he makes music
at all; it is by the quality of his touch that he evokes a more or less
miraculous vision of sound for us. Touch gives him his only means of
expression; it is to him what relief is to the sculptor or what values
are to the painter. To "understand," as it is called, a piece of music,
is not so much as the beginning of good playing; if you do not
understand it with your fingers, what shall your brain profit you? In
the interpretation of music all action of the brain which does not
translate itself perfectly in touch is useless. You may as well not
think at all as not think in terms of your instrument, and the piano
responds to one thing only, touch. Now Pachmann, beyond all other
pianists, has this magic. When he plays it, the piano ceases to be a
compromise. 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 seems to touch the
notes with a kind of agony of delight; his face twitches with the actual
muscular contraction of the fingers as they suspend themselves in the
very act of touch. I am told that Pachmann plays Chopin in a morbid
way. Well, Chopin was morbid; there are fevers and cold sweats in his
music; it is not healthy music, and it is not to be interpreted in a
robust way. It must be played, as Pachmann plays it, somnambulistically,
with a tremulous delicacy of intensity, as if it were a living thing on
whose nerves one were operating, and as if every touch might mean life
or death.

I have heard pianists who played Chopin in what they called a healthy
way. The notes swung, spun, and clattered, with a heroic repercussion of
sound, a hurrying reiteration of fury, signifying nothing. The piano
stormed through the applause; the pianist sat imperturbably, hammering.
Well, I do not think any music should be played like that, not Liszt
even. Liszt connives at the suicide, but with Chopin it is a murder.
When Pachmann plays Chopin the music sings itself, as if without the
intervention of an executant, of one who stands between the music and
our hearing. The music has to intoxicate him before he can play with it;
then he becomes its comrade, in a kind of very seriou