away from them, you would know how little he
had told you. Now let us ask Godowsky, whom Pachmann himself sets above
all other pianists, what he has to tell us about the way in which he
plays.

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 difficult 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 Etude 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