should have
played the Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment. Between those
limits there seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, and
Paderewski has attained both limits.

After his concert was over, Paderewski gave seven encores, in the midst
of an enthusiasm which recurs whenever and wherever he gives a concert.
What is the peculiar quality in this artist which acts always with the
same intoxicating effect? Is it anything quite normal in his fingers, or
is it, in the image of a brilliant and fantastic writer on music in
America, Mr. James Huneker, a soul like the soul of Belus, "the Raphael
of the piano," which, "suspended above him, like a coat of many colors,"
mesmerises the audience, while he sits motionless, not touching the
notes?

Is Paderewski after all a Belus? Is it his many coloured soul that
"magnetises our poor vertebras," in Verlaine's phrase, and not the mere
skill of his fingers? Art, it has been said, is contagious, and to
compel universal sympathy is to succeed in the last requirements of an
art. Of what difference is it whether, like Keats, he perpetuates his
personal magnetism in a stanza, or, like Paderewski, sheds it, like a
perfume, for that passing moment which is all the eternity ever given to
the creator of beautiful sounds?

A REFLECTION AT A DOLMETSCH CONCERT

The interpreter of ancient music, Arnold Dolmetsch, is one of those rare
magicians who are able to make roses blossom in mid-winter. While music
has been modernising itself until the piano becomes an orchestra, and
Berlioz requires four orchestras to obtain a pianissimo, this strange
man of genius has quietly gone back a few centuries and discovered for
himself an exquisite lost world, which was disappearing like a fresco
peeling off a wall. He has burrowed in libraries and found unknown
manuscripts like a savant, he has worked at misunderstood notations and
found out a way of reading them like a cryptogrammatist, he has first
found out how to restore and then how to make over again harpsichord,
and virginals, and clavichord, and all those instruments which had
become silent curiosities in museums.

It is only beginning to be realised, even by musical people, that the
clavecin music of, for instance, Bach, loses at least half its charm,
almost its identity, when played on the modern grand piano; that the
exquisite music of Rameau and Couperin, the brilliant and beautiful
music of Scarlatti, is almost i