A curious legend has been for decades current in English
and American musical circles regarding Vladimir de
Pachmann and Chopin. As the folk-lore specialists and ethnologists
have discovered, in their own spheres of study, that no
legend is without its kernel of fact, so also in the case of
Pachmann and Chopin a small inner kernel of truth may be found
at the centre of an immense mass of pulp—the fiction surrounding
it. Before his extravagances and eccentricities had almost
entirely swamped his artistry, that is to say up to within fifteen
or even ten years ago, his playing of the smaller nocturnes,
waltzes, études and mazurkas was exquisite—the almost
unlimited range of his gradations of tone within a mezzo forte
and an unbelievable quasi niente, the amazing fluidity and limpid
liquidity of his finger work, his delicious dainty staccato, the
marvellous cantilena, the exquisite phrasing and the wonderful
delicate fantasy of the whole, all made his playing of these
things an enchantment and a delight. Of these things: but of
these things only . Always he was a lamentable failure in works
on a large scale or cast in a heroic mould; his lack of intellectual
staying power, grasp, personal force, or ability to think in big
sweeps, the essential smallness of his style and his musical
outlook has been pitifully revealed. Equally terrible has been
the revelation on the few (very few) occasions on which he
has ventured to try conclusions with the 'paramount Olympians'
such as Bach, and he had the good sense generally to
avoid what was so evidently beyond his range. Miniaturist—p. 177exquisite
miniaturist he has been—with the merits and defects
of miniaturists. But the miniaturist, applying the wrong end of
the telescope
of his Lilliputian style to the Ballades, the great
Polonaises, the Sonatas, the Scherzos, has been hailed as the
supreme and inspired interpreter of Chopin, one side at least
of whose musical genius has been musically and spiritually
completely a closed book to him—as if any artist could in any
sense be considered a great Chopin player who could not play
the greatest, deepest and most typical products of his genius!
Busoni, the greatest mind and supreme creative-interpreter
among pianists of modern times, who could do all and much
more than Pachmann in Pachmann's own sphere, with a glowing
white fire of intellectual power added, that was as utterly
out of Pachmann's reach as Busoni's Bach, once said with his
usual subtlety and profundity to a pupil of his who came back
after a Pachmann recital, noisily enthusiastic: 'My child, if you
cannot do all that Pachmann does, and if it is not just one small
part of your powers, you are not a pianist'.