Par 1 The present writer does not boast of having once been a pupil of Vladimir de Pachmann. For one thing, this would not be fair to Pachmann. It was very literally "once". There was but a single lesson.

Par 2 The admirable principles expounded that afternoon, so many years ago, failed to make a pianist of the unworthy pupil, who has to admit that the details of the precious instructions have escaped his memory. The details in question concerned the fingering of the first movement of Beethoven's Sonate Pathétique. Generously, the strange little old master not only revealed his secrets — his discovery after half a lifetime of thought — of the right fingering for the opening of the Allegro of that movement, and other passages, but moreover, devoted the afternoon to an endeavour to persuade the pupil's graceless hands to emulate his own wonderfully suave execution.

Par 3 If it has to be confessed that the details of that fingering have gone out of mind, a general impression of the lesson remains vivid enough. In public Pachmann had for a long while been indulging in his celebrated unconventionality, which the unsympathetic called clowning. It was, no doubt, more the fault of the audience than his own, but his concerts had begun to be almost tiresome, since the celebrated unconventionality seemed to be growing into a rite. Although Pachmann's playing remained incomparable, the interruptions, if you happened not to be amused, could be thoroughly irritating. But that afternoon with the Sonate Pathétique blew away any doubt one might have harboured about Pachmann's genuineness. To the unworthy pupil it was brought home afresh and unanswerably that the queer old man, though on the concert platform he may at times have let himself go wild a little deliberately, incited by the public's delight in his confidences, was an artist through and through.

Par 4 He, who had all along been the most exquisite of pianists, touchingly declared himself that day to be only beginning to attain a style of real refinement. He spoke with comically exaggerated horror of the enormities he had committed in his less enlightened years. There was nothing in him of that fatigue and disillusionment so common in great executants in their later phases. The ageing Pachmann felt the allurement and possibilities of the keyboard with all the freshness of youth; and Pygmalion, when his statue came to life, could hardly have been more delightfully infatuated than he was with one of his own elegant solutions of the problems of fingering the classics. Nothing else in life, at that time, mattered much to him. His was a pure artist's passion, touching and, indeed, impressive.

Par 5 This little reminiscence was called to mind by the appearance of the first installments, just published by Augener's, of a Pachmann edition of Chopin's works, which we owe to Marguerite de Pachmann-Labori. Seven of the Studies from Op. 10 are issued, and also the C sharp minor Fantaisie-Impromptu.

Par 6 Mme. Labori's preface deserves to be quoted. She — who was first known to the world as Maggie Okey, an Australian child pianist, then becoming Pachmann's wife, and then the wife of the celebrated French barrister, Maître Labori, Dreyfus's counsel — was Pachmann's one pupil, and after his death last year she entered into possession of his music, fully marked with the fingering of which he was so proud. In the course of her remarks Mme. Labori says:

Par 7 "Those who have heard Vladimir de Pachmann play will remember how even in public he used with innocent pride to speak of his fingering, and the solutions of difficult problems which it represented. All pianists, of course, attach great importance to fingering, but with Pachmann it was the essence of his method — that method which he described as his life's work. He never wearied in his search for the fingering that would enable the hands always to retain the position which he, like Chopin, considered so desirable — the position in which they appear to glide over the keyboard and are, at the same time, capable of articulating perfectly the individual notes. . . .

Par 8 "Pachmann's choice of fingering depended often upon the quality of the tone he desired to produce. This should be remembered if, at times, his fingering appears difficult and even awkward. No one has ever been able to dispute the beauty of Pachmann's touch. His fingering once mastered, the most intricate passages will be exempt from any blur or unevenness, and the hands will retain the position in which they seem to move effortlessly, with never a jerk or twist. In this way a perfect legato is attained. Let us remember how highly Chopin prized an easy position and smooth motion of the hands."

Par 9 No pianist, one imagines, can fail to be interested by this edition. It was all very well for Edouard Ganche in the recent Oxford edition of Chopin — based on the composer's MSS, and containing no fingering but Chopin's own — to decry all forms of editorial additions. Such an edition as the Oxford, or the stately Breitkopf and Härtel, supposes in the user either an accomplished artist or else a student with a first-rate teacher. For the average student, and, indeed, for the average teacher, Chopin's own indications of fingering are altogether too scanty.

Par 10 Let us take the E major Study, Op. 10, No. 3. Except in bars 38-41 Chopin himself seems to have given no fingering at all. It is true that the crucial difficulty of the piece occurs in those four bars, but there are other things in the Study which no ordinary player is going to finger aright by the mere light of nature. The Pachmann edition may infuriate some people, but really it is fascinating. Often a Pachmann fingering that at first sight seems far-fetched ends by recommending itself. Let us look, for instance, at the 19th bar of this E major Study. Pachmann fingers the treble part thus: 5, 4—1, 5—1, 4, &c. (Please turn up the page in question.)

Par 11 The surprise is the 4—1 on the C sharps. It looks at first like a misprint. But when the fingers have got hold of it you will see the point. The point lies in the phrasing. Use this unconventional fingering, and the phrasing comes right of itself, with the effect as of a slight, a tiny, catch of the breath at the half-bar.

Par 12 Many a student surely will at first stare puzzled, and then chuckle with joy at the unexpected way in which Pachmann sometimes divides a part between the hands — thus, in the eighth bar of the E major study (last three notes of the tenor part, in which the A is allotted to the left hand), but still more in the 42nd and 44th bars, in which the left hand makes its momentary excursions high up the keyboard. Here the upper note of the first chord in each of the groups of two chords in the lower stave is allotted to the right hand. One can fancy how Pachmann himself chuckled when he thought of that. It was a find!

Par 13 "Pachmann all over!" we may [say], too, when we open the Fantaisie-Impromptu and find him beginning the right-hand part with the thumb. The thumb on that G sharp is Pachmann's signature. There are other things, too, that no one else would have thought of. The opening of the first Study in C may not seem to leave much room for the unexpected. Chopin fingered it thus: 1, 2, 4, 5, 1, 2, 4, 5, &c. So did Bülow and probably everyone else. But Pachmann suggests: 2, 5, 1, 4, 1, 2, 4, 5. The reader will see from these few casual examples that there is matter for debate in Pachmann's Chopin.

Par 14 Did that gentle composer, one may wonder, foresee the toil and care which his ethereal art was to provoke among generations of would-be pianists — the anxiety that was to be caused, to give a simple example, by the spreading left-hand part of the F minor Study, Op. 10, No. 9? The composer's fingering of this accompaniment figure (5, 4, 1, etc.) does nothing to smooth matters. That "5, 4" means a stretch for the fifth and fourth fingers over a fifth. Pachmann's surely is more helpful: 5, 3, 1, 4, 1, 3, etc.

Par 15 There are also points of interest in the famous arpeggio study in E flat. Thus in the second bar the A flat and A natural of the third chord are fingered: 3, 5, and not 3, 4, as might have been expected. It is a trifle, but Pachmannian. Every pianist will appreciate having his fourth finger free for the top note (B flat) of the next chord, and his fifth finger for the following C. There is an interesting note by the editor at the end of this Study, saying that Pachmann in the sixth, fifth and fourth bars from the end of the piece used to play the left-hand arpeggios not upwards but downwards, for the sake of the melody notes which are at the bottom.

Par 16 Our intention here is assuredly not to assert that all Pachmann's fingerings are right and all others wrong. It can well be imagined that another interpretative approach to the music might require a different system. But the fact remains that Pachmann who, after all, was incomparable, at least in Chopin's smaller pieces, has here granted the world, posthumously, a precious glimpse of his technical labours. It will be surprising if pianists are not fascinated by the little secrets now disclosed.

R. C.