The art of the pianist, after 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 serious game; himself, in short, that is to say inhuman.  His fingers have in them a cold magic, as of soulless elves who have sold their souls for beauty.  And this beauty, which is not of the soul, is not of the flesh; it is a sea-change, the life of the foam on the edge of the depths.  Or it transports him into some mid-region of the air, between hell and heaven, where he hangs listening.  He listens at all his senses.  The dew, as well as the raindrop, has a sound for him.