In Pachmann’s playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments, the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or a diamond.  Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman.  To him, and rightly, it is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household cat with our hearth.  When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us, has nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks a language which we do not know.  It comes to us a divine hallucination, chills us a little with its “airs from heaven” or elsewhere, and breaks down for an instant the too solid walls of the world, showing us the gulf.  When d’Albert plays Chopin’s Berceuse, beautifully, it is a lullaby for healthy male children growing too big for the cradle.  Pachmann’s is a lullaby for fairy changelings who have never had a soul, but in whose veins music vibrates; and in this intimate alien thing he finds a kind of humour.

In the attempt to humanise music, that attempt which almost every executant makes, knowing that he will be judged by his success or failure in it, what is most fatally lost is that sense of mystery which, to music, is atmosphere.  In this atmosphere alone music breathes tranquilly.  So remote is it from us that it can only be reached through some not quite healthy nervous tension, and Pachmann’s physical disquietude when he plays is but a sign of what it has cost him to venture outside humanity, into music.  Yet in music this mystery is a simple thing, its native air; and the art of the musician has less difficulty in its evocation than the art of the poet or the painter.  With what an effort do we persuade words or colours back from their vulgar articulateness into at least some recollection of that mystery which is deeper than sight or speech.  Music can never wholly be detached from mystery, can never wholly become articulate, and it is in our ignorance of its true nature that we would tame it to humanity and teach it to express human emotions, not its own.

Pachmann gives you pure music, not states of soul or of temperament, not interpretations, but echoes.  He gives you the notes in their own atmosphere, where they live for him an individual life, which has nothing to do with emotions or ideas.  Thus he does not need to translate out of two languages:  first, from sound to emotion, temperament, what you will; then from that back again to sound.  The notes exist; it is enough that they exist.  They mean for him just the sound and nothing else.  You see his fingers feeling after it, his face calling to it, his whole body imploring it.  Sometimes it comes upon him in such a burst of light that he has to cry aloud, in order that he may endure the ecstasy.  You see him speaking to the music; he lifts his finger, that you may listen for it not less attentively.  But it is always the thing itself that he evokes for you, as it rises flower-like out of silence, and comes to exist in the world.  Every note lives, with