the whole vitality of its existence.  To Swinburne every word lives, just in the same way; when he says “light,” he sees the sunrise; when he says “fire,” he is warmed through all his blood.  And so Pachmann calls up, with this ghostly magic of his, the innermost life of music.  I do not think he has ever put an intention into Chopin.  Chopin had no intentions.  He was a man, and he suffered; and he was a musician, and he wrote music; and very likely George Sand, and Majorca, and his disease, and Scotland, and the woman who sang to him when he died, are all in the music; but that is not the question.  The notes sob and shiver, stab you like a knife, caress you like the fur of a cat; and are beautiful sound, the most beautiful sound that has been called out of the piano.  Pachmann calls it out for you, disinterestedly, easily, with ecstasy, inevitably; you do not realise that he has had difficulties to conquer, that music is a thing for acrobats and athletes.  He smiles to you, that you may realise how beautiful the notes are, when they trickle out of his fingers like singing water; he adores them and his own playing, as you do, and as if he had nothing to do with them but to pour them out of his hands.  Pachmann is less showy with his fingers than any other pianist; his hands are stealthy acrobats, going quietly about their difficult business.  They talk with the piano and the piano answers them.  All that violence cannot do with the notes of the instrument, he does.  His art begins where violence leaves off; that is why he can give you fortissimo without hurting the nerves of a single string; that is why he can play a run as if every note had its meaning.  To the others a run is a flourish, a tassel hung on for display, a thing extra; when Pachmann plays a run you realise that it may have its own legitimate sparkle of gay life.  With him every note lives, has its own body and its own soul, and that is why it is worth hearing him play even trivial music like Mendelssohn’s “Spring Song” or meaningless music like Taubert’s Waltz:  he creates a beauty out of sound itself and a beauty which is at the root of music.  There are moments when a single chord seems to say in itself everything that music has to say.  That is the moment in which everything but sound is annihilated, the moment of ecstasy; and it is of such moments that Pachmann is the poet.

And so his playing of Bach, as in the Italian Concerto in F, reveals Bach as if the dust had suddenly been brushed off his music.  All that in the playing of others had seemed hard or dry becomes suddenly luminous, alive, and, above all, a miracle of sound.  Through a delicacy of shading, like the art of Bach himself for purity, poignancy, and clarity, he envelops us with the thrilling atmosphere of the most absolutely musical music in the world.  The playing of this concerto is the greatest thing I have ever heard Pachmann do, but when he went on to play Mozart I heard another only less beautiful world of sound rise softly about