The art of Paderewski recalls to me the art of the most skilled and the most distinguished of equilibrists, himself a Pole, Paul Cinquevalli.  People often speak, wrongly, of Paderewski’s skill as acrobatic.  The word conveys some sense of disparagement and, so used, is inaccurate.  But there is much in common between two forms of an art in which physical dexterity counts for so much, and that passionate precision to which error must be impossible.  It is the same kind of joy that you get from Cinquevalli when he juggles with cannon-balls and from Paderewski when he brings a continuous thunder out of the piano.  Other people do the same things, but no else can handle thunder or a cannon-ball delicately.  And Paderewski, in his absolute mastery of his instrument, seems to do the most difficult things without difficulty, with a scornful ease, an almost accidental quality which, found in perfection, marvellously decorates it.  It is difficult to imagine that anyone since Liszt has had so complete a mastery of every capacity of the piano, and Liszt, though probably even more brilliant, can hardly be imagined with this particular kind of charm.  His playing is in the true sense an inspiration; he plays nothing as if he had learned it with toil, but as if it had come to him out of a kind of fiery meditation.  Even his thunder is not so much a thing specially cultivated for its own sake as a single prominent detail in a vast accomplishment.  When he plays, the piano seems to become thrillingly and tempestuously alive, as if brother met brother in some joyous triumph.  He collaborates with it, urging it to battle like a war-horse.  And the quality of the sonority which he gets out of it is unlike that which is teased or provoked from the instrument by any other player.  Fierce exuberant delight wakens under his fingers, in which there is a sensitiveness almost impatient, and under his feet, which are as busy as an organist’s with the pedals.  The music leaps like pouring water, flood after flood of sound, caught together and flung onward by a central energy.  The separate notes are never picked out and made into ornaments; all the expression goes to passage after passage, realised acutely in their sequence.  Where others give you hammering on an anvil, he gives you thunder as if heard through clouds.  And he is full of leisure and meditation, brooding thoughtfully over certain exquisite things as if loth to let them pass over and be gone.  And he seems to play out of a dream, in which the fingers are secondary to the meaning, but report that meaning with entire felicity.

In the playing of the “Moonlight” sonata there was no Paderewski, there was nothing but Beethoven.  The finale, of course, was done with the due brilliance, the executant’s share in a composition not written for modern players.  But what was wonderful, for its reverence, its perfection of fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of the little sharp movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of a bird.  The ear waited, and was satisfied in every shade of anticipation; nothing was missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were a faithful and obedient shadow.  As you listened you forgot technique, or that it was anybody in particular who was playing:  the sonata was there, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had known that it existed.