Before the Beethoven there had been a “Variation and Fugue on an original theme,” in which Paderewski played his own music, really as if he were improvising it there and then.  I am not sure that that feeling is altogether to the credit of the music, which, as I heard it for the first time, seemed almost too perilously effective, in its large contrasts, its Liszt-like succession of contradictory moods.  Sound was evoked that it might swell and subside like waves, break suddenly, and die out in a white rain of stinging foam.  Pauses, surprises, all were delicately calculated and the weaver of these bewildered dreams seemed to watch over them like a Loge of celestial ingenuity.

When the actual Liszt came, the interminable Sonata in B minor, in which the sugar and the fire are so strangely mixed, it was as if Paderewski were still playing his own music.  If ever there was a show piece for the piano, this was it, and if ever there was a divine showman for it, it was Paderewski.  You felt at once the personal sympathy of the great pianist for the great pianist.  He was no longer reverential, as with Beethoven, not doing homage but taking part, sharing almost in a creation, comet-like, of stars in the sky.  Nothing in the bravura disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth by the delighted skill with which he set them singing.  A more astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could hardly be achieved on the piano:  could an eruption of Vesuvius be more spectacularly magnificent?

Liszt’s music for the piano was written for a pianist who could do anything that has ever been done with the instrument, and the result is not so wholly satisfactory as in the ease of Chopin, who, with a smaller technique, knew more of the secret of music.  Chopin never dazzles, Liszt blinds.  It is a question if he ever did full justice to his own genius, which was partly that of an innovator, and people are only now beginning to do justice to what was original as well as fine in his work.  How many ideas Wagner caught from him, in his shameless transfiguring triumphant way!  The melody of the Flower-Maidens, for instance, in “Parsifal,” is borrowed frankly from a tone-poem of Liszt in which it is no more than a thin, rocking melody, without any of the mysterious fascination that Wagner put into it.  But in writing for the piano Liszt certainly remembered that it was he, and not some unknown person, who was to play these hard and showy rhapsodies, in which there are no depths, though there are splendours.  That is why Liszt is the test rather of the virtuoso than of the interpreter, why, therefore, it was so infinitely more important that Paderewski should have played the Beethoven sonata as impersonally as he did than that he should have played the Liszt sonata with so much personal abandonment.  Between those limits there seems to be contained the whole art of the pianist, and Paderewski has attained both limits.