PACHMANN—PIANIST

Arthur Symons

PACHMANN was born in Russia, July 27, 1848. His father, Ritter von Pachmann, came from Aachen, where the family was settled for 300 years; his mother was Turkish, from Uskub, and related to the Due de Richelieu. She was a beautiful and distinguished woman, and played the piano; the father was also a musician. The father knew Weber intimately, and remembered the great funeral of Haydn, and seeing him as a tottering old man. Somewhere (was it not at Prague?) he and Weber once dined with Beethoven, who cooked the dinner, very badly, in a little room, over a smoky fire; Weber coughed and ate little, and when Beethoven took out a long pipe and began to smoke, Weber escaped into the next room and began to play the piano. Pachmann, pere, turned the leaves for him of one of his new compositions.

To Pachmann the three really great pianists, the ones who have done something wholly new, are Liszt, Billow and Godowsky; and Liszt was the greatest of all. Once, after a concert by Rubinstein, when people were complimenting him in the artiste's room, Rubinstein said, "I am only a child compared to Liszt; he could take Pachmann and me and carry us away in his pocket." Liszt wrote of Pachmann to Walter Vache that he played Chopin better than Chopin himself. And he said to him that Chopin was maniere. Pachmann heard Liszt when he was sixty-three playing for a charity, and at that age he was incomparable, though people shook their heads, and spoke of what he had been at forty. Then, later, in London, he heard Liszt again at 70, and it was only an old, sleepy, music, beautiful indeed, but pathetic.

Pachmann once played a study by Godowsky for me. He played it three times, each time more exquisitely. The left hand sounded like two hands, the two hands like four hands.

HE then played, in his neat little room, in which everything was in faultless order, two other studies by Godowsky, then a nocturne, a movement of the Mozart fantasia, a Mendelssohn lied, scraps of mazurkas, and a piece of Liszt, which he had not played for twenty years—just to show me the way Liszt played it. It was electric, a thing of leaping fire. Never have I heard him play with such gorgeous and glowing effect. He admits that he has not now the muscular force to play much in this way, but realizes that, for him, with his subtle gradations, it is not needed.