This is the secret of Paderewski’s white magic. He’s still the supreme god! Bauer plays perfectly within the rules—exquisitely and powerfully—and misses the top height by the mere fraction of a mood, the simple lack of a temperament; or, as O. Henry might have explained it, by the unfortunate encumbrance of a forty-two-inch belt. Hofman has an impatience with his medium, apparently, that leaves his hearer unsatisfied with the piano; while Paderewski, though he transcends the instrument, does so because of his love for the piano as a medium, and forces his hearer to agree with him that it’s the supreme one. Godowsky forces things into the piano—pushes them in and makes them stay there; Paderewski draws things out, always, and fills the world with them.
I can think of no comparison from which he doesn’t emerge unscathed. If I were a musical reactionary, this judgment would have no value here; but I’m not. Classical perfection is no longer interesting; Beethoven seems no longer to comprehend all music—in fact, the people who have no rebellions about the sterility of the old symphonies are quite beyond my range of understanding. But Paderewski plays the old music in a new way, gives it such vitality of meaning that you feel it’s just been born—or, better, perhaps, that its composers have been triumphantly revalued, rejustified in their claim for eternal life. His Beethoven is as full of color as his Chopin; and who, by the way, ever started the popular nonsense about De Pachmann or anyone else being the supreme Chopin exponent? No one has ever played Chopin like Paderewski; no one has ever made such simple, haunting melodies of the nocturnes; no one has ever struck such ringing Polish music out of the polonaises, or such wind-swept cadences from the Berceuse; no one has ever played the Funeral March so like a cosmic procession—the mighty moving of humanity from birth to death and new life; no one has ever so visualized those “orchestras of butterflies that played to Chopin in the sun.”
I have still one great wish in the world: that some time I may hear Paderewski play on a Mason and Hamlin—that piano of unutterable depth and richness. The fact that he’s never used it is the one flaw in his performances, for no other instrument that I’ve heard gives you the same sense of drowning in great waves of warm sound. The combination would convince even the followers of the new gods. But, old or new, and even on his cold Steinway, no one has ever drawn from the piano the same quality of golden tone or dared such simplicity of singing as Paderewski. To put his genius into a sentence: no one has ever built so strong a bridge across the gulf that yawns between vision and accomplishment.
The Major Symphony
George Soule
Round splendor of the harp’s entonéd gold
Throbbing beneath the pleading violins—
That hundred-choiring voice that wins and wins
To over-filling song; the bright and bold
Clamor of trumpets; ’cellos that enfold