The music has to intoxicate him before he can play with it;
then he becomes its comrade, in a kind of very serious game; himself,
in short, that is to say inhuman. His fingers have in them a cold magic,
as of soulless elves who have sold their souls for beauty. And this
beauty, which is not of the soul, is not of the flesh; it is a
sea-change, the life of the foam on the edge of the depths. Or it
transports him into some mid-region of the air, between hell and heaven,
where he hangs listening. He listens at all his senses. The dew, as well
as the raindrop, has a sound for him.
In Pachmann's playing there is a frozen tenderness, with, at moments,
the elvish triumph of a gnome who has found a bright crystal or a
diamond. Pachmann is inhuman, and music, too, is inhuman. To him, and
rightly, it is a thing not domesticated, not familiar as a household cat
with our hearth. When he plays it, music speaks no language known to us,
has nothing of ourselves to tell us, but is shy, alien, and speaks a
language which we do not know. It comes to us a divine hallucination,
chills us a little with its "airs from heaven" or elsewhere, and breaks
down for an instant the too solid walls of the world, showing us the
gulf.
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