They drop like stones; you are sorry for
them, because they are alive. How Chopin suffers, when he plays the
Preludes! He plays them without a throb; the scholar has driven out the
magic; Chopin becomes a mathematician. In Brahms, in the G Minor
Rhapsody, you hear much more of what Brahms meant to do; for Brahms has
set strange shapes dancing, like the skeletons "in the ghosts'
moonshine" in a ballad of Beddoes; and these bodiless things take shape
in the music, as Godowsky plays it unflinchingly, giving it to you
exactly as it is, without comment. Here his fidelity to every outline of
form becomes an interpretation. But Chopin is so much more than form
that to follow every outline of it may be to leave Chopin out of the
outline.
Pachmann, of all the interpreters of Chopin, is the most subtle, the one
most likely to do for the most part what Chopin wanted. The test, I
think, is in the Third Scherzo. That great composition, one of the
greatest among Chopin's works, for it contains all his qualities in an
intense measure, might have been thought less likely to be done
perfectly by Pachmann than such Coleridge in music, such murmurings out
of paradise, as the Etude in F Minor (Op.
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