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.
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