t. When he plays, the
piano seems to become thrillingly and tempestuously alive, as if brother
met brother in some joyous triumph. He collaborates with it, urging it
to battle like a war-horse. And the quality of the sonority which he
gets out of it is unlike that which is teased or provoked from the
instrument by any other player. Fierce exuberant delight wakens under
his fingers, in which there is a sensitiveness almost impatient, and
under his feet, which are as busy as an organist's with the pedals. The
music leaps like pouring water, flood after flood of sound, caught
together and flung onward by a central energy. The separate notes are
never picked out and made into ornaments; all the expression goes to
passage after passage, realised acutely in their sequence. Where others
give you hammering on an anvil, he gives you thunder as if heard through
clouds. And he is full of leisure and meditation, brooding thoughtfully
over certain exquisite things as if loth to let them pass over and be
gone. And he seems to play out of a dream, in which the fingers are
secondary to the meaning, but report that meaning with entire felicity.

In the playing of the "Moonlight" sonata there was no Paderewski, there
was nothing but Beethoven. The finale, of course, was done with the due
brilliance, the executant's share in a composition not written for
modern players. But what was wonderful, for its reverence, its
perfection of fidelity, was the playing of the slow movement and of the
little sharp movement which follows, like the crying and hopping of a
bird. The ear waited, and was satisfied in every shade of anticipation;
nothing was missed, nothing was added; the pianist was as it were a
faithful and obedient shadow. As you listened you forgot technique, or
that it was anybody in particular who was playing: the sonata was
there, with all its moonlight, as every lover of Beethoven had known
that it existed.

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,