Chopin's Prophet by Edward Blickstein & Gregor Benko

Author:Edward Blickstein & Gregor Benko [Blickstein, Edward & Benko, Gregor]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
Published: 2013-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Pachmann’s fourth tour of the United States was even more successful than the former ones. Audiences and critics both reached a pitch of appreciation previously unmatched, and couldn’t get enough of him. In Chicago he appeared seven times. Orchestral Hall was newly opened and host to concerts by all the world’s greatest artists, but the Chicago Daily News wrote on March 11, 1905, that Pachmann’s performance of the Chopin Concerto elicited “the most pronounced demonstration of enthusiasm Orchestral Hall has witnessed.” Will Hubbard, critic for the Chicago Daily Tribune, wrote some of the most intense paeans to Pachmann’s art (November 9, 1904):

There are some things in the realm of art so beautiful so ideally perfect, that all thought of technical difficulties involved in their accomplishment vanish before the charm of their finished beauty. To this class belongs the piano playing of Vladimir de Pachmann.

And on December 19, 1904, Hubbard continued:

As I came out of Music Hall yesterday afternoon I passed one dried up specimen of the musical masculine—a man to whom the exact value of a dot placed after a thirty-second note is of more importance than is the whole poetic content of a Chopin nocturne—and he was just saying to his companion that “Pachmann so seriously detracts from the dignity of musical art by his antics.” And “dignity” and “musical art,” as he mouthed them, should be spelled with capitals large, fat and black. He was of the type to whom the letter of music is everything; the spirit nothing save as “tradition” and “proper reading” constitute it. . . . They have forgotten, if they ever knew, that music is a spirit of joy and radiant loveliness.

But then, there was New York, with the hostility of some critics unabated. W. J. Henderson, now moved to the Sun, was still leader of the VladyFloppers. With scurrilous similes, he created a picture that suggested there was nothing behind Pachmann’s vaunted originality but superficiality, narcissism and meaningless vulgarity. By 1904 he felt that Pachmann’s concerts should not be praised, but ridiculed. He wrote in the Sun on November 15, 1904:

Mr. de Pachmann was in a highly good humor with himself yesterday afternoon and he played battledove and shuttlecock with the notes set down by the composers in a most gleeful manner. He had heaps of fun with the little bird that undertook to prophesize [Schumann’s Vogel als Prophet]. No birds that ever lived could have prophesized what the pianist was going to do next, and the sport was to try to guess it. “Warum,” the unique person turned into a flowing river of innocent merriment. It was a new conception, entirely Pachmann’s own and it will probably always remain so. However, it may never occur to this pianist again. He may have a different conception before 2 o’clock this afternoon and another one after dinner. “Hark, Hark, the Lark” is supposed to be a song transcribed into a piano lyric by Liszt. This is all a mistake. Pachmann disclosed yesterday that it was a full report of the Princeton-Yale football game with the cheers thrown in.

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