Music: Critics Enraged

In Carnegie Hall, Manhattan, Vladimir de Pachmann, famed Russian pianist, aged 75 (TIME, Sept. 10), gave a recital on the pianoforte —his first in America in twelve years. Standees packed the parquet five deep.

Next day metropolitan critics commented :

Deems Taylor (World): “Three thousand people saw murder done last night at Carnegie Hall. . . .

“The brown curtains parted and out came a chunky little old man with a head something like Franz Liszt’s portraits—the same high forehead, eagle nose and long gray hair. The audience burst into applause. . . The little man put his feet together and clasped his hands and bowed stiffly from the waist, looking very like the frog footman in Alice as he did so. The audience kept on applauding and he kept on bowing. . . . Then he sat down and began to play Beethoven’s Pathetic Sonata.

“He played the opening section, marked ‘ grave/ with a cool, velvety perfection of touch that fell very gently and softly on the ear. . . .

” A phrase ended, with a brief pause before the next began, and in the pause the little man raised his hands from the keyboard and beat time as though he were conducting a band, and grinned at the audience. And everybody giggled. . . .

“He played the allegro. More gestures and comical faces, and more giggles. . . .

” And in the middle of it the little man raised his hands and beat time, and grinned at the audience, and said something. And the man in the row behind one laughed aloud, and then everybody giggled. For the little man was really outdoing himself. And Beethoven died and went to Hell, and everybody was frightfully amused at Mr. de Pachmann. . . .”

Lawrence Gilman (Tribune) : “Mr. Vladimir de Pachmann brought his inimitable one-man vaudeville show into town last night. .’ . . Mr. de Pachmann favored his audience with an almost continuous monologue, addressing little speeches to them between his numbers and commenting on his performance as he went along. He registered comic despair when he found difficulty in adjusting the piano stool to his satisfaction, gestured elaborately between phrases, grimaced, scowled melodramatically and indulged in various other monkey shines.”

Henry T. Finck (Post) : ” The audience, I regret to say, encouraged the Odessan pianist in his disrespectful treatment of the great masters’ music. . . . After a while his mumbled speeches, which could be heard only in the front rows, got on the nerves of some of the listeners, and they resorted to continuous applause to make him shut up.”

The New York Herald: “One of the player’s many statements made from the platform which caused some special laughter among his hearers was when he said: ‘ I have more music in my fingers than singers in their throats. I am very modest.'”

H. C. Colles (Times): “It was a good sign that the audience, which began by listening breathlessly for Mr. de Pachmann’s remarks, soon took to drowning them with applause, as a gentle hint that music and not conversation is the business of the concert room.”

Only two critics defended de Pachmann in the public prints. These were Gilbert Gabriel of The Sun and The Globe and Alexander Woollcott of The New York Herald, who happens to be a theatre critic.

Wrote Mr. Woollcott: ” De Pachmann seemed to us to be caressing that piano and to be evoking from it a voice of gold. . . .

” He is thinking aloud—or, to be more exact, feeling aloud. A difficult Impromptu of Chopin may be before him. He wonders if he will play it well. . . . ‘ Dear God, help me to play this beautiful music tonight as You meant it to be played when You sent it into the world.’ Fragments of something like this escaped from the little man as he served at that altar on Carnegie’s stage.

” Such communicativeness in the world of affairs or on the concert platform may be an infirmity, but, after all, it is a part of de Pachmann, and one did not come away from Bernhardt’s last Camille denouncing her for being a grandmother with a wooden leg. It is barely possible that de Pachmann could be made by a grim management to keep his behavior orderly, his face straight, his mouth shut. But probably he would burst.”