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, 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. Nothing in the bravura disconcerted or even displeased him, no lack of coherence or obviousness in contrasts disturbed him; what was loud, boisterous, explosive, he tossed about as in a colossal game, he bathed luxuriously in what was luscious in the melodies, giving them almost more than their real worth by the delighted skill with which he set them singing. A more astonishing, a more convincing, a more overwhelming tour de force could hardly be achieved on the piano: could an eruption of Vesuvius be more spectacularly magnificent?