I can think of no comparison from which he doesn't emerge unscathed. If I were a musical reactionary, this judgment would have no value here; but I'm not. Classical perfection is no longer interesting; Beethoven seems no longer to comprehend all music--in fact, the people who have no rebellions about the sterility of the old symphonies are quite beyond my range of understanding. But Paderewski plays the old music in a new way, gives it such vitality of meaning that you feel it's just been born--or, better, perhaps, that its composers have been triumphantly revalued, rejustified in their claim for eternal life. His Beethoven is as full of color as his Chopin; and who, by the way, ever started the popular nonsense about De Pachmann or anyone else being the supreme Chopin exponent? No one has ever played Chopin like Paderewski; no one has ever made such simple, haunting melodies of the nocturnes; no one has ever struck such ringing Polish music out of the polonaises, or such wind-swept cadences from the Berceuse; no one has ever played the Funeral March so like a cosmic procession--the mighty moving of humanity from birth to death and new life; no one has ever so visualized those "orchestras of butterflies that played to Chopin in the sun." I have still one great wish in the world: that some time I may hear Paderewski play on a Mason and Hamlin--that piano of unutterable depth and richness. The fact that he's never used it is the one flaw in his performances, for no other instrument that I've heard gives you the same sense of drowning in great waves of warm sound. The combination would convince even the followers of the new gods. But, old or new, and even on his cold Steinway, no one has ever drawn from the piano the same quality of golden tone or dared such simplicity of singing as Paderewski. To put his genius into a sentence: no one has ever built so strong a bridge across the gulf that yawns between vision and accomplishment. The Major Symphony GEORGE SOULE Round splendor of the harp's entonéd gold Throbbing beneath the pleading violins-- That hundred-choiring voice that wins and wins To over-filling song; the bright and bold Clamor of trumpets; 'cellos that enfold Richly the flutes; and basses that like djinns Thunder their clumsy threatening, as begins The oboe's mystic plaint of sorrows old:-- Are these the symphony? No, it is will In passion striving to surmount the world, Growing in sensuous dalliance, sudden whirled To ecstasies of shivering joy, and still Marching and mastering, singing mightily, Consummate when the silence makes it free. The Prophet of a New Culture GEORGE BURMAN FOSTER