After De Pachmann--Paderewski. Paderewski, the master-colourist, the grand visionary, whose art is often strained, morbid, fantastic. And after Paderewski? Why, Leopold Godowsky, of course. He belongs to the Joseffy-De Pachmann, not to the Rubinstein-Josef Hofmann, group. I once called him the superman of piano-playing. Nothing like him, as far as I know, is to be found in the history of piano-playing since Chopin. He is an apparition. A Chopin doubled by a contrapuntalist. Bach and Chopin. The spirit of the German cantor and the Polish tone-poet in curious conjunction. His playing is transcendental; his piano compositions the transcendentalism of the future. That way, else retrogression! All has been accomplished in ideas and figuration. A new synthesis--the combination of seemingly disparate elements and styles--with innumerable permutations, he has accomplished. He is a miracle-worker. The Violet Ray. Dramatic passion, flame, and fury are not present; they would be intruders on his map of music. The piano tone is always legitimate, never forced. But every other attribute he boasts. His ten digits are ten independent voices recreating the ancient polyphonic art of the Flemings. He is like a Brahma at the piano. Before his serene and all-embracing vision every school appears and disappears in the void. The beauty of his touch and tone are only matched by the delicate adjustment of his phrasing to the larger curve of the composition. Nothing musical is foreign to him. He is a pianist for pianists, and I am glad to say that the majority of them gladly recognise this fact. One evening Godowsky was playing his piano sonata with its subtle intimations of Brahms, Chopin, and Liszt, and its altogether Godowskian colour and rhythmic life--he is the greatest creator of rhythmic values since Liszt, and that is a "large order"--when he was interrupted by the entrance of Josef Hofmann. Godowsky and Hofmann are as inseparable as were Chopin and Liszt. Heine called the latter pair the Dioscurii of music. In the Godowsky apartment stood several concert grands. Hofmann nonchalantly removed his coat and, making an apology for disturbing us, he went into another room and soon we heard him slowly practising. What do you suppose? Some new concerto with new-fangled bedevilments? O Sancta Simplicitas! This giant, if ever there was one, played at a funereal tempo the octave passages in the left hand of the Heroic Polonaise of Chopin (Opus 53). Every schoolgirl rattles them off as "easy," but, with the humility of a great artist, Hofmann practised the section as if it were still a stumbling-block. De Lenz records that Tausig did the same.