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Vladimir de Pachmann: a Piano Virtuoso''s Life and Art.

Article Excerpt
By Mark Mitchell. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. [xiv, 231 p. ISBN 0-253-34169-8. $37.95.] Illustrations, discography, list of works played, bibliographical notes, bibliography, index.

Concertgoers who lived in the years from 1882 to 1929 took a chance of being ridiculed if they attended a recital by Vladimir de Pachmann. He was blatantly offensive, petulant, and whimsically cruel. But he was also a pianist who mesmerized audiences with his glorious interpretation and performance of the music of Frederic Chopin. These contradistinctions provided fodder for much consternation and laudation toward Pachmann in his heyday.

Pachmann (1848-1933) was the thirteenth child of a middle-class family in Odessa, Russia, the son of a Roman law professor and a Turkish countess. He began studying violin at age six, but by the age of ten preferred the piano. His father sent him to Vienna in 1867 to study at the Konservatorium der Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde where he was remarkable from the beginning. When assigned two fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, he not only learned them in every...

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