Vladimir de Pachmann

"Ever since the time when the feat of playing whole programs without the notes originated among the great virtuosi of the first half of the nineteenth century, musical memory has occupied an important place in piano playing and in all serious piano study. Today the frequenters of concert-halls have come to take it quite for granted that all public performers on the instrument shall play from memory, so much so in fact that to have seen Vladimir de Pachmann with the notes of the Chopin F minor Concerto in front of him on the music-rack, or the late Raoul Pugno tripping gaily out onto the platform with the music of the Italian Concerto in his hand, was to have experienced a slight shock to one's accustomed sense of the fitness of things. Entirely aside from any feeling among the artists themselves as to the advantages or disadvantages of playing from memory, their audiences have quite decided that they want their Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, and all the rest performed without reference to the printed page, so that it well behooves the young aspirant for public pianistic honors to question himself about the quality of his musical memory."