I don’t play accurately—anyone can play ac curately—but I play with wonderful expres sion. As far as the piano is concerned, senti ment is my forte. I keep science for Life.
—Algernon, in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest

By common consent, the French pianist Alfred Cortot (1877-1962) was one of the greatest musical performers of the century. One of the most recorded pianists of the pre-LP era, he left behind him an extensive phonographic documentation that included most of the works of Chopin, almost all the important keyboard works of Schumann, and some of the classics of late-nineteenth and eariy-twentieth-century French compo sition as well. He was a brilliant chamber musician, forming a trio as early as 1905 with the violinist Jacques Thibaud and the cellist Pablo Casals; their recordings remain clas sics. He wrote important books about Chopin and about French piano music. He also published working editions, replete with technical suggestions, of Chopin, and taught many important pianists who came to notice after World War II. He was an important con ductor, working first as an assistant in Bayreuth at the turn of the century to Felix Mottl and Hans Richter, both of them close as sociates of the composer, and then playing a significant role in introducing Wagner’s late operas to France.

And yet it can hardly be denied that Cortot’s wider reputation has been under a cloud for the past fifty years. The reason is not hard to find. He was