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He was a pianist. He was born on the island of Shikoku, where his father had some kind of post in the administration of the prefecture of Tokushima. His mother was from Tokyo. When she married his father she had her piano brought down on the ferry to her new home. He was taught from the age of two by his mother, and from the age of eight by a woman who had studied in Paris with Koslowski until the mid-40s, when she had cut short a promising career to keep house for her widowed father.

Koslowski had said

Of all my pupils who showed the finest sensibility in the interpretation of Chopin was Mlle Matsumoto. To praise her technique is to say nothing. The simplicity and ease with which she executed even the most difficult passages, the absence of any kind of affectation or showmanship in pieces where it is too common to see talent on display, while the pianist plays the virtuoso, all this gave one some notion of the style of performance favored by the composer himself. We know for example on the authority of de Bertha that Chopin obtained his effects by methods very different from those of today, relying not on brute force but on gradations achieved through an infinite extension of the piano. This was to have the nuances, the expressive shading of the human voice or of that instrument which comes closest to the voice, the violin. His masters were a Paganini, a Bellini, a Catalani. What was remarkable was Mlle Matsumoto’s ability to realize the impossible, to transform a percussive instrument into one which had the fluidity of the voice.

Her retirement has robbed music of a precious ornament but it is impossible to regret it, for it springs from the very thing which made her playing incomparable—I refer to the complete absence of self…

This was not the opinion of the pupil of Koslowski’s who achieved the greatest renown. He did not hesitate to express his views on the Automaton in the most intemperate language.

Morhange said later

All sorts of contemptible things were done during the War and even later, and they did not stop at the door of the Conservatoire. One of these was old Koslowski’s retention of Mlle Matsumoto, undoubtedly to curry favor with the Nazis, while at the same time washing his hands of anyone with any sort of Jewish connection—

Elle avait du talent, oui, mais elle jouait d’une façon tout à fait machinale, there was a tiresome perfection about her performance—

[…]

The virtues of the French style were usually said to be clearness of phrasing, richness of shading, a predominance of the legato element, a strict avoidance of tempo rubato. While it was not true that Morhange had the vices which were the opposite of those virtues, his attack on the keyboard was something very different. The massive shoulders hulked over the keys; fingers like cigars grabbed at chords like bunches of bananas.

[…]

For the next thirty years Morhange was one of the most celebrated pianists in the world.

In 1975 he retired to Japan, & by coincidence took a house on the very island, in the very town where Mlle Matsumoto lived.

—Why Japan?

—Japan had fascinated me for a long time—the prints of Utamaro and Hokusai and Hiroshige—those remarkable little poems, the haiku—it is an art of subtraction, an art with a horror of the extraneous, but it’s not so much that it has a horror of the extraneous as that it avoids histrionics, Western art gives the impression by contrast of being saturated with sincerity—

         It was pointed out that his greatest triumphs had been with Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky—

         —Yes, exactly, it’s precisely for that reason that the Japanese art really struck me. As a young man I had nothing but contempt for the Fossil, an old man who in the first place understood nothing of the works he pretended to teach, who was flattered by the reverence he received from Mlle Matsumoto, something which a Japanese—and a young girl at that—accords so readily to a teacher. What I did not see at the time was that there was something genuine in her performance—

—What happened you see was that, when I had spent many years in America, someone happened to play me a recording of Mlle Matsumoto playing Chopin’s fourth Ballade. This was the very piece with which I had won the Prix d’Orphée. I was astonished by a performance which seemed to anticipate so much of the last twenty years, & in justice to myself I listened to the recording I myself had made at the time. I was filled with contempt. If Delacroix could have played the piano, this theatrical display is precisely what he would have produced—

         Hearing Mlle Matsumoto’s recording I now saw the quality I had been unable to see before, that she had escaped the fatal plunge into egotism which the idiocy of the Fossil forced upon all his pupils of any talent, & had extracted something better from within herself—

         I finished my tour—I went to Tokyo—c’était affreux—I thought that the true Japan was elsewhere—I crossed the sea to Shikoku, an island with 88 Buddhist shrines—I had my Steinway brought from Paris, as well as an old pedalier which I had managed to pick up—

         I discovered that it was here that Mlle Matsumoto still lived. I remembered my behavior and could not approach her.

         For eight years I lived in this town without meeting her. I knew where she lived, for once walking I heard the fourth Ballade & there could not have been two to play it in such a place. Thereafter I avoided the street.

         One day after walking in the country I came back & walked down her street—I heard the opening bars of Chopin’s fourth Ballade in F minor. More than ever was I conscious that I had wronged her—I felt that I must apologize—in agony I walked up and down outside the door, waiting for her to finish—double octaves in the bass melted into the air in a legato of the most perfect unhurried simplicity—I saw suddenly an insuperable difficulty. It is regarded in Japan as a common politeness to take off the shoes on entering a house—but I have always been careless of clothes, I remembered suddenly that that morning I had not been able to find any socks, that I had put on a blue and red, each with a large hole at the big toe—I could not appear to Mlle Matsumoto like this. Like a madman I ran through the streets of Tokushima, I found a shop, I bought a pair of socks, in my mind I heard the Ballade approaching the arpeggiated chords before the end, I flung down a few yen & ran off, I darted into the precincts of a nearby shrine—no one in sight—I took off my shoes & the old socks, bundled the latter into a pocket, put on the new, put on my shoes, dashed to the house of Mlle Matsumoto. She had come to the moment of stillness before the final explosion. It came to an end— 

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Thanks very much for listening. Until next time.

These excerpts were taken from Some Trick by Helen DeWitt, published by New Directions in 2018.