Maurizio Pollini was already praised by Arthur Rubinstein as a young pianist; his piano playing foreshadowed the latent catastrophes. The great musician died on Saturday.
Maurizio Pollini (1942-2024).
Cosimo Filippini / Tonhalle Zurich
Apparently it works completely differently. For decades, Maurizio Pollini was one of the most successful pianists in the international music world, a crowd puller, an exclusive artist, and a guarantee for sold-out halls. And yet he remained the most uncompromising artist throughout his life: unwavering in his programmatic demands, in his radical interpretations, his ideals and his criticism.
Fame couldn’t corrupt him. At the age of eighteen, Pollini won the Warsaw Chopin Competition and was also given the highest compliments by Arthur Rubinstein. But Pollini reacted to this early triumph in a way that was both paradoxical and far-sighted by refusing to pursue a rapid career and even withdrawing from the podiums entirely for a year, even then only agreeing to a few appearances – a principle that he stuck to until the end: more than He never wanted to put up with forty concerts a year.
His relationship with Chopin, whose work accompanied him throughout his life, also remained contradictory. Pollini did not want to be given the one-sided reputation of being a Chopin specialist. Nevertheless, he felt closer to this composer than to others. This is due to the “double character of his music,” he revealed: “incredible depth” in interaction with a “magical ability to compose for the piano.”
Snapshots
Pollini, who studied sources in detail and compared versions and editions, particularly admired Chopin’s scrupulous way of working, writing down a measure a hundred times, changing it, discarding it, and then rewriting it completely again. Pollini also played the pieces “a thousand times”. His art had little to do with ideas of masterful perfection; he even saw photographs as snapshots.
If you listen to Pollini – unfortunately never live anymore, but in countless audio documents – you are not confronted with final interpretations for eternity: you follow a search movement and understand the wealth of possibilities that open up behind every note: everything could also be completely different be. Restlessness, enthusiasm, tension, unpredictability characterized Pollini’s piano playing – there was no chance of sitting back comfortably.
Schumann and Chopin were on his program again and again. And Ludwig van Beethoven. His cyclical complete recording of the 32 piano sonatas spanned almost forty years: “His music is full of food for thought. Our understanding has not gone deep enough,” emphasized Pollini. “When we get to the late sonatas, we can meditate for years on what these pieces want to tell us.”
And even with a work as extremely popular as the “Waldstein Sonata,” Pollini revolutionized perception: in the first movement, the incomprehensible tones swirl under the extreme speed like in a whirlpool, they dissolve into pure tonal sensation; and in the fragmented introduction to the finale, the breaks provide a glimpse into bottomless abysses. Pollini’s piano playing avoided devotion and idyll; rather, he suggested the latent catastrophes, the finite, not the final.
Music history in microcosm
The architect’s son, born in Milan in 1942, could not ignore the traumas of European history: under his hands, all music clarified into music of the twentieth century. In any case, as an interpreter, Pollini wanted to raise awareness of the modernity of older works, an aha effect in two directions: “For example, in a concert it can help to understand music by Anton Webern if you have previously heard a piece by the late Beethoven that is riddled with pauses. »
He was all about a “coexistence of the great works of music history”. He feared, at least for Europe, the “spirit of repetition,” a lack of courage and initiative. You really couldn’t blame him for that. In his concerts, Pollini combined Chopin’s preludes with Beethoven’s bagatelles and short to shortest pieces from the Schönberg school to create a musical history in microcosm.
In the mixed programs of his “Progetto Pollini” he opened up the repertoire across all boundaries, supplemented his piano playing with works of chamber, ensemble and choral music and spanned a wide musical-historical arc across the centuries from Monteverdi to Stockhausen and from Josquin to Boulez. “For me it is completely normal,” admitted Pollini, “to see, hear and perform contemporary music together with ancient music.” He liquidated the prize money he received from the Ernst von Siemens Music Foundation into commissions for compositions. Conversely, Pollini received dedications and donations, especially from his compatriot Luigi Nono.
Rejection of activism
Together with Nono and the conductor Claudio Abbado, Pollini launched the “Musica/Realtà” series in the 1970s: concerts in factories and schools, discussions with workers, public rehearsals, grassroots cultural work organized by the trade unions and the Communist Party. Pollini caused a legendary scandal when he wanted to read out a protest note against the Vietnam War at the beginning of a recital in Milan and left the podium amidst the general tumult (even the police had to intervene).
Later, however, Pollini greatly relativized this phase of left-wing activism, almost denying it: “An artist can express himself sufficiently through the art he practices. It is not essential for him to do what we call political engagement. If he wants to get involved beyond his art, that’s great, but he doesn’t have to.”
But a break with the past, with the politically inspired art of Pasolini, Moravia, Visconti, Antonioni, Berio, Maderna or Manzoni, was out of the question for him: “It was a great heyday. As if Italian culture had suddenly revived after its liberation from fascism.”
No one could take this love for Italy away from him, despite his despair at the later vicissitudes of his country’s politics. What he absolutely detested, however, was nationalism of any kind, even in art: “I don’t believe in an Italian school, not at all in national schools of interpretation. I only believe in the strong spiritual world of personality.”
On the morning of March 22nd, Maurizio Pollini died at the age of 82, as announced by the Milan “Teatro alla Scala”. With his death, a world has disappeared: a shining sphere of culture, intellectuality and conscience.