Maurizio Pollini, Celebrated Pianist Who Defined Modernism, Dies ...

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Published March 23, 2024Updated March 25, 2024, 12:14 p.m. ET

Maurizio Pollini, an Italian pianist of formidable intellectual powers whose unrivaled technique and unwavering interpretive integrity made him the modernist master of the instrument, died on Saturday in Milan. He was 82.

His death, in a clinic, was announced by the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, where he performed frequently. The announcement did not specify a cause, but Mr. Pollini had canceled a concert at the Salzburg Festival in 2022 because of heart problems and had pulled out of a number of subsequent recitals.

Mr. Pollini, who performed for more than a half-century, was that rare pianist who compelled listeners to think deeply. He was an artist of rigor and reserve whose self-assurance, uncompromising directness and steadfast dedication to his ideals were evidence of what his colleague Daniel Barenboim called “a very high ethical regard of music.”

Whether he played Beethoven, Schumann or Stockhausen, Mr. Pollini was almost unmatched in his abilities. He took perfect command of his instrument, a prowess that came across “as neither glib facility nor tedious heroic effort,” the critic Edward Said once wrote, but instead as a technique that “allows you to forget technique entirely.”

There were, however, many listeners who could not forget that technique, and Mr. Pollini was long a subject of controversy. Detractors heard only cold objectivity, accusing him of being too distant, too efficient or too unyielding when compared with the great characters of the piano; one of his few equals in sheer ability, Sviatoslav Richter, privately complained of hearing Mr. Pollini play Chopin on the radio with “no poetry or delicacy (even if everything’s impeccably precise).”

“It was not a very imaginative performance,” Harold Schonberg of The New York Times said in his review of Mr. Pollini’s Carnegie Hall debut in 1968, eight years after the pianist had stormed to victory in the sixth International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw — the first Westerner to do so, and at only 18. “With all his skill,” Mr. Schonberg continued, “Mr. Pollini failed to suggest that he was deeply involved in the music.”

Mr. Pollini typically refused to comment on his own style, or even to outline his interpretive aims beyond solving the specific problems that particular composers posed. But, he told The Wall Street Journal in 2013, “I have a completely different idea of what I am and what I do.”

“Certainly I’m not for a cool approach to music,” he said. “This would limit the power of a musical creation. Objectivity I can understand in a certain way. I want the music to speak for itself, but music played coolly is not enough. It would be wrong to be detached.”

Mr. Pollini’s many admirers heard an artist whose intense, unadorned drive revealed the stark emotional force of whatever he chose to play. His work offered “a monument to what it is possible for two hands to achieve on one musical instrument,” the critic David Fanning wrote in Gramophone magazine about Mr. Pollini’s classic 1970s recordings of 20th-century works.

If the disagreement was settled at all — and the decline of Mr. Pollini’s skills to merely human levels toward the end of his career raised it again — it was through a general acclamation of him as the definition of what it meant to be a modernist pianist, or at least what it meant to play the piano in a contemporary way.

“It is true that I look for and try to uncover what seems to me the essence of a work, its truth,” he told Gramophone in 2002. “And I suppose in that sense I am a pianist of my time.”

That was a matter of repertoire as well as manner. In Mr. Pollini’s recitals, he would mirror Chopin with Debussy, or confront Beethoven with Pierre Boulez, whose Second Sonata presented colossal difficulties that Mr. Pollini simply annihilated.

“He does not say very much, but he thinks quite a lot,” Mr. Boulez said of him in 1993, an assessment that counted as extreme praise from that ordinarily truculent French composer and conductor. “He goes into depth in the music, and is not superficial, and his attitude as a musician is exactly his attitude as a man. He is as interesting as anyone could be.”

Maurizio Pollini was born in Milan on Jan. 5, 1942. His family cultivated intellectual curiosity, especially about novel trends in the arts. His father, Gino Pollini, was a violinist and a leading rationalist architect whose projects included a factory for the industrialist Adriano Olivetti in the town of Ivrea, Italy. His mother, Renata Melotti, sang and played the piano, as did her brother, Fausto Melotti, who was also a pioneer of abstract sculpture.

As a boy, Mr. Pollini was as enthralled with the orchestra as he was with the piano. In later interviews, he noted the importance not just of hearing Arthur Rubinstein and Walter Gieseking, but also of seeing Arturo Toscanini lead Wagner and Dimitri Mitropoulos promote Schoenberg. At the Milan Conservatory, Mr. Pollini took courses in composition and conducting; he dabbled professionally as a conductor for a short time in the 1980s, recording the Rossini opera “La Donna Del Lago.” But he was always most associated with the piano, which he studied under Carlo Vidusso.

Mr. Pollini began giving concerts before his 10th birthday, performed Chopin’s Études at 14 and won prizes in several competitions before his triumph in Poland in March 1960. By the end of that April, he had made a recording of Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 that was instantly hailed as a classic, its ease and elegance reminiscent of the work of Rubinstein, who was the honorary chairman of the jury that oversaw the Chopin competition in Warsaw and who was later a friend; that September, Mr. Pollini also recorded an equally shapely set of the Études.

He would later say that being considered a Chopin specialist was “a great honor, the most marvelous thing that can happen to a pianist,” as he put it in “De Main de Maître,” a 2014 documentary about his life. But by age 18, he had grown irritated with the label. He refused to release the Études and retreated from concert life, learning repertoire and studying briefly with another pianist of restraint, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.

Mr. Pollini did not entirely withdraw from performing, making his London debut in 1963. But it was not until the end of the 1960s that he emerged fully on the international stage, touring widely and starting his long collaboration with the Deutsche Grammophon label, for which he recorded Stravinsky, Prokofiev and an imperious new set of the Chopin Études, recast as if they were Brutalist edifices. He matured into a pianist with a unique approach that a New York Times Magazine profile described as “elegant, clear, lucid and specifically modern,” though it struck some critics as impersonally, mechanically literal.

Part of the transformation came from politics. Mr. Pollini rarely spoke about the relationship between his politics and his playing style — or his personal life, or indeed anything else — in his infrequent interviews, but it was hard to hear the pitiless force and the ferocious defiance of the Chopin Polonaises he recorded in 1975 outside the context of his avowed antifascism.

He joined the Italian Communist Party at the start of the so-called Years of Lead, a period of political violence and social upheaval in Italy. He justified that decision because the party's denunciation of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 allowed him to square doctrine with democracy. He was escorted from one of his own recitals for protesting the U.S. bombing of Hanoi, and he befriended the composer Luigi Nono, with whom he collaborated on works like “Como una ola de fuerza y luz,” dedicated to the memory of the Chilean activist Luciano Cruz.

Convinced that music was a right for all, Mr. Pollini gave concerts for workers and students with the conductor Claudio Abbado, a lifelong collaborator, and he abandoned conventions that separated new music from old, recording the piano works of Schoenberg as strikingly as he did the late sonatas of Beethoven. His fervor had dimmed by the 1980s — “It was something of a letdown,” he said of the period — but he retained his socialism, along with an idealistic belief in the power of art.

“Art itself, if it is really great, has a progressive aspect that is needed by a society, even if it seems absolutely useless in strictly practical terms,” Mr. Pollini told The Guardian in 2011. “In a way, art is a little like the dreams of a society. They seem to contribute little, but sleeping and dreaming are vitally important in that a human couldn’t live without them, in the same way a society cannot live without art.”

Mr. Pollini kept up with modern art, read all of Shakespeare repeatedly in English and Italian, and studied scores well beyond those for the piano. But he selected what he performed with care, committing only to works that he knew he would never tire of, and that had contributed to what he saw as the evolution of music.

Even so, Mr. Pollini was a modest modernist. Rarely seen without a jacket, a tie and cigarettes, he spoke of his appreciation for musicians of antithetical persuasions, from the arch-Romanticism of the pianist Alfred Cortot to the regal grandeur of the conductor Karl Böhm, with whom he made exquisite recordings of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms concertos. Unusual for a modernist, he even confessed to listening to Rachmaninoff from time to time.

Mr. Pollini married Maria Elisabetta Marzotto, known as Marilisa, in 1968. Survivors include his wife and their son, Daniele, both of whom play the piano.

“We have the most beautiful repertoire ever written for an instrument,” Mr. Pollini said of pianists in an interview with The Times in 2006. “We have at our disposal a richness. And then we deal with an instrument that has an absolutely extraordinary possibility. There are no limits to what you can do on the piano.”

How we handle corrections

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT