An Inhabited Life

It’s well past obsession and most of the way into electronic stalking, this interest I have in Martha Argerich. It started out with seeing her play, which is a riveting experience. Here’s the conductor Antonio Pappano:

“It’s impossible to separate the person from the musician – she is music. First of all, what a dynamo! Despite all the energy and mercuriality she has in her playing she manages to get every nuance along the way – which very few pianists can do.

You can’t put her in a cage, you can’t put her in a box, she’s a free spirit. She has such class, such old-world elegance, it’s from another era, almost…  just wonderful!” says conductor Antonio Pappano.

True enough. What Pappano doesn’t comment on is her technique, for which the adjective of choice among commentators is “prodigious.” And she admits it: her natural preference is for a faster, rather than slower, tempo. To see her play a section of octaves in the Tchaikovsky Concerto is akin to watching a landscape from a speeding train. It almost makes you queasy.

She wears no makeup since her trademark hair usually ends up covering her face, anyway, so why bother? Nor is she entirely sure of her nationality, since she rarely returns to her land of birth, Argentina, and has lived in Europe most of her life. Her English is excellent, as is her French, Spanish, Italian, and German.

She arrives to study with Gulda at age fourteen; Peron made it possible by appointing Argerich’s parents to the Argentine Embassy in Vienna. At age sixteen, she has won two major competitions, and is travelling alone and performing in Europe. Here’s her description of the time.

When I was seventeen I lived like a forty-year old. I wanted to have the life of a young student, other people of my age were free, had fun, had no stage fright. I found that my life was sad. I’d travel a lot, on my own. I was very shy, I still am because I think that you stay shy. Today, it’s true, I have friends everywhere, and they look after me,” she smiles. 

Catch that reference to stage fright? Here’s the New York Times on the subject.

Like other legendary performers, including the cellist Pablo Casals and the pianist Vladimir Horowitz, Ms. Argerich has suffered from stage fright. “Sometimes I was in terrible panics,” she says ruefully. “I’d imagine the worst things, imagine a full hall. It’s terrible.” Her knees would tremble so forcibly, she says, that her feet would inadvertently bang on the floor, and she suffered chills and runny noses.

It’s hard to believe, looking at her, that she has anything but supreme confidence and nerves. And really, Argerich on her worst day would be way ahead of most concert pianists. But the anxiety and loneliness got so bad that she stopped her career when she was 19 or 20, went to New York, and, in the words of the Times, “spent a few years watching late-night television.”

She decided in midcareer that she really preferred making music with others, so she turned to chamber music, at which she excels. And she is not a lady who tells all, who reveals all. There’s a mystery about her, there are curtains firmly drawn in her life. She stated once that she wasn’t “lucky” in the marriage department, and that was that.

She surprises. No, she doesn’t enjoy playing, she’s working too hard, it’s not fun any more. She doesn’t know what she thinks about the second movement of the Ravel, and then corrects herself: she enjoys it if she’s hearing, not playing, the music. Her head, when she speaks, is so often bent to her right, as if she is pondering something. The eyes drift up as she considers her response. At times she answers the question instantly, at other times she pauses, thinks, ruminates. And always, she ends each response with a smile that lights her face better than a spotlight.

She is intense, private, and very intelligent. She’s a bit removed, distanced from herself and life. One senses—she has given more joy to others than she has herself received. And she has worked very hard to do so.

Has she lived? Or has she rather been inhabited by that prodigious technique, that enormous talent, that driving and driven demon that pushes her—nose running and knees trembling—onto the stage so many nights?