Maurizio Pollini, celebrated pianist who defined modernism, dies at 82
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 Saturday morning 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 Pollini had been forced to cancel a concert at the Salzburg Festival in 2022 because of heart problems and had pulled out of a number of subsequent recitals.
Pollini, who performed for more than half a century, was that rare pianist who compelled listeners to think deeply. He was an artist of rigor and reserve whose staunch 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 Ludwig van Beethoven, Robert Schumann or Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pollini was almost unmatched in his capabilities. He took perfect command of his instrument, a prowess that came across “as neither glib facility nor tedious heroic effort,” 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 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 Pollini play Frédéric 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 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, Poland — the first Westerner to do so, and at only 18. “With all his skill,” Schonberg continued, “Mr. Pollini failed to suggest that he was deeply involved in the music.”
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.”
Pollini’s many admirers, for their part, 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,” critic David Fanning wrote in Gramophone magazine about his classic 1970s recordings of 20th-century works.
If the disagreement was settled at all — and the decline of 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 Pollini’s recitals, he would mirror Chopin with Claude Debussy, or confront Beethoven with Pierre Boulez, whose Second Sonata presented numerous colossal difficulties that Pollini simply annihilated.
“He does not say very much, but he thinks quite a lot,” Boulez said of him in 1993, an assessment that counted as extreme praise from the 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 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, 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 of seeing Arturo Toscanini lead Richard Wagner and Dimitri Mitropoulos promote Arnold Schoenberg. At the Milan Conservatory, Pollini took courses in composition and conducting; he dabbled professionally as a conductor for a short time in the 1980s, recording the Gioachino Rossini opera “La Donna Del Lago.” But he was always most associated with the piano, which he studied under Carlo Vidusso.
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, the honorary chair of the jury that oversaw the Chopin competition in Warsaw and later a friend; that September, 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.
Pollini did not entirely withdraw from performing and made 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 Igor Stravinsky, Sergei 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. 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, Vietnam, and he befriended composer Luigi Nono, with whom he collaborated on works like “Como una ola de fuerza y luz,” dedicated to the memory of Chilean activist Luciano Cruz.
Convinced that music was a right for all, 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 subsequently said of the period — but he retained his socialism, along with an idealistic belief in the power of art.