Beethoven, Chopin and anti-Vietnam concerts: Maurizio Pollini not only saw himself as a pianist, but also got involved in political debates. Now the legendary artist has died at the age of 82.
He was the enlightened, the “progressive” pianist of his time, perhaps the most brittle, sensitive, brooding among the great virtuosi. Maurizio Pollini was admired by audiences for decades because he played the piano brilliantly and with outstanding intelligence. But he was never a fighter for beautiful sound or emotional art, never the hero in the keyboard circus. For Chopin, Pollini relied on crystal-clear energy, for Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier or Beethoven’s 32 Sonatas on an iron formal logic, for Schubert, Schumann or Brahms, for Debussy or Schönberg on poetry, conciseness, straightforwardness. In fact, he could have been content with his technical and intellectual sovereignty. With what Joachim Kaiser had raised to a beacon in this newspaper early on, continuing the Berlin Karajan headline from the 1930s: The Miracle of Pollini.