46 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
PROFILES
THE FEARLESS PIANIST
After streaming performances from his Berlin apartment, Igor Levit is asking what a concert can be.
By Alex Ross
O
n March 10th, the German pi-
anist Igor Levit played Bee-
thoven’s Third and Fifth Piano
Concertos at the Elbphilharmonie, the
hulking concert complex in Hamburg.
It was his thirty-third birthday and, it
turned out, his last public concert for
many weeks. The next day, Angela
Merkel, the German Chancellor, deliv-
ered a dire warning about the scope of
the looming coronavirus pandemic, and
performance spaces began closing across
the country. At the time, Levit had a
full schedule before him. He had re-
cently issued a boxed-set recording of
Beethoven’s thirty-two piano sonatas,
and was playing Beethoven cycles in
several European cities. He was also
preparing to tackle an arcane colossus
of the piano literature—the seventy-
minute Piano Concerto by the early-
twentieth-century composer-virtuoso
Ferruccio Busoni, a hero of his.
“That next day, the eleventh, was
kind of a shock day,” Levit told me re-
cently, in a video call from his apart-
ment, in Berlin. “On the twelfth, I was
shopping in a grocery store, and I had
this thought: What if I live-streamed a
gig?” He peered into his phone with a
grin. He is a trim young man with sharp
features, a high Mahlerian hairline, and
a thin growth of beard. He was wear-
ing a T-shirt that read “Love Music
Hate Racism.” He speaks rapidly and
incisively, his English nearly as good as
his German. Sometimes he seems more
mature than his years, poised and orac-
ular; at others, he comes across as an
antic, restless member of his digital-
native generation.
Levit went on, “When I got home,
I did what I usually do, which is to throw
a thought into the public arena with-
out thinking about any consequences.
I went on Twitter and said, ‘O.K., I’m
going to play for you guys tonight at
my place.’ After having tweeted that, I
realized, Hang on—I’ve never streamed
anything, I know shit about streaming,
I don’t even know if Twitter allows thirty
minutes of streaming, I have no cam-
era stand. I had a total panic. I was send-
ing messages to friends: ‘Do you know
how streaming works?’ And this tweet
was already out there. It was a catastro-
phe. I ran to the last electronics store
that was still open, and got some stuff
for twenty-four euros.”
I saw Levit’s tweet and tuned in. The
setting was familiar, because I had met
with him there the previous summer.
He lives in a spacious, airy, sparely dec-
orated apartment in the Mitte neigh-
borhood of Berlin, with plate-glass win-
dows overlooking a park. His instrument
is a 1923 Steinway B that once belonged
to the great Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer.
At 7 p.m., Levit pressed the Record but-
ton on his smartphone and trotted in
front of his newly acquired home-Web-
casting equipment, dressed casually in
a black-and-gray pullover shirt and black
pants. He gave a brief introduction, in
German and English: “It’s a sad time,
it’s a weird time, but acting is better than
doing nothing. Let’s bring the house
concert into the twenty-first century.”
He then tore into Beethoven’s “Wald-
stein” Sonata, in a fashion typical of
him—precipitate, purposeful, intricately
nuanced. It was an imposing structure
aglow with feeling.
Other pianists of Levit’s generation
may have achieved wider mass-market
fame—Lang Lang and Yuja Wang come
first to mind—but none have compa-
rable stature as a cultural or even a po-
litical figure. In German-speaking coun-
tries, Levit is a familiar face not only to
classical-music fans but also to a broader
population that shares his leftist, inter-
nationalist world view. He has appeared
on mainstream German TV shows; par-
ticipated in political panel discussions;
and attended the annual gathering of
the Green Party, playing Beethoven’s
“Ode to Joy,” the anthem of the Euro-
pean Union. It was no surprise that Lev-
it’s inaugural live stream attracted at-
tention, though I was taken aback when
the number of viewers climbed into the
tens of thousands.
In the following weeks, as Levit kept
Webcasting each night, a convivial on-
line community formed around him on
Twitter and its Periscope app—a self-
described “Igor Familie.” Periscope in-
cludes a chat-room sidebar, with hearts
floating up the screen like bubbles. Most
comments were in German, but there
were salutations from Nairobi, Tokyo,
and Montevideo. Some viewers made
musicological points—“New harmonic
structures become transparent,” one per-
son wrote when Levit tackled Brahms’s
arrangement of the Bach Chaconne in
D Minor—while others discussed the
pianist’s facial hair, T-shirts, and foot-
wear. “Hard rock fan from Düsseldorf
is thrilled,” one commenter said. Levit
delivered short talks, usually focussed
on the music at hand. He never spoke
at the end, though emotion sometimes
surfaced. Once, halfway through
Schubert’s sublime Sonata in B-flat, he
buried his head in his hands, hiding
tears; he did the same after Morton
Feldman’s solitary, unearthly “Palais
de Mari.”
Levit’s Hauskonzerte drew notice in
high places. For the twenty-second night
of the series, he was invited to perform
in the concert room at Schloss Bellevue,
the German Presidential residence.
Frank-Walter Steinmeier, who holds
the largely ceremonial office of Presi-
dent, provided an introduction, prais-
ing Levit not just for giving comfort
but also for highlighting the fact that
“many artists are in crisis—no perfor-
mance opportunities, no concerts, no
productions—and, because they are in
crisis, they need our support.” Levit,
this time wearing a black jacket and
dress shoes, again played the “Wald-
stein”—the only time in the series that
