he repeated a piece. When I asked Stein
meier’s office for a comment about Levit,
I received a statement extolling the pi
anist’s “acute sense of the power of pub
lic life, community and solidarity.” At
a recent press conference, Steffen Sei
bert, the chief spokesperson for the Mer
kel government, made mention of “a
pianist’s famous house concerts”—un
doubtedly meaning Levit, even if the
name went unsaid.
On May 4th, Levit streamed his
fiftysecond concert—his last, for the
time being. “I need to take a break and
recalibrate,” he told me. “I mean, I
haven’t read a book in four weeks.” This
phase of his career had been disorient
ing. He had gained even greater visi
bility, yet he was isolated in his apart
ment, fearful of what an extended
shutdown will mean for cultural life.
(He has had several girlfriends, but is
currently unattached.) Levit went on,
“I mean, one journalist said that I was
creating ‘fireplace moments for the na
tion.’ For God’s sake! All I wanted to
do was to share something, do some
thing, instead of just sitting in my apart
ment and watching everything crum
ble.” One day, Levit sent me a text saying,
“Maybe for the first time do I under
stand what it means to speak of music
as something lifekeeping. It really keeps
me alive.... I don’t care if it’s wrong or
right, whatever B.S. that means, just as
long as I can actually press down the
black and white keys. I’ve never, never
been freer than now. Never. And I am
in tears half the day. Very, very dark.
And yet. The existential must of music
making really becomes bigger and big
ger by the minute.”
Concert pianists are often stereo
typed as remote souls, apt to lose them
selves in the palaces of sound they
summon at the keyboard. Levit is em
phatically not a loner. He has a global
network of friends, and transmits count
less emails, texts, emojis, and GIFs every
day. He is a cultural omnivore who is
as likely to quote from Kendrick Lamar
or “Simpsons” episodes as from Kafka
or James Baldwin. Outfitted in a hoodie,
a Tshirt, and jeans, he blends in easily
with other guys on the streets of Ber
lin. His moderately hip image arouses
suspicion in conservative corners of the
classicalmusic world. “Just shut up and
play,” he has heard people say, in several
languages. From a more radical perch,
the Berlinbased online magazine VAN
has suggested that Levit is excessively
selfdramatizing: “In the race for atten
tion, Levit is a bit like Usain Bolt: he
always seems effortlessly ahead.”
The fixation on Levit’s extramusicalactivities tends to overlook the fact that
music is always churning through his
mind, even when he seems preoccupied
with other matters. As I met with him
during the past year, I was most struck
by his staggering command of centuries
of repertory, whether or not a work is
written for his instrument. Rehearsing
Beethoven’s “Les Adieux” before a re
cital, he noticed that one passage resem
bled a phrase in Wagner’s “Götterdäm
merung,” and began playing the opera
from memory. Another time, he tried
out a piano piece by the nineteenthcen
tury French maverick Charles Valentin
Alkan, then segued into a sonorous ap
proximation of the Adagio of Bruckner’s
Sixth Symphony. He is just as prone to
break into Henry Mancini, Nina Si
mone, or the Fred Hersch arrangement
of Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes.” He is
a completely musical animal, albeit an
alert and worldly one.L
evit was born in Nizhny Novgorod,
Russia, in 1987, and moved to Ger
many with his family when he was eight.
His father, Simon, is a construction en
gineer; his mother, Elena, is a pianist
and a pedagogue, specializing in chil
dren’s musical education. The family is
Jewish, though not particularly religious.
“My parents simply wanted a better
life—a better education for my sister
and for myself, a better perspective for
themselves,” Levit told me. They set
tled in Hannover, the capital of the state
of Lower Saxony.
He has few memories of Russia. “My
first encounter with Germany and the
German language was, in a way, so emo
tional, so enthusiastic, that everything
before that disappeared,” Levit told me.
“I said that I was going to learn to speak
better German than any of my class
mates. I speak Russian with my parents.
But when I went back to Russia re
cently—for the first time in seventeen
years—it felt very touristy.”
Germans love to debate the question
“What is German?” In 2017, the scholar
Dieter Borchmeyer published a bestsell
ing thousandpage book with that title,
arguing that German culture hangs in
perpetual tension between expansively
cosmopolitan and strictly nationalist
definitions of identity. Levit firmly be
longs to the cosmopolitan camp. On his
Web site, he describes himself as “Cit