THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020 49
izen. European. Pianist.” Not until his
early twenties did he feel his right to
Germanness questioned. At an upper
crust dinner following a concert, he was
shocked when a middleaged lawyer
said to him, “You must never forget that
although you grew up in Germany and
live in Germany, you belong to a pop
ulation group that was intended not to
live here anymore.” Levit was being told,
in shockingly racist terms, that some
people would always see him as an in
terloper. He knew then that the old
ghosts of German hypernationalism
and antiSemitism could rise again, as
indeed they have.
Levit began playing piano at the age
of three, under his mother’s tutelage,
and made his début a year later, with
Beethoven’s “Ecossaise in G.” By his
early teens, he was playing the Grieg
Piano Concerto and other entrylevel
virtuoso fare. More atypically, he made
a piano transcription of Beethoven’s
“Missa Solemnis.” He did not, however,
become a touring prodigy after the fash
ion of Lang Lang, or, in a previous gen
eration, Evgeny Kissin. After earning
second prize at the Arthur Rubinstein
International Piano Master Competi
tion in Tel Aviv, in 2005, he returned to
his studies at the Hochschule für Musik
und Theater, in Hannover. His mother
has long taught there; he recently joined
the faculty, which means that he can
visit his family more often.
This relatively slow start allowed Levit
to develop away from the spotlight, try
ing out repertory without facing out
sized expectations. He also underwent
a socialization process that many prod
igies forgo. He was, in some ways, a nor
mal high schooler, and, along with many
of his German peers, developed a taste
for American hiphop. “I went around
with my Walkman and pretty much
knew every line of Eminem,” he said.
“Black Star was also very big for me. My
first real experience of undertheskin
politicization was this fearless, border
less storytelling about yourself.” A little
later, he fell in love with the music of
Thelonious Monk. “For the longest time,
I wanted to be Monk, which was, of
course, absurd, but it had a big, big in
fluence on how I play the piano. That
naked sound—no, not naked, but ex
posed, skeletonlike, oppositional. That
is also Beethoven, for me.”
Some of Levit’s teachers discouraged
his voracious musical appetites, but at
the Hochschule he was fortunate to re
ceive instruction from the Finnish pia
nist Matti Raekallio, who let him roam
free. Raekallio, who now teaches at Juil
liard, told me that having Levit as a
student was like winning the lottery:
“The socalled lessons with him were
not really lessons, since there was noth
ing one could teach him
about piano playing. In
stead, they were conversa
tions—about music, about
life, about everything. I had
never encountered such a
natural curiosity, in which
he had devoured everything
and then wanted to know
more.” Levit has a formi
dable technique, although
maintaining it is not effort
less. “Octaves are not really my friends,”
he told me after a performance of the
Brahms Second Concerto in Vienna,
shaking his hands at his sides. He as
serts himself through his grasp of mu
sical architecture, his differentiation of
moods, his urgency of expression. These
qualities make him a superlative inter
preter of Beethoven, whose power is al
ways cumulative in effect.
Raekallio also led Levit toward the
grand eccentrics in the piano firmament:
the likes of Alkan, Busoni, Kaikhosru
Sorabji, and Ronald Stevenson. The last
two are twentiethcentury British cult
figures who specialized in scores of de
lirious complexity. As Levit explored
this esoteric terrain, he developed an in
tense regard for the man who perhaps
knows it better than anyone alive—the
august Canadian pianist MarcAndré
Hamelin. “When I was a student, my
single greatest hero was Marc,” Levit
says. “Everything he recorded I had to
learn. Now we are good friends, and
sometimes play together.”
When Levit was sixteen, he came
across Hamelin’s recording of “The Peo
ple United Will Never Be Defeated!,”
an hourlong work from 1975 by the
radicalminded American composer
Frederic Rzewski. By turns convulsively
modernistic and brashly neoRoman
tic, it consists of thirtysix variations on
Sergio Ortega’s “El Pueblo Unido Jamás
Será Vencido,” which became famous
as a song of protest against the Chilean military dictatorship. Levit, whose
commitment to leftist politics was deep
ening, found Rzewski’s email address
on the Internet and wrote him a fan
letter. “And then, because I was sixteen,
or whatever, I asked him if he would
write a piece for me.” To Levit’s sur
prise, Rzewski responded that he would
write something, for money. After per
suading a local newmusic group to pay
for the commission, Levit
became the dedicatee of
the second book of Rzew
ski’s “Nanosonatas”—mu
sic of nervous brilliance
that matched the pianist’s
emerging personality.
An unlikely friendship
developed between the ac
complished young German
and the legendarily con
trarian older American,
who has long railed against the main
stream classicalmusic business. In 2015,
Levit played “The People United” at
Wigmore Hall, the venerable London
chambermusic venue, where Beetho
ven string quartets and Schubert piano
sonatas are the more usual fare. Rzew
ski was in the audience, and afterward
he went onstage to congratulate Levit.
“He leaned in to hug me and rasped in
my ear, ‘You’re a real motherfucker,’ ”
Levit recalled. “I wasn’t sure how to take
that at first. Eventually, I decided that
it was the single greatest compliment
I’ve ever received.”L
evit introduced himself to the in
ternational public in an ostensibly
conventional manner, with a recording
of Beethoven. The Sony Classical label
signed him in 2012, after he had at
tracted notice as a member of the BBC’s
youngartist program. His first Sony
project was nonetheless bold in concept,
even brazen: where other début pianists
might have stuck to the “Moonlight,”
the “Appassionata,” or the “Waldstein,”
Levit offered a twodisk set of Beetho
ven’s final five piano sonatas, including
the titanic “Hammerklavier.”
To some, the gesture smacked of ar
rogance. He told me, “I know there is
this attitude that you are supposed to
wait until you are sixtyfive and have
seen life and the world and suffering
before you approach late Beethoven.
But I know thirteenyearolds who