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Monica Lewinsky. He told me, his eyes
still wide in amazement, that Lewinsky
was “gorgeous, smart, clever, focussed—
the nicest human being.”
Perhaps the most remarkable of Lev-
it’s recordings is a two-disk album ti-
tled “Life,” which came out in 2018. It
was a memorial to the German artist
Hannes Malte Mahler, who died in a
bicycle accident in 2016. The two men
had met in 2011 and immediately be-
came close friends. “Hannes came from
a world very different from mine, this
wild world of contemporary art,” Levit
told me. “Accidentally or not, he always
gave me the feeling that I am allowed
to be who I am, without explaining or
apologizing. I can just be.” Mahler’s
death left Levit in a state of prolonged
shock. “Aside from the loss, I had this
sense that I had to go on even more
with that process of taking away layers,
discarding fears, letting myself be who
I am. I really turned into a different per-
son. No more bullshit.” A painting of
Mahler’s, showing a gray village street
with a gladiolus suspended above it,
hangs next to Levit’s piano.
In honor of his friend, Levit fash-
ioned for his disk a centuries-spanning
montage of styles, eras, and genres: ad-
aptations of Bach by Brahms and Bu-
soni, Liszt’s elaborations on Wagner
and Meyerbeer, a Rzewski work called
“A Mensch,” Bill Evans’s “Peace Piece.”
Most of these scores involve one com-
poser responding to another—a suit-
able memorial for a friendship between
artists. This idiosyncratic project made
Levit even more of an outlier among
pianists of his generation—a swerve
from the conventional path of carefully
curated concert tours, recordings, and
media appearances. Many an agent
would have discouraged such an under-
taking, but Kristin Schuster, who has
managed Levit’s career since 2013, sup-
ported him, as did Sony Classical. “They
were fantastic,” he says. “They knew
there was this grizzly-bear-like energy
in me, and it had to run its course.”
Rebellious gestures notwithstanding,
Levit remains a disciplined artist. He
is not the kind of interpreter who draws
attention to himself with outlandish
gestures. Sometimes he wonders whether
he could do something more radical.
Last summer, I joined him as he trav-
elled from Berlin to Zurich and on to
Lucerne, where he was playing a Bee-
thoven recital. During a late-night ride
from the airport, he asked me if I knew
Rzewski’s 1991 live recording of the
“Hammerklavier.” I didn’t, and within
seconds he had summoned up a video
of the performance on his iPad. “You
will notice that it says one hour, six min-
utes, fifty-two seconds,” he said. “Usu-
ally, the ‘Hammerklavier’ takes around
forty-five minutes. So, why is this? Does
he play it very slowly? No! He plays
several long cadenzas.” Levit slid his
finger along the timing bar until he
found a representative stretch—a key-
board-spanning, avant-Romantic fan-
tasia on the sonata’s thunderous open-
ing motif.
Levit shook his head in awe as light
from the computer danced against the
lenses of his glasses. “Now, this is some-
one who has total freedom,” he said.
“And it’s probably a very good approx-
imation of what Beethoven himself
sounded like, because everyone said that
his improvisations were far crazier than
whatever he wrote down. But, you know,
only Frederic gets to do that. I have no
idea how I’d go about doing such a thing.
Improvisation is a systematic art you
must study for a long time.”
He fell silent for a moment. “Oh, and
let me show you this,” he said, brows-
ing on his iPad again. “Here!” It was a
scene from “The Simpsons,” in which
Homer says, “I have three kids and no
money. Why can’t I have no kids and
three money?”
I looked puzzled, and he laughed.
“O.K., yes, that has nothing do with the
‘Hammerklavier.’ I just think it’s funny.
‘Three money’!”W
hen I next saw Levit, in early De-
cember, his mood had changed.
He was in Hamburg, at the outset of a
brief tour with the Deutsche Kammer-
philharmonie Bremen, playing Brahms’s
two piano concertos on separate nights.
His manner was uncharacteristically
furtive. “Things are strange,” he told me,
backstage at the Elbphilharmonie, where
the concert was taking place. “These last
couple of weeks, they have been very
strange.” I waited expectantly. “Very, very
strange. We will discuss later.”
Levit went into his dressing room to
take a phone call while the orchestra
gathered onstage to rehearse. Paavo Järvi,the Kammerphilharmonie’s longtime
music director, stepped to the podium
and looked around. “Where is Igor?” he
asked. He shrugged, smiled, and gave
the downbeat for the grandly ominous
orchestral introduction of Brahms’s Con-
certo in D Minor: a fortissimo D in the
horns, double-basses, violas, and tim-
pani. I sent a text to Levit: “Your con-
certo is starting.” After a minute or two,
he appeared through the side door and
bounded toward the piano, waving his
arms in a birdlike motion, as if riding
the waves of the music. He arrived on
the bench twenty or so seconds before
the piano’s stealthy, pensive entrance.
The orchestra, apparently accustomed
to such behavior, took no notice.
After the rehearsal, in Levit’s dress-
ing room, he told me what had been
going on. A few weeks earlier, he had
appeared on a political talk show hosted
by the German journalist Maybrit Ill-
ner, and participated in a discussion of
hate speech. The panel also included
Ralf Schuler, an editor from the right-
wing tabloid Bild. Schuler, attempting
to show that hate could inflame the left
as well as the right, brought up a tweet
that the pianist had posted in 2015, at
the time of the refugee crisis in Ger-
many. Levit had written that mem-
bers of the right-wing Alternative für
Deutschland Party, who had waged hate
campaigns against the refugees, had “for-
feited their humanity”—their Mensch
sein. Wasn’t the tweet itself dehuman-
izing? Levit responded by saying that
he had been brought up to understand
the word Mensch in its Yiddish sense:
“A Mensch is a person of honor.” On
that basis, he remained secure in his be-
lief that the extremists lacked human-
ity, and he took nothing back.
Schuler’s remarks brought Levit to
the attention of people on the far right,
who began attacking him publicly and
privately. He was called Judensau, a Jew-
ish pig, and within a couple of weeks
he had received three death threats—
two on e-mail, one on Instagram. The
messages, which Levit shared with the
police, mentioned two forthcoming
events on his schedule: a concert in early
December and one in January. The first
of these dates was in Wiesbaden—the
night after the concert I was about to
see at the Elbphilharmonie. But some
ambiguous wording in the threat made