52 THENEWYORKER,M AY18, 2020
it seem possible that tonight could be
the target.
Levit paced his dressing room and
made himself an espresso. “To hell with
these people,” he said. “It doesn’t pro-
duce fear, it produces a certain kind of
anger, like, a real anger. And it produces
a very energizing feeling of ‘O.K., you
try me, you will get more.’ I don’t want
to overprize myself: other people, espe-
cially women, receive this kind of thing
on a daily basis. But it does make me
very intensely consider who I want to
be—what kind of, let’s say, citoyen I want
to be. I am a musician, but I am who I
am. I think about becoming not only
louder but deepening my actions. I don’t
know yet what that would be. It’s a very
interesting time.” Levit told me that he
has no interest in entering politics, al-
though it is obvious that the field fas-
cinates him.
I went to my seat in the hall while
Levit put on his concert dress. Thirty
minutes later, he was launching into
the Brahms. I felt an unease I had never
experienced before in a concert hall.
Looking around, I wondered whether
an attack was actually possible, and
whether Levit’s performance had ac-
quired some extra edge of anger and
defiance. It was difficult to say, since
the first movement of the D-Minor
Concerto is angry and defiant from the
start. In the second movement, though,
dire thoughts receded. The piano part
of the Adagio begins with a passage
marked “molto dolce espressivo,” or “very
sweet and expressive.” It is music of al-
most vertiginous loveliness and loneli-
ness—a lullaby remembered in grief.
Levit is never more impressive than
when he loses himself in such lyric idylls.
Afterward, I asked Levit what he
had felt onstage. He said, “Honestly?
Once the music started, I did not think
about it. For me, the stage becomes the
one place of freedom, absolute freedom.
Nobody is bothering me, there are no
phone calls, no interruptions. The worst
thing that can happen, the worst thing
possible, is a wrong note. Also, to hell
with those people.”
The police had asked Levit to avoid
talking about the threats until after the
Hamburg and Wiesbaden concerts. In
late December, he published an essay
on the subject, which appeared in the
Berlin newspaper Der Tagesspiegel. “ Wa s
I afraid?” he wrote. “Yes, but not for my-
self.” He linked his experiences to more
serious instances of physical and verbal
violence in Germany: a 2017 knife at-
tack on Andreas Hollstein, the mayor
of Altena; the 2019 assassination of the
Hessian politician Walter Lübcke, who
supported Merkel’s open-door policy
toward refugees; the 2019 resignation of
Martina Angermann, the mayor of Arns-
dorf, in the wake of incessant online ha-
rassment. This trend of violence could
be connected to the spread of hate speech
online: “First the speech, then the deed.”
Levit defended his stance as an en-
gaged musician—his refusal to “shut up
and play.” Music has astonishing pow-
ers of communication, he wrote, but it
cannot name things: “To be free re-
quires employing your own senses. To
hear, to see, to feel, to smell. Music al-
lows us to feel this kind of freedom.
But music is not a substitute, it cannot
be a substitute. Not for truth, not for
politics, not for human understanding
and sympathy. It cannot be a substitute
for calling racism racism. It cannot be
a substitute for calling misogyny mi-
sogyny. It can never be a substitute for
being a wakeful, critical, loving, living,
and active citizen.”
Smoldering beneath this essay was
an undiminished fury over the odious
remark that had been made to Levit at
that dinner years ago—the insinuation
that, as a Jew, he could never overcome
his outsider status. He likes to quote
James Baldwin: “I love America more
than any other country in the world,and, exactly for this reason, I insist on
the right to criticize her perpetually.”
For Levit, America is Germany.T
he main event of Levit’s spring sea-
son was to have been a string of
performances of Busoni’s immense, im-
moderate Piano Concerto, which re-
quires not only a hypervirtuosic pianist
but also a male chorus. The work is atonce a transcendent example of the Ro-
mantic concerto and a diabolically en-
tertaining satire of the genre—a self-
conscious exhibition of excess. Levit
played it once when he was eighteen,
with the Göttingen Symphony. For years,
he had been plotting his way back to it,
and, with the assistance of the English-
Italian conductor Antonio Pappano, had
finally conquered the logistical obsta-
cles. The first performance had been
slated for April 2nd, in Rome, with the
Orchestra and Chorus of the Academy
of Santa Cecilia. It was cancelled as
coronavirus deaths in Italy escalated into
the thousands.
I had planned to attend the Rome
performance; there is no concerto in or
outside the repertory that I love more.
During a video call in April, I asked
Levit to talk about the piece, mainly be-
cause I wanted to hear it. After placing
a pair of aubergines in the oven, he
propped his phone on the piano and
launched into the second movement,
“Pezzo giocoso.” The piano begins with
rapid-fire runs and scalar patterns that
are all the more fiendishly difficult for
being muted in dynamics and delicate
in articulation. The orchestra bursts in
with a galumphing passage marked
“giovanescamente”—“youthfully.” Levit
mimed it by chanting the dotted rhythm
and waving his fists in the air. “Some
passages in this movement are difficult
to the point of total insanity,” he said,
plunging into a finger-entangling run
of thirds and sixths. “Once you get past
those, you are in the clear. The piece
gets wilder and wilder, but also easier,
more pianistic. The ending is bananas.”
He attacked the keyboard again, bob-
bing his head like a hard-rock guitar-
ist. Then he broke off and looked down.
“It kills me not to be playing it,” he said.
“Six months of work—gone.” He re-
trieved the aubergines from the oven
and took a bite. A moment later, he was
grinning again. “Oh, I have to show you
this.” He paged through his score, found
a passage in the second movement, and
held it up to the phone. It was a swirl
of scalar runs, next to which the word
“SEX” had been scrawled, underlined
twice. “That is me at age eighteen. I
can’t explain it. There is nothing at all
sexy on this page. Maybe it was some
other kind of memo to myself.”
Busoni lingers on the edges of the