The great pianist Maurizio Pollini has passed away

The pianist Maurizio Pollini died on Saturday morning. Born in Milan in 1942, he had been ill for some time and for health reasons had canceled the last scheduled concerts. The funeral home, as already happened for Carla Fracci, will be held at La Scala, a theater to which Pollini was very attached.

Graduated from the Milan conservatory, Pollini won the very prestigious Chopin piano competition in 1960 and began a very long and prestigious career, also giving space to contemporary music in his repertoire. The last concert in which he performed at La Scala was dedicated to Schoemberg’s music, on 13 February last year, while his debut was on 10 October 1958 with the La Scala orchestra conducted by Thomas Schippers. «One of the great musicians of our time and a fundamental reference in the artistic life of the Theater for over fifty years» La Scala recalls him in a note. «The Superintendent Dominique Meyer, the Musical Director Riccardo Chailly, the professors of the Orchestra and the workers at La Scala – continues the note – are alongside his wife Marilisa, his son Daniele and the whole family». Usually the funeral chamber is opened at La Scala for former superintendents and former musical directors, but exceptions are made for personalities of extraordinary importance who have a particular significance for the theatre.

Maurizio Pollini, who turned 82 on 5 January, won his first international competition at the age of 15 and when, three years later, in 1960, having recently graduated from the Milan conservatory, he won the prestigious Chopin Competition in Warsaw, Arthur Rubinstein, who was among the jurors, he exclaimed: «This young man already plays technically better than all of us». His fame soon became absolutely international and he entered the legend of the history of great pianists. This meant very hard and continuous discipline and only in recent years did he admit to “feeling a certain fatigue”.

His studies, following the success in Warsaw, continued and had a high moment in the improvement with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli who also helped him to work further on the technique which, together with a profound musical culture and skill, always allowed him to highlight the structural construction of a piece approached with a rational spirit, but in which the feeling, the melancholic or passionate vein, slowly emerges as the very substance of the details and form of the composition, with a lesser rigidity that has also arrived over time: «I believe today my interpretation is freer in rhythm and that there are more elements of ‘rubato’ – he confessed five years ago – but always remaining far from the exaggerations of the late nineteenth century”.

His has always been an interpretation based on total respect for the written text, but always remaining very modern, without lyrical abandon or virtuosic elegance, with an expressive force entirely internal to the work. A modernity that was in his cultural education which, due to his family environment (his father was a well-known rationalist architect and his mother a musician and sister of the painter and sculptor Fausto Melotti) and acquaintances in the 60s, starting from that with Nono, he did not experience art and music as something detached from life and therefore made him an intellectual artist who has always publicly expressed his ideas and his civil and political commitment, as when in the 70s he played in schools and factories, or when expressed his opinions, critical of the Berlusconi governments since the Vietnam War.