The most difficult should sound easy and effortless, overcoming all obstacles to return to a liberated game. In this respect, the grace of the juggler Rastelli can be a "key figure in musical interpretation" (Theodor W. Adorno). Who would be more passionately admired for this special, magical “can do more than it can” than the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich? But the applause has become a burden for them; he made her realize that there is more intrusiveness in praise than in censure. She quarrels with the hymns that are intoned to her even when she believes she has played badly. But according to her admirers, she, "the greatest pianist" in the world, cannot play badly. She is under pressure to live up to expectationswhich she herself woke up: always having to play as if God were walking on earth as a pianist.
As if in a defensive reflex, she once said: “I love to play the piano, but I don't really like being a pianist.” In the course of her long career, as with Vladimir Horowitz, whom she admires, long years in which the virtuosa avoided the arena of the large concert halls and played neither concerts nor solo recitals.
Instead, she and friends, among them generously sponsored young musicians, devoted herself to chamber music at her festival in Lugano.
In the late 1990s she won the battle against serious cancer.
The piano as a fiance
Martha Argerich, born in Buenos Aires and granddaughter of Jewish immigrants, gave birth to that incomprehensible gift that Bruno Walter described with the paradox of “innate technology”. Her first teacher was the Italian-Argentine pianist Vincenzo Scaramuzza, who taught her to "sing with her fingers like bel canto sopranos like Maria Malibran or Giulia Grisi". She was eight years old when she made her debut in Buenos Aires with Mozart's Concerto in D minor KV 466. But soon she resisted the urge of the teacher and her parents to see the piano as a fiancé. At the age of fourteen, supported by the government of the dictator Juan Perón, she went to study with Friedrich Gulda in Vienna, for her the “greatest inspiration of my career”. In 1960 she made one of the most brilliant debut records ever:The hardest part - the staccatos, the broken chords and the glittering passages of Frédéric Chopin's C sharp minor Scherzo; the repetitions divided between both hands on a note by Serge Prokofiev's Toccata; the octave thunder of the Sixth Hungarian Rhapsody by Franz Liszt - mastered it in such a way that it would have been accused of sorcery earlier. The cheerleader of the applause was Vladimir Horowitz.
In 1961 she fled concert life to Montcalieri (Piedmont), Italy, to study with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli.
When asked what he gave her in just four lessons over eighteen months, the mysterious perfectionist replied, “I've done a lot for the girl.
I taught them the music of silence. "
She then stopped playing for a while, contemplating working as a secretary, and married the composer Robert Chen, from whom she separated shortly before the birth of her first daughter.
(Two other daughters come from the marriage with the conductor Charles Dutoit and the pianist Stephen Kovacevich).
She traveled to Brussels in 1964 for the Reine Elisabeth Concours, for which her mother had registered her, but did not compete.