Star pianist Mitsuko Uchida: ‘Condemnation of the West is so stupid. Every country has dark episodes in its history’

Mitsuko Uchida at home in Notting Hill  Credit: Geoff Pugh

By Ivan Hewett

The virtuoso on why she has no patience for fashionable ideologies – and how Schubert nearly made her believe in God

“You English know nothing about tea,” says Dame Mitsuko Uchida, breathing in the scent of her favourite Castleton blend. “You make it with boiling water. That’s why it always tastes bitter. It has to be 95 degrees.” Another blissful inhaling follows as she serves us the brew in exquisite 18th-century Dutch porcelain. “They say Castleton tastes so good because it’s organic and the leaves are gathered under the full moon,” she says, “But I don’t believe that crap… Excuse my language.”

Uchida, now 76, is clearly enjoying the freedom that age brings to do and say the wrong things. She raises a sceptical eyebrow when I test out the names of some flamboyant, famous young pianists, and drops in a sarcastic judgment on one of them. “You are not to print that,” she says with a raised forefinger – and laments the fact that when they come to her for advice they won’t give her the necessary time. “They insist on giving 150 concerts a year, so what can I do? I say if you want to study with me it should be only 25 or 50 maximum.”

Music-making for Uchida is something that demands utmost devotion. These days she prefers to direct the orchestra as well as playing the solo part in those concertos, a dual role she’ll be taking on in her concert with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra at the Southbank Centre in London next month. All her fans – and there are many of them—will be looking forward to the pearly perfection of Uchida’s tone, and the way she moulds a phrase with vocal expressivity. But she may surprise them too, with a burst of energy and wit.

Uchida believes that to be worthy of playing the great classical composers you have to take a deep dive into the music’s structure to understand the role of every note, as well as immersing yourself in the culture from which the music arose. It’s an attitude that ensured her initial progress was slow. Uchida spent her formative years in Vienna, as her father was a diplomat in the Japanese embassy, and the wonder of being in the city of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms has never left her. “I felt completely out of place in this wonderful city where the tradition was visible everywhere. I had the best teachers, but I was quite stupid so it took me a long time to understand how this music works. I played late Brahms before I was ready,” she says severely, as if chastising her younger self.

The musical world was soon entranced by the serious, exquisitely turned-out young Japanese woman with the perfect, pearly touch. She carried off top prizes in competitions, including 2nd Prize at the Leeds International Competition in 1975, and since then has kept an unwavering and very unfashionable focus on ‘the great masters’. Has her personal pantheon changed over the years?  “No – it is still Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert,” she says very firmly. “I don’t believe in God,” she adds, “but when I play Schubert I think maybe there could be one!” In fact, her tastes aren’t as narrow as she makes out. She loves the music of that modernist bogeyman Arnold Schoenberg, and more recent modernists like her old friend Pierre Boulez.

She could have remained forever at the dead centre of the classical tradition, in Vienna. She spoke German with a proper Austrian lilt, and knew everybody. But in a typically puckish move she relocated to London. “London felt more open intellectually, there was more room to dissent. And it was a great musical centre, and still is,” she says. She met her partner, the retired diplomat Robert Cooper, and settled into a lifestyle that hasn’t changed in decades: living in a mews house in Notting Hill, crossing the cobbled street every morning to another mews house to practice on one of her numerous pianos, travelling on concert tours or to co-direct the Marlboro Music Festival in the US.

So what is it about European music that makes it so extraordinary? Her answer is more a confession of faith than an academically watertight thesis. “Take an extraordinary, difficult, stubborn genius like Ludwig van Beethoven. He was so original, but he could only achieve what he did because of a great discovery of the West. It is the system of harmony, which came out of the old church modes very slowly over time. It has so many possibilities and is always growing. It is this system which makes Mozart and Bach and Beethoven possible.”

‘Really it’s not craziness, I’m just very direct’ Credit: Hyou Vielz

By praising something so quintessentially Western as tonal harmony Uchida is definitely swimming against the fashionable ideology now rampant in intellectual circles, which holds that Western harmony is oppressive and colonialist. “This condemnation of the West is so completely stupid,” she snaps. “Every country and every race has terrible episodes in its history when it oppressed other cultures.”

Uchida is also impatient with attempts to boost the profile of under-represented minorities in music. “I don’t care whether a musician is black, white, green, transgender or whatever. If they are musical I will respect them. For musicians the music is all that matters.” Her stance on this topic hasn’t changed since the time she arrived in the US as a girl and was asked to declare her colour on an immigration form. “I didn’t know the answer ‘black’ or ‘white’ was required, and I thought about it very hard before writing ‘beige!’” she says with a laugh.

Uchida receiving her DBE from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace Credit: PA Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Having become so Europeanised, how does Uchida feel when she visits Japan? “Well, they want to own me, because there are not that many Japanese who offer something credible. But they also know I don’t really belong there. And they are right, because Japanese culture does not value self-expression, the language isn’t designed for it, it’s designed to provide ways of agreeing with everyone around you. I don’t do that so now their view is ‘Well she’s crazy but we’ll tolerate it’”.

I get the sense Uchida actually quite likes being thought of as a bit crazy. Does she, in fact, want to grow old disgracefully? “Oh yes!” she says with a laugh. “Really it’s not craziness, I’m just very direct. But I do like that poem about an old woman who wants to do everything she didn’t do when she was young and very correct – you know, things like wearing purple and running her umbrella along the railings and spitting on street corners. There is something of me in that.”

First published at The Telegraph, January 28, 2025