Martha Argerich, the Elusive, Enigmatic ‘Goddess’ of the Piano

At 83, the Argentine-Swiss pianist is at the peak of her powers. But she doesn’t want to talk about it.

“I want to hide.” Argerich in Basel, Switzerland.Credit...Mischa Christen for The New York Times

By Javier C. Hernández

The pianist Martha Argerich had just delivered an electrifying performance on a snowy night in northern Switzerland. Fans were lining up backstage for autographs, and friends were bringing roses and chrysanthemums to her dressing room.

But Argerich, who at 83 is still one of the world’s most astonishing pianists, with enough finger strength to shatter chestnuts or make a Steinway quiver, was nowhere to be seen. She had slipped out a door to smoke a Gauloises cigarette.

“I want to hide,” she said outside the Stadtcasino concert hall in Basel, Switzerland, shrinking beneath her billowy gray hair. “For a moment, I don’t want to be a pianist. Now, I am someone else.”

As she smoked, Argerich, one of classical music’s most elusive and enigmatic artists, obsessed about how she had played the opening flourish of Schumann’s piano concerto that evening with the Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana. (Her verdict: “not so good.”) And she became transfixed by the memory of performing the concerto for the first time, as an 11-year-old in Buenos Aires, her hometown.

There, at the Teatro Colón in 1952, a conductor whose name was seared into her memory — Washington Castro — had offered a warning. Never forget, he said: Strange things happen to pianists who play the Schumann concerto.

At 83, Argerich is busier than ever. “They look old now,” she said of her hands, “but they still work.”Credit...Mischa Christen for The New York Times

Argerich thought about his words every time she played the piece. And now, in the ninth decade of her life, she felt that strange things were happening to her too.

She was defying all expectations of age — many concert pianists lose speed and strength in their 70s and 80s — her fingers still capable of dizzying acrobatic feats. (“They look old now,” she said of her hands, “but they still work.”) She was having dreams about Schumann, the composer closest to her soul. (“There is something so spontaneous and so touching and so true about him,” she said.) She was seeing “new colors, new dimensions” in music she had played hundreds of times.

And as she watched more of her friends and musical colleagues die or fall ill, Argerich was pondering what she called her own “peculiar existence.”

A FEW DAYS earlier, I had gone to the emerald shores of Lake Lugano, near Switzerland’s border with Italy, in search of Argerich, a notoriously private artist who rarely grants interviews.

Argerich (pronounced AR-guh-reech), who grew up in Argentina but has lived for decades in Geneva, has a reputation for mysticism. She can summon immense power and velocity in Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky. Yet she can also play Bach with delicacy and flair; Ravel with intuitive grace; and Schumann with innocence and wonder.

“She’s a pure goddess,” said the star pianist Yuja Wang. “She transfixes you. You go to her concerts and you walk out saying, ‘Holy cow, what was that?’”

Argerich’s eccentricities have made her a cult figure in classical music. She does not sign contracts — as a Gemini, she said, she fears commitment. She has no publicists or minders. Since the 1980s, she has eschewed solo performances, saying they make her feel lonely, “like an insect” under a light.

Her irreverent spirit — she is prone to making faces — has inspired memes on social media, including one that shows her massaging her face with a tangerine. (“Silence please,” a caption says.) She moves between engagements in peasant blouses and baggy jeans, carrying her own tote bags full of scores, astrology texts, high heels and red lipstick.

In Lugano, a holy place for Argerich where she once curated a festival, I caught her by surprise on the stage of the Auditorio Stelio Molo. She had just finished rehearsing the Schumann concerto under the baton of Charles Dutoit, an ex-husband. She greeted me with uneasy eyes, saying she was tired, not feeling well, in desperate need of practice and had nothing to say. But after a cigarette and a Coca-Cola, she invited me into her dressing room to chat.

Some critics have called Argerich the greatest living pianist — the last in a line of titans like Sergei Rachmaninoff, Arthur Rubinstein and Vladimir Horowitz, her idol. But she rejects that title.

“The greatest pianist in the world?” she told me, shaking her head. “There is no such thing.”

I SHADOWED Argerich on tour in Switzerland over the winter. I tried to put her at ease, helping carry her bags and speaking casually in Spanish, her native language. But she was rarely in the mood to talk. One night, a friend of Argerich’s texted to say that I should meet Argerich in a hotel lobby at 3 a.m. When I showed up, Argerich, a night owl, had already changed her mind. “Buenas noches,” she said plainly, before heading to her room.

When she felt like talking, she could be entrancing. She told me that love and music were the twin mysteries of life; she spoke of her kinship with dead composers (she called Chopin “my impossible love”); she said that music makes her feel alive; and she acknowledged that she often doubts her abilities (“I have insecurities all the time — that it’s not good, that I’m not prepared,” she said).

Read the full article here.

First published at The New York Times, April 1, 2025. Updated April 2, 2025