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.
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.”
“I don’t know what I am doing, because I am still here,” she said. “This is quite recent, this type of feeling. Of not knowing.”
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).
On the global stage, Argerich is busier than ever. She played more than 80 engagements last year — Shanghai one week, Pamplona the next — a lifestyle that she described as “a little bit absurd.” Her concerts have a precious air — she has developed a reputation over the years for canceling — attracting fans from around the world, including her musician peers, who flock to study her hands, her trills, her octaves, her touch. She receives nearly unanimous praise wherever she goes, though some critics have said her playing can be volatile and unrestrained.
In recent months, Argerich has waded into politics, speaking in support of a Russian pianist and critic of President Vladimir V. Putin who died last year in prison, and paying tribute to an Israeli pianist being held in Gaza. She said she felt it was important to speak out because “these are very dangerous days for the world.”
She has avoided performing in the United States over the past decade, in part, she said, because of the treatment of Dutoit, who was accused of sexual assault by several women in 2017 and lost engagements with major American orchestras. (The two divorced in 1973, but she still performs with him frequently; Dutoit has denied the accusations.)
But she said she was planning a New York comeback: She has agreed to play Beethoven sonatas with the violinist Maxim Vengerov at Carnegie Hall in 2027.
“I don’t know how I will be — if I will be,” she said. “I don’t stop, and I don’t know why.”
ARGERICH’S LIFE in music began before she turned 3, when a boy in her kindergarten class in Buenos Aires teased that she could not play the piano. In response, she sat at the keyboard and flawlessly rendered a lullaby. Her teacher, stunned, called her parents.
Martha’s father, Juan Manuel, a math teacher and accountant, was easygoing, taking her on walks in the garden and performing magic tricks, like making candy appear from her ears. Her mother, Juanita, who had studied economics, was stern and domineering. Martha wanted to be a doctor. But her mother insisted that she study music, saying her fiancé would be the piano.
“It was as if I were hypnotized,” she said. “I had no choice but to play.”
When she was 8, Martha met Daniel Barenboim, then 7, a fellow Argentine who went on to become an eminent pianist and conductor. They became fast friends, playing games underneath a grand piano and performing Chopin études for each other.
“From the very beginning, she was not a mechanical virtuoso who was all about dexterity and speed,” Barenboim said. “Of course she could do that too, but she could also bring out so many colors.”
By the time she was in middle school, Martha had made a name in Argentina. With the help of Juan Perón, then the country’s president, her family moved to Vienna when she was 14 so she could study with Friedrich Gulda, an iconoclastic Austrian pianist.
A few years later, she moved again, this time to New York, hoping to meet Horowitz, the virtuoso of the era. (“He was the best lover that the piano ever had,” she said.) She found an apartment in his same neighborhood, but the two never met.
Lonely and isolated in New York, Argerich fell into a depression. She stopped playing the piano for two years, passing the time drinking beer and watching late-night television. (“It was like being used to running,” she said, “and then all of a sudden you can’t even walk.”)
She began a relationship with Robert Chen, a Chinese composer and conductor, giving birth to their daughter, Lyda, in 1964, when she was 22. Chen and Argerich later split up and she lost custody of Lyda. They were apart for more than a decade, before reuniting when Lyda was a teenager.
“I was always trying to get away from something or someone at that time,” Argerich said in “Bloody Daughter” (2012), a documentary by the youngest of her three daughters, the filmmaker Stéphanie Argerich. “I was overwhelmed by everything.”
Slowly, Argerich returned to the piano. In 1965, a year after giving birth to Lyda, she had a triumph: She won first prize in the prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw. Too nervous to eat, she chain-smoked through the contest as she prepared programs of polonaises, scherzos, mazurkas and nocturnes.
The Polish public was enraptured. Commentators described her playing as “close to a whisper” and compared her to Chopin. Argerich was given a nickname: the whirlwind from Argentina.
NOT LONG AFTER we met in Lugano, Argerich headed to the United States, where she was to help judge a piano competition at Arizona State University.
In Arizona, she said, she was at ease, basking in the desert sun and visiting relatives. But toward the end of her time there, she came down with the flu and had a fever of 103 degrees. As she was recovering, she had a bad fall on the floor of her hotel bathroom, bruising her face and arms.
Alone and unable to move, she said she had a revelation. She thought of her friend Mischa Maisky, the renowned cellist, who stopped performing last year because of a spinal cord infection that left him almost paralyzed.
“I was suddenly connected to him,” she said. “I have never experienced anything like this.”
Argerich, who endured treatments for metastatic melanoma in the 1990s, lives with a kind of survivor’s guilt. Now that is compounded by losses, including the death, in 2021, of her soul mate in music, the Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire. She has been pained in recent years to see friends like Barenboim fall ill. (He recently announced he has Parkinson’s.)
When she returned to Switzerland from Arizona, she was determined to help rehabilitate Maisky, persuading him to return to the stage at Le Piano Symphonique festival in Lucerne.
“Martha is like life itself,” Maisky said in an interview. “She’s not easy, she can be very complicated, unpredictable and a pain in the neck. But she, like life, is the most beautiful thing there is.”
On a chilly night in Lucerne, they reunited, playing the slow movement from Chopin’s cello sonata. Maisky moved differently, but his sound was intact.
Argerich smiled as she left the stage that night. “Mischa is back,” she said.
THE DOZEN or so students who gathered backstage at the Tonhalle St. Gallen, a concert hall in eastern Switzerland, were buzzing. They had come for a weeklong piano seminar. And now, over potato chips, ham sandwiches and palmier cookies, they were about to meet their idol, Martha Argerich.
She walked into the room with little fanfare after performing Rachmaninoff suites with her longtime friend, the pianist Darío Ntaca. Nibbling on olives, she fielded questions about her rise as a leading soloist in the 1970s and beyond; her many classic recordings of Schumann, Chopin, Prokofiev, Liszt and Ravel; and growing up in Argentina. She shared her trick to avoid crying when a piano teacher yelled at her in her youth: She would look only at the wart on his face.
After the students left, I asked Argerich, who was watching Pavarotti videos on YouTube in her dressing room, if she might be willing to answer a few more questions.
“I have already told you everything,” she said. “I should have the freedom to do what I would like.”
But she did not object when I accompanied her back to her hotel. She stayed up for hours in the lobby chatting with friends about Jungian astrology, the controversy at the 1980 Chopin competition and a suitor who once told her that she had so many personalities, she could date several people at once. She grew obsessed at one point with proving that a waxy-looking plant in the lobby was real, burying her nose in its branches and digging into the soil.
“Look at this,” she said to her friends. “You see? Every leaf is different. It’s alive.”
As we parted around 4 a.m., I asked Argerich one more question. I noticed that evening that she had lingered outside the concert hall, looking at the stars. I wondered if she ever pondered her place in the universe.
Argerich said she sometimes reflected on the absurdity of a life spent hunched over black and white keys. “What are we pianists?” she said. “Nothing. We think it is so extraordinary. But it is not.”
As a storm blew in, filling the streets with rain, Argerich said she had made peace with her life.
“I don’t ask anymore,” she said. “I just play.”
Audio excerpts, all with Martha Argerich: Schumann, Piano Concerto in A Minor, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, conductor; Schumann, Piano Concerto in A Minor, Orquesta Sinfónica de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, Washington Castro, conductor; Bach, Partita No. 2 in C Minor; Ravel, “Gaspard de la Nuit”; Schumann, “Kinderszenen”; Beethoven, Violin Sonata No. 8 in G Major, Renaud Capuçon, violin; Chopin, Polonaise in A-flat Major; Chopin, Scherzo in C-Sharp Minor; Chopin, Mazurka in A Minor; Chopin, Nocturne in F Major; Chopin, Cello Sonata in G Minor, Mischa Maisky, cello; Rachmaninoff, Suite for Two Pianos No. 2 in C Major, Alexandre Rabinovitch-Barakovsky, piano. Credit: Warner Classics (“Martha Argerich: The Warner Classics Edition“); Teatro Colón; Deutsche Grammophon (“Maisky-Argerich, Live in Japan”).
Javier C. Hernández reports on classical music, opera and dance in New York City and beyond. More about Javier C. Hernández
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