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Addio, Pollini
25 March 2024
This weekend Maurizio Pollini, the Italian classical pianist, left us at the age of 82. We have been admirers of his recordings of Chopin, Mozart and Shumann, among others, since our youth.
In David Allen's obituary (gift link) of him, he writes, "Convinced that music was a right for all, Pollini gave concerts for workers and students with the conductor Claudio Abbado, a lifelong collaborator and he abandoned conventions that separated new music from old, recording the piano works of Schoenberg as strikingly as he did the late sonatas of Beethoven."
Behind those choices was a theory of art that Pollini shared in an interview with the Guardian:
Art itself, if it is really great, has a progressive aspect that is needed by a society, even if it seems absolutely useless in strictly practical terms. In a way, art is a little like the dreams of a society. They seem to contribute little, but sleeping and dreaming are vitally important in that a human couldn't live without them, in the same way a society cannot live without art.
No one would deny we need sleep. Not only to recover from physical exhaustion but, as anyone who has ever had a dream knows, to untangle the mind from the demands of the day.
To overlay that daily personal battle for balance on the collection of human beings we call society so it falls on the business of the day and the arts strikes us as a wonderfully incisive metaphor.
Society dreams in its art.
That's why propaganda on the scale we've seen practiced in Communist countries always fall short. You cannot manipulate a dream. You cannot choose its subject.
It will always depart from what you fear and what you hope to something that has not happened. Not what has already been, not what you want to happen. But an imaginative leap unbound from reality.
Pity the society without art. Without dreams, it has no idea what it's doing.