utoit and Martha
Argerich- truly behaved as such. As any parent of someone living in
Manhattan on September 11, 2001, perceived that the world, for some
minutes or hours, had reached its end.
As the smoke of the burning towers
billowed up into the sky and the caustic smell invaded the streets and corners of the city, my parents were each on opposite sides of the
globe. As most telephone lines were interrupted, my father, who was on
tour in Australia, expressed his nervous state via e-mail: "Annie,
I've just seen the horror of the attack on television. Answer urgently, I
can't sleep" - he wrote. I answered immediately, while I tried to
phone my mother in Brussels from a mobile phone. After approximately 60
tries, I managed to get through and, to my surprise, she, who never
answers a call unless she knows where it is coming from, picked up the
phone on the first ring -and I must confess this is exceptional-.
Since the disaster, they have called me on a daily basis -which, in my
family, is even more exceptional still-. When human beings confront their
own historic reality and their condition of frailty, existential issues
naturally arise - one of them being what the purpose of each individual in
the world is. What does it mean to be a classical musician in a
disintegrating world? This is one of the questions my father faced as news
of the attack reached him: "I'm about to go to a rehearsal and I
wonder what for. All this is so insignificant now" - he wrote.
My mother, who has always questioned the nature of her profession, only
increased her doubts. "The only professionals of any use now
are doctors -a career she would have liked to pursue if she had not been
sat at the piano aged 3- and firemen". They are the ones who
can materially save lives.
I believe that it is at this precise
moment, when the most elementary human values are challenged, that
classical music and any other type of artistic and intellectual
expression, should strive to defend human greatness. But my mother doesn't
think so. "I don't know what I can change by touring and giving
concerts. I don't think this is of much use" - she told me a couple
of hours ago. She is very upset by the events. And her mistrust towards
the media and governments has increased. "There is a lot of hypocrisy
in the world of politics" -she said over the phone. "Governments
and mass media are always willing to fight for ideals of peace and
justice, but there is always something dirty behind. This is all a great façade".
She believes that we are living through chaotic
times, of miscommunication, in which it is not only impossible to find
one's place, but one does not know how to behave or who to trust. "I
only know one thing, I know I can trust my own strength and try to be
tolerant and supportive of my fellow human beings". These are the values
she always tried to instill in her children. A society sustained by
individuals, not by abstract principles, so we must start looking towards
our inner selves and try to enact the principles in which we
believe.
But the world has not stopped yet and apart from emerging existential
issues, especially in the light of the terrorist attack and the likely
possibility that the conflict may materially expand throughout the world, we must
continue with our everyday existence. My father will return to Montreal,
where he lives the greatest part of the year, and my mother plans to fly to
Montreal and New York to play with him. And I hope they do so in New
York, for there is nothing more important to me than having the family
gathered round, even if only for a few hours.
For my parents, playing together
means much more than being on stage, for they share far more than a
daughter. They share forty years of friendship and musical partnership.
They met in the early fifties in Geneva [Original Spanish text reads
"Genoa, Italy"], where my father had just received
his diploma as conductor and my mother was enjoying the success of her
second international competition.
The first time they set eyes on each
other, he made her laugh all night -he was apparently a tireless
clown-. He
was doing his own show until he finally fell asleep, fully dressed,
underneath the piano. My mother never understood how he could always fall
asleep wherever he was, always fully dressed, and managed to look fresh
and clean the next morning -without a crease in his suit-. As their
friendship grew, he asked her if she would be the soloist at his first
professional engagement. For that venue, she learnt Ravel's Piano
Concerto in G Major -and she was learning it until the last minute-. The
night prior to the concert, my father took her on a scooter to Lausanne,
where his parents lived. The concert was to be broadcast. They had dinner
and my mother, pretending to be tired, left the table and went to her
bedroom. She later explained the reason for her abrupt departure. Knowing
that my father was particularly nervous at his professional début, she
tried to conceal the fact that she had not yet studied the second
movement. So she locked herself up in her room, spent the night
studying it and playing it on a virtual piano. The recording of this first
concert together must still exist in the archives of the Lausanne radio
- the first of many, which spanned across forty years of friendship and
collaboration.
The story of the Tchaikovsky Concerto, which my mother will
play with my father at Carnegie Hall, is also interesting. In 1970, just
after I was born, my father had a car accident. He had to go into hospital
for back surgery, whilst I, only six weeks old, underwent surgery for
removal of a hernia. My
parents had agreed to record the Tchaikovsky Concerto, which my
mother had just learnt, but given the circumstances, she didn't want to go
ahead. My father, for whom his professional life has always predominated above
all other circumstances, refused to cancel the concert. So they went ahead
and made the recording -their first together- under these conditions.
On a
video of one of their performances -at the Victoria Hall in Genf-
[nr. Geneva - 24 October, 1973 - Orchestre de la Suisse Romande], I
think- my father is wearing a corset and you can see my mother
smothering back tears. She was not happy with her performance and she
later confided in me that the events surrounding that concert marked the
beginning of the end of her marriage to my father.
And this leads me to return to what I hastily omitted
at the beginning of this article, when I referred to how
trivial the program for a concert can be. There has been a
change in the repertoire that my parents will perform at
Carnegie Hall. Possibly the reader is asking himself
whether my mother will play Ginastera's Piano Concerto on the
evening dedicated to Argentine music. The answer is simple: she
didn't have time to learn it. Over the past years, my
mother's musical and administrative activities have
increased -her International Competition
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