Maurizio Pollini, a world-renowned, Grammy-winning Italian pianist and frequent performer at the prestigious La Scala theatre in Milan, has died at age 82. The news was first announced by the opera house last Saturday, March 23, but a cause of death was not shared.
However, Pollini had been suffering from heart problems, with symptoms most pronounced in 2022 as the complications forced him to cancel a concert slated for that year at the Salzburg Festival in Germany.
Maurizio Pollini's Expansive Six-Decade-Long Career as a Pianist
Pollini was born in Milan in 1942 to a man named Gino, who was also renowned in his own right as one of Italy's most celebrated modernist architects at the time. The pianist himself started fiddling with the keys as a young boy and eventually won prestigious competitions all around Europe.
Since he grew up in a family whose principal outlook was modernism, Pollini would go on to champion the experimental works of 20th-century composers like Pierre Boulez and Stockhausen.
By the 1960s and '70s, the pianist broke out into international renown as one of the leading interpreters of music by legendary masters Beethoven and Chopin. In terms of his approach to music, Pollini was always experimenting and trying out new innovative ways to play the classics of the canon.
During the last four decades of his endeavor to record works made by these two composers, he eventually produced what is regarded as some of the most definitive performances of the masters' pieces.
In the latter part of his life, Pollini once again found himself knee-deep in the piano sonatas of Beethoven, which culminated in his momentous 2019 performance of the German's final sonata in Munich.
As can be heard below, Pollini fully captures the full breadth of artistry that Beethoven possessed and projected through his "Piano Sonata in C minor, op. 111" arietta, which is symbolically the German composer's last "breath" as a musician.
In 2007, Pollini was given the Best Instrumental Soloist Grammy Award for his performances of several of Chopin's Nocturnes, and by 2012, the pianist was inducted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame.
Pollini was an incredible musician who understood the classical canon's masterpieces beyond their sonic quality and his artistry that rivaled the composers themselves will forever be missed.
