Martha Argerich feels lonely playing solo, so she mostly stopped
Martha Argerich is often called one of the greatest living pianists, yet since the 1980s she has rarely given solo recitals. She has said she feels lonely alone on stage. Instead she plays concertos and chamber music with friends such as the cellist Mischa Maisky, turning a star career into a long conversation.
She was born in Buenos Aires in 1941; her maternal grandparents, Jewish migrants who had left the Russian Empire, made their home in a farming colony in Entre Ríos. She began piano at three, reportedly after a kindergarten friend teased that she couldn't play and she answered by playing a piece by ear. At eight she performed a Beethoven concerto on national radio, and at eleven she was touring Argentina.
When she was about fourteen the family moved to Europe, where she studied in Austria with Friedrich Gulda, whom she counted among her biggest influences. In 1957, aged sixteen, she won two major contests within weeks, the Busoni and the Geneva competitions. Then came a crisis. Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli gave her only four lessons in a year and a half, and for three years she barely played, thinking about becoming a secretary or a doctor. She credited Anny Askenase, the wife of her teacher Stefan Askenase, with coaxing her back.
Her comeback was decisive. At 24 she won the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1965, and her American debut followed the next year at Lincoln Center. She became known especially for Chopin, Ravel, Liszt, Prokofiev and Schumann, a composer she feels particularly close to. A BBC Music Magazine poll of 100 pianists placed her among the finest of all time. Her home life was famously unconventional: she raised three daughters with three different fathers, often practised through the night and preferred the children at home rather than at school.
She has also spent decades championing younger players, sitting on competition juries and running her own festival in Beppu, Japan, since 1996. In 1990 she was diagnosed with melanoma, which later spread; after an experimental treatment in Santa Monica it went into remission, and she gave a Carnegie Hall recital to support the institute that treated her. She was still touring in 2026.
Source: Martha Argerich
