I hadn’t heard Martha Argerich play before I saw a picture of her for the first time. The picture was arresting. A friend owned the CD, a live recording of Rachmaninoff. Argerich is a mountain on the cover, deeply black, her face is cleaved into a ‘V’ and a single eye peers west skeptically, the other is shrouded. We see an eyebrow that by blending into shadow appears immense. Perhaps her hands inside her sleeves are under her chin. The texture of her hair and sweater appear to be identical. To this day, I don’t know much about her, Argerich is South American, or Central American, possibly European, that’s everything I know.
But from that album cover I imagine things. That she is punctual. That she is a private person who found her own way to exist in the public eye. Someone’s daughter once asked her how many countries she’d visited, and she quit counting around thirty-five. She trusts few people. Those she does, she has a bad habit of entrusting with too much. She has been betrayed and robbed, she struggles with celebrity, she has been in love multiple times, but her passions are of their era, which surprises people. She doesn’t eat at night. She prefers to drive herself. When people notice her on the street, just a woman fashioned into this shape, this hair, she is still a person with purpose. She can be cold. Sluggish. Her experiences in airports are often taxing – you try having a face that resembles no other face to millions. Going through life, somebody once told her, is about learning when to press yourself into the world and when to retreat. She never took up smoking. She likes to watch live golf. In some ways, she is exactly the same person she was at sixteen – and some of those ways still go misunderstood – but much has changed around her. Why didn’t anyone ever tell her that dying isn’t what to fear, but the years when all your friends start to die? In the middle of the afternoon, in a hotel suite, she’ll lay on a sofa and press her cheek against the cushion, eyes facing the window, and remember what it was like to be a girl in South America, or Central America, possibly Europe, revisiting the memories that made her into the person she became.
None of this is true, but maybe some is true. I’m listening to Argerich perform Schumann, I can’t say much about her style with any expertise, I just know I find her work moving in ways little else begins to approach.
What the what? An occasional newsletter by Rosecrans Baldwin of (very) short essays about things he finds beautiful. Any books mentioned are on a list at Bookshop. Rosecrans’s next book, Everything Now, is available for preorder via Amazon, Bookshop, or your local store.