Igor Levit, the pianist who has made refusing silence part of his repertoire

Igor Levit

Photo: FA2010 / Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	March 10, 1987 Nizhny Novgorod
Occupation	Pianist
Awards	Gilmore Artist Award · Lower Saxony State Prize · Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany

The first album on Igor Levit’s own record label begins with a name crossed out. Beethoven wrote Napoleon Bonaparte’s name on his Third Symphony and scratched it off the title page when Napoleon crowned himself emperor; the work became the Eroica. Levit plays it alone, in Franz Liszt’s piano transcription, and sets it beside Arnold Schoenberg’s Ode to Napoleon, written in American exile with another dictator in mind. He called the label NO SILENCE, and the name sums up the argument that has followed him for a decade. To one part of his public he is the pianist the New Yorker called “like no other”, winner of Gramophone’s biggest prizes for Bach and Beethoven. To another he is a public voice against antisemitism and the far right who happens to own a Steinway. Levit has never accepted that these are two different people.

He was born on 10 March 1987 in Gorky, the closed Soviet city now called Nizhny Novgorod again, into a Jewish family. His mother, Elena Levit, a piano teacher and répétiteur whose training went back to the school of Heinrich Neuhaus, sat him at the keyboard at three. In 1995, when he was eight, the family emigrated to Hanover. After a year with Hans Leygraf at the Mozarteum in Salzburg he spent a decade at the Hanover University of Music, Drama and Media under Karl-Heinz Kämmerling and finished with the highest exam score in the school’s history. At the Arthur Rubinstein competition in Tel Aviv in 2005 he was the youngest player in the field and left with the silver medal and three further prizes.

His debut for Sony Classical, in 2013, was Beethoven’s last five sonatas, music pianists have traditionally left for later in a career. Bach’s Partitas came next. The record that defined him was the three-disc set of 2015 that placed Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations beside Frederic Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!, thirty-six variations on a song of the Chilean protest movement. Seating a 1975 piece built on a marching song next to the two great keyboard variation cycles was a statement in itself, and Gramophone named the set its Recording of the Year in 2016.

Grief shaped the next album. His closest friend, the German artist Hannes Malte Mahler, was killed in a cycling accident in 2016, and Life, two years later, is Levit’s answer, running from Busoni and Bach to Wagner by way of Liszt and a piece by the jazz pianist Bill Evans. In 2019 he became a professor at his old Hanover school, and Sony released his complete Beethoven sonatas, which went straight to number one on the classical charts; Gramophone named him Artist of the Year in 2020.

That March the concert halls closed. On the 12th he sat down at the piano in his Berlin flat and streamed Beethoven’s “Waldstein” Sonata on Twitter, and he kept going for more than fifty of these Hauskonzerte, from Schubert’s B-flat sonata to Billy Joel’s “And So It Goes”. At the end of May he played Erik Satie’s Vexations, a single page repeated 840 times, for more than fifteen hours straight. His audience now reached well past people who buy piano records; he later recorded Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” for The Metallica Blacklist and appeared on television with the Berlin rapper Danger Dan.

That reach also gave his critics a target. In October 2020 Helmut Mauró, music critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, published “Igor Levit ist müde”, which dismissed him as a “Twitter virtuoso” and used the phrase “victim-claim ideology”. Readers and fellow critics called it antisemitic, and after first defending it, the paper’s editors-in-chief apologised. The story is usually told as a smear withdrawn. The harder fact is that Levit’s activism does not sit easily even with people who share his fears. After the Hamas massacre in Israel on 7 October 2023 he organised an evening called “Against Silence, Against Antisemitism” at the Berliner Ensemble; he has said since that his words left him for a time and that he lost “almost all” of his friends and acquaintances, though not his closest circle. In the summer of 2026 the broadcaster ZDF pulled him and Danger Dan from the hundredth edition of the satire show Die Anstalt shortly before taping, saying the lyrics of their song “Keine Angst” could be read as a call to violence. The two called it censorship, and the show’s own ensemble distanced itself from the decision. Yet a commentary in the Jüdische Allgemeine, the paper of Germany’s Central Council of Jews, argued that ZDF had been right.

The recordings kept widening the map. On DSCH paired Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes and Fugues with Ronald Stevenson’s enormous Passacaglia on DSCH; Tristan was built around Hans Werner Henze, Wagner and Mahler; Fantasia ran from Bach to Alban Berg. His Brahms concertos with Christian Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic won an Opus Klassik in 2025. He has been co-artistic director of the Heidelberger Frühling festival since the 2022-23 season, and in the spring of 2025 he played Vexations for thirteen hours with the performance artist Marina Abramović at London’s Southbank Centre.

NO SILENCE launched in June 2026, in partnership with Sony Classical. Levit pays for it himself and calls it his company; he wants it open to every genre and to grow into a foundation with a festival and an academy. Its first three albums came out on 23 October 2026: Resistance, recorded with the Kammerakademie Potsdam under Antonello Manacorda and the actress Dörte Lyssewski as narrator; a Vexations of close to sixteen hours by his own estimate, pressed in 840 copies, the number of times Satie’s page repeats; and the debut of the young Viennese pianist Lukas Sternath. Levit hears the heroism of the Eroica in Beethoven rather than in Napoleon: “Here is a man who is losing his hearing, who finds himself on the brink of suicide, and yet carries on.”

He lives in Berlin. In December 2026 he plays the Nobel Prize Concert in Stockholm with Antonio Pappano and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. The larger commitment is Beethoven again: complete cycles of the 32 sonatas, eight recitals each, from October 2026 to June 2028 in New York, London, Vienna, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg and North Rhine-Westphalia, with Carnegie Hall from April 2027 and Hamburg closing on 14 June 2028 with Opp. 109, 110 and 111. His first complete set came out on a label he did not own. He plays the sonatas now with one of his own behind him, and the next test for NO SILENCE is whether it signs artists willing to be as loud as he is.

Selected Recordings

Fünf Klavierkonzerte (2007)
The Late Piano Sonatas (2013)
Partitas, BWV 825-830 (2014)
Diabelli Variations (2015)
Goldberg Variations (2016)
Life (2018)
Encounter (2020)
On DSCH (2021)
Tristan (2022)
Fantasia (2023)
Brahms (2024)
Resistance (2026)

Tags: singers, Danger Dan, Igor Levit, Ludwig van Beethoven, Goldberg Variations, Marina Abramović

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