Martha Argerich (Olivier Bellamy)
Olivier Bellamy, Martha Argerich: Die Löwin am Klavier (2010)
The original biography is in French, but these short notes (edited) - looking at the early years in Buenos Aires - are taken from a Google translation of the German edition.
She was born on 5 June 1941. Her family lived in Avenida Coronel Dias, Palermo, Buenos Aires.
When one asks the former students of this piano legend about him, a gleam appears in their eyes—one that reflects both respect and fear. Vincenzo Scaramuzza was a brilliant teacher, but his instruction amounted to a reign of terror. "My mother witnessed him once give a boy twenty lashes with a cane," recounts pianist Bruno Leonardo Gelber, who was subjected to Scaramuzza’s arbitrary cruelty until the age of seventeen. In those days, teachers were by no means held accountable for violent assaults on their students.
Martha Argerich, who studied under him between the ages of five-and-a-half and eleven [1952], recalls one of his famous sayings: "Students are like swords. Some break the moment you try to bend them; others adapt until they have found their true form." Scaramuzza reportedly preferred the former type. Martha, who took pride in belonging to the latter category, always interpreted this definition as a compliment.
This fearsome piano master was born in 1885 in Crotone, located at the heel of the Italian boot. The youngest of four brothers, Vincenzo Scaramuzza initially took piano lessons from his father before moving to Naples to attend the San Pietro a Majella Conservatory. The city of castrati, *bel canto*, Porpora, and Pergolesi also holds a distinguished place in the art of piano playing. Paolo Denza (teacher of Aldo Ciccolini) was a student of Busoni...Sigismund Thalberg* (Liszt’s great rival in Paris) also settled in Naples, where he founded a school and developed a highly regarded *bel canto* style of piano playing.
Scaramuzza began his career as a virtuoso at the age of twenty-one, giving concerts in Palermo, Rome, Florence, Parma, and Genoa. Because he struggled greatly to control his stage fright, he also applied for a position as a piano professor. To his immense disappointment, however, he ranked only second behind Giovanni Sgambati (who transcribed the "Lament" from Gluck’s *Orfeo* for piano—a popular encore for many pianists). An assistantship was out of the question for him, so in 1907 he boarded a ship bound for Buenos Aires. Without giving up performance entirely, he began teaching and very quickly discovered a passion for it. After several years of studying the relationship between virtuosity and a detailed knowledge of human anatomy, he opened the "Scaramuzza Music Academy" in Buenos Aires in 1912. Over the course of half a century, he would train four generations of pianists there, including forty truly outstanding ones. Enrique Barenboim—who counts among the latter—passed this art on to his son, Daniel Barenboim.
Footnote: * Thalberg’s most important student was Beniamino Cesi, who—at the request of Anton Rubinstein, the founder of the great Russian piano school—initially taught at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Stricken by paralysis, he returned to Naples, where his most important pupils included the following pianists: Alessandro Longo (known for his numbering of the more than five hundred Scarlatti sonatas), Giuseppe Martucci (a composer and Wagner conductor revered by Toscanini, who conducted the first Italian performance of *Tristan und Isolde*), and Florestano Rossomondi.
As a matter of principle, Vincenzo Scaramuzza did not accept child prodigies into his class. His sister Antonietta trained younger students using his method until they reached the age of twelve; only then would Scaramuzza take them on. He made an exception for Martha Argerich and Bruno Leonardo Gelber, allowing them to begin lessons at the age of five. Their piano lessons followed one another directly. When they crossed paths at the door, the student who had just finished would signal to the other—using facial expressions—whether the Maestro was in a good mood or a bad one that day.
Martha went to see Scaramuzza two or three times a week at his studio on Calle Lavalle in downtown Buenos Aires. The entrance hallway was always filled with waiting students, both day and evening. As soon as the Maestro appeared, the chatter would cease abruptly, and everyone would stand up. Juanita accompanied her daughter every time. Using her finest handwriting, she would jot down every word the Maestro spoke in a small notebook. Scaramuzza held her in high regard. One day he said: "Señora Argerich, you could become my assistant!" He was delighted that her maiden name was the same as that of the Hungarian pianist Stephen Heller—a friend of Liszt and Chopin and the composer of significant piano études.
Scaramuzza's celebrated conservatory was on Calle Lavalle 1982 at the intersection of Calle Ayacucho and Avenida Callao.
In the Argentine newspaper La Nacion 27 December 2024, Cecilia Scalisi records that Martha said: “I feel like his musical daughter,” she recounted. “Besides, Scaramuzza was a Gemini like me,” she recalled with such vivid, intense, and grateful emphasis that, beyond the limits of the article, the stories gave rise to a book (Cecilia Scalisi, En la Edad de las Promesas. La infancia de los prodigios, La infancia de tres prodigios en los años de oro de la Buenos Aires musical - In the Age of Promises: The Childhood of Prodigies: SUDAMERICANA, 2014)
“Once we went to visit him after he played a Mozart concerto on Radio El Mundo [No. 20?]. He came down the stairs of his house, looked at us seriously, and in a dry, austere voice, breathing heavily through his asthma inhaler, said to me: ‘Argerich, I had a terrible day today! Then I turned on the radio and heard you. That made me ‘almost’ happy. I didn’t live long in Buenos Aires, but it was during an extraordinary time. There were interesting people who created a special atmosphere in Argentina. I don’t know what happened afterward… Something changed. The great figures of the world came: Rubinstein, Backhaus, Gieseking, Arrau. I saw them all play! I don’t know what it’s like now. Before, there was more emotion and enchantment. And with Maestro Scaramuzza, we were aware that we were living in that era.”
An examination of mother Juanita's records allows us to gauge the repertoire Martha had mastered within a single year. It is not merely the difficulty of the works that is truly phenomenal for such a young child, but also the sheer scope of the repertoire—far exceeding the average standard at a conservatory. Here are a few examples from 1950 (when Martha was nine years old): Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 18 in E-flat major; a Bach prelude; the pieces "Jeux d'eau à la villa d'Este" and "Au bord d'une source" from Liszt’s *Années de pèlerinage*; Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 7 in D major; a Bach gigue; Schumann’s *Kinderszenen*; a Schubert impromptu; Chopin’s Mazurka Op. 17 No. 4; one of Bach’s English Suites; and Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor (with several hours devoted solely to the cadenzas penned by Beethoven). The following year saw the addition of Beethoven’s *Waldstein* Sonata, one of Bach’s French Suites, several Chopin études...
Scaramuzza never prescribed purely technical exercises for his students. He was convinced that classical works provided a sufficient array of scales, chord progressions, and other technical challenges. (...) For Scaramuzza, even the simplest scale had to be expressive—something he believed was possible only within the context of a work by Beethoven, not in a collection of études by Czerny or Hanon*.
Scaramuzza’s teaching method was grounded in an absolute knowledge of the piano’s universe and an equally profound understanding of the human body. To make himself understood by his students, he even produced anatomical drawings...
In her writings on piano technique, his student María Rosa Oubiña de Castro (known as Cucucha) elaborates on the aspects that determine the quality of a technique: the correct application of weight, the development of high sensitivity in the fingertips, an awareness of the touch process, and evenly distributed finger strength...
"Imagine you are an octopus with tentacles that have suction cups at their tips," he would lecture. The old maestro insisted on finger-by-finger articulation, on elasticity, and on the avoidance of unnecessary gestures. He had given the matter much thought and devised a method to tackle any technical difficulty, regardless of tempo. His conviction that the intensity of the tone depended on the speed of the key strike gave his playing an impressive dynamic range. Thanks to his perfect understanding of arm and shoulder anatomy, he could diagnose the source of a specific technical problem with unerring, almost sleepwalking certainty. Martha Argerich’s hands, as they fly across the keyboard, impressively demonstrate the simultaneous tension and relaxation of the fingers, as well as the precision and speed of movement—the true touchstones of piano technique. When she wasn't around, incidentally, the distinguished professor was fond of saying that her hands were "made for playing the piano."
(...)
Whatever his mood, Scaramuzza cultivated the art of contradiction to unsettle his students, thereby forcing them to continually broaden their horizons. One day, he might insist a passage be played with raised wrists; the next, he would demand the exact opposite. He could fly into a rage if one simply executed his instructions to the letter without thinking. "I believe he wanted the students to discover and test the various possibilities for themselves, so that they would be capable of making the right decision in the moment of performance rather than beforehand," Martha surmises today. "He had his students search, but he was searching too. I think that is ultimately what defines a good teacher."
One day, Scaramuzza decided he no longer wanted Martha to attend his lessons. The reason: she had forgotten to greet him and had refused to apologize. Her father sought out the maestro to discover the deeper reason for his discontent. The old Italian cried out in a plaintive voice: "She takes everything from me, squeezes me dry like a ripe lemon... and gives me nothing in return!"
Juan Manuel Argerich quickly tried to suppress his anger: "That may be, but she is still just a child, after all!" The other man, his eyes bloodshot, let out a deep sigh: "No! She may be nine years old, but she has the soul of a forty-year-old." After being forced to offer a formal apology, Martha was required from that day on to shake her teacher's hand before every lesson. Naturally, she sought every possible way to escape this irksome duty. During an end-of-year celebration held at Scaramuzza’s home, the clever girl spent the entire evening trailing him at a distance, simply to avoid having to come face-to-face with him.
Because her teacher was not particularly good with children, Martha secretly took extra lessons with Carmen Scalcione, a student and muse of Scaramuzza.
Everything about Scaramuzza was theatrical and volatile. Yet, could he have been any other way in that post-war Argentina? With its all-consuming obsession with the piano, the country was reminiscent of the Italy of the era of the castrati, Tsarist-era Russian ballet, or the China of *Raise the Red Lantern*—complete with the sacrifices such obsessions inevitably demanded. Among the countless anecdotes circulating about the "pianomania" of Buenos Aires’ Golden Age, the strange fate of Fausto Zadra stands out. The pianist had calculated the date of his death based on the alignment of the stars. On that very day, during a concert—right in the middle of a trill in Chopin’s Nocturne Op. 27, No. 2—he breathed his last.
Scaramuzza, an Italian by birth, focused primarily on the singing quality of piano playing. Yet if the Argentine pianist Alberto Neuman (a student of Benedetti Michelangeli) is to be believed, "too little attention was paid to the culture of legato in his school." Obsessed with clarity and fluidity, Scaramuzza demanded, above all, maximum expressiveness for every single note. If the tone was too flat, he would say: "It’s like a pair of trousers walking down the street with no one inside them."
Martha Argerich was always aware that her gruff teacher was a truly extraordinary personality and that she was very fortunate to pursue her piano studies under his tutelage, even though she never shared his passion for *bel canto*. Her heart beat more for rhythm, for polyphony. "I felt embarrassed when I had the feeling..."
Page 40
When Scaramuzza heard Martha play Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20 in D minor for the second time—this time in a live broadcast by the radio station El Mundo, conducted by Alberto Castellanos (she was nine years old by then!)—Vincenzo Scaramuzza paid her the finest compliment of her life: "Yesterday I was utterly exhausted because I’d had to teach nothing but blockheads all day long. Then I heard your D minor concerto on the radio—and I was almost happy." Looking back, Martha feels that the essence of Scaramuzza is captured in that single word: "almost."
Her mother used to take her to 1257 Calle Talcahuano, the home of Ernesto Rosenthal—a wealthy Austrian-born Jew whose drawing room served as a gathering place every Friday afternoon for the crème de la crème of the international music scene passing through Buenos Aires: Arrau, Solomon, Rubinstein... Whenever it was her turn to play, Martha would hide under the table. Daniel Barenboim, even younger than she was, had the honour of dragging her out from beneath it. Unlike her, the young prodigy—who would go on to become one of the most significant musicians of his time—felt no shyness whatsoever about performing in public. Both his parents were piano teachers, so he saw their students coming and going from the house all day long. It was not until relatively late that he discovered, to his great astonishment, that there were actually people who did not play the instrument.
At the age of seven, Daniel Barenboim met the conductor Sergiu Celibidache—who would have a profound influence on him—and Igor Markevitch, who even then predicted a future for him as a conductor. Daniel’s life followed a very different path from Martha’s. He attended a Jewish school, belonged to a Jewish sports club, and practiced his instrument for no more than an hour and a half a day. For him, music was something completely natural; he enjoyed playing piano duets with his father or performing sonatas with family friends. Above all, he loved playing for an audience. Martha, for her part—though also an enthusiastic musician—constantly felt the pressure exerted by her mother, who would repeatedly tell her: "Martha, go practise!" Performing in public made her terribly nervous. Two days before one concert, she even lined her shoes with wet paper in hopes of catching a cold and thereby escaping that cruel ordeal...
At the age of eleven, Martha made her debut at the Teatro Colón performing Schumann’s Piano Concerto—a work that would become something of a musical autobiography for her. The conductor, undoubtedly envious of the attention she was garnering from the audience, gave her a hostile reception. "There is a passage in this piece where every pianist invariably messes up. Just make sure you don't do that to me!" he snapped at her. And this to a child, right before the performance... But thanks to Scaramuzza, Martha was accustomed to a rough manner.
As for Martha's musical preferences at the time, her taste was highly eclectic and extended well beyond piano pieces. Weber’s *Invitation to the Dance*—in the orchestration by Berlioz—was among the first works to captivate her. Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 1 was another. Her fascination with Paganini stayed with her throughout her life: his daring, his boundless virtuosity that drove him to attempt the impossible, and the immense influence he exerted on composers such as Schumann, Liszt, Berlioz, Brahms, and Rachmaninoff. Like those artists, Martha always sensed that Paganini’s art was not merely a display of musical pyrotechnics, but above all a path to transcendence—requiring the performer to be ready to give everything and to risk a freefall without a safety net. One of her favorite quotes came from Nijinsky. When complimented on the seemingly endless leaps for which he was celebrated, the dancer replied: "It’s quite simple; you just have to stay in the air a little longer."
At the age of ten, her preferred pieces were Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in D major and Ravel’s *Daphnis et Chloé*—two masterpieces by composers who remain among her favourites to this day. Ballet was one of her great passions, even more so than opera. At the Teatro Colón, two choreographies made a lasting impression on her: *The Sorcerer’s Apprentice* (based on Paul Dukas) and *Capriccio espagnol* (set to the music of Rimsky-Korsakov). Juanita had indeed tried enrolling her in ballet classes when she was six or seven, but Martha took an immediate dislike to the forced discipline and the atmosphere that pervaded the school. Nevertheless, she still loves classical dance to this day. She knew the *Romeo and Juliet* choreography set to Prokofiev’s music—performed by her great idols Rudolf Nureyev and Margot Fonteyn—almost by heart.
Juanita regularly took Martha to the Teatro Colón—that legendary concert hall where Caruso, Toscanini, and Callas had performed, and which boasts some of the finest acoustics of any concert hall in the world. In the post-war era, the atmosphere surrounding these concerts was charged with a unique tension; Buenos Aires, home to one of the world’s largest Jewish communities, was simultaneously a haven for numerous high-ranking Nazis. Jokes were frequently made about these two groups—united in their love of music in an almost macabre fashion—who would encounter one another night after night at the Teatro Colón.
Performances began late, at 9:30 p.m., and—with two intermissions—usually lasted until midnight. For young Martha, this was too long, and she would often fall asleep in her seat. One evening in 1947—when she was just six years old—she experienced a pivotal moment in her life. The Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau was performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 in G Major. From the very first notes, the little girl felt as though she were being suffused by a new, unfamiliar light. The sublime slow movement—in which piano and orchestra, having previously clashed, reconcile in an infinitely long trill—electrified her to the very tips of her hair. She vowed never to perform this concerto in public, as it had triggered a musical shock of almost traumatic proportions within her.
List of Scaramuzza students
Amicarelli, Francisco
Argerich, Martha
Barenboim, Enrique
Filoso, Cristina
Gelber, Bruno
Kersenbaum, Sylvia
Oubiña de Castro, Maria Rosa
Salgan, Horacio
Scalccione, Carmen
Somma, Nilda
Stampalia, Ana
Stirpari, Monica
Vinas, Maria Cristina
Westerkamp, Elizabeth
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