A bit of Beethoven here, a recital there—that doesn’t interest me,” the pianist Igor Levit said five years ago. Instead he wanted to become a thought leader, like Bob Dylan. Levit was reading Greil Marcus’s Like a Rolling Stone. “People like [Dylan] didn’t see music as a separate reality,” Levit told me. “They arrived on the scene and wanted to reach the top, to have their voices guiding people in how to think.” This was the cusp of the era of fake news, alternative facts, the politician as reality TV personality. We were talking in a small cafe in Hannover, Germany, close to the conservatory. Levit struck me then as a talented young musician who was beginning to assert his individuality through politics. He felt constrained by the profession of the pianist and the recognition it could give him. At the time, his publicist offered interviews with Levit with the note, “Igor Levit has opinions on many things, not just music.”
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