In June, I met pianist and musicologist Robert Levin at his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Complete editions of works by Mozart, Schubert, Beethoven, and many other composers filled his living room. As a musician, Levin has an almost uncanny ability to assimilate an oeuvre into the component elements of its style. It’s a remarkable process of distillation and abstraction that Levin demonstrates easily at his piano, toggling between similar passages from disparate pieces—especially by Mozart—both finished and fragmentary.
In 1991, Levin finished his version of the composer’s Requiem, which many critics consider the most convincing (even counting the 1791 version made by Mozart’s assistant Franz Yaver Süßmayr). In 2005, Levin completed the Mass in C Minor. We talked about these long settled—yet still omnipresent—projects; artificial intelligence in musicology; and the interpretation of contemporary music, while sitting masked in Levin’s living room.
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