In 1922, during a performance of Verdi’s Falstaff in Milan, a group of Blackshirts in the audience demanded that the orchestra play the Fascist anthem, “Giovinezza.” The conductor, Arturo Toscanini, refused. “The disrupters became more vociferous,” writes his biographer Harvey Sachs, until Toscanini broke “his baton and exited from the orchestra pit, shouting and cursing.” Nine years later a similar scene occurred in Bologna; this time Toscanini was badly beaten outside the theater. “If I were capable of killing a man,” he once told a friend, “I would kill Mussolini.”

It is hard to imagine any classical musician today occupying the cultural position that Toscanini filled in the 1920s. He and his peers, like the Catalan cellist Pablo Casals and the Polish pianist Ignacy Jan Paderewski, were civic figures, seen as embodiments of a people or a cause—Europe, socialism, democracy, the nation. Yet even during Toscanini’s lifetime that civic responsibility was giving way to something else; by his death, in the words of the critic Joseph Horowitz, he had become “music’s golden calf.” As one of classical music’s first modern celebrities and last Romantic geniuses, he has been remembered in radically different ways. To contemporaries like Theodor Adorno, he was an avatar of the culture industry; to his recent admirers, he is a symbol of what we have lost.

This second Toscanini is central to how the classical music world views its past, and increasingly its present as well. The standard, morality-tale reading links its capitulation to fascism with its postwar decline, while Toscanini represents the road not taken: his steadfastness contrasts with the opportunism of an artist like Richard Strauss, his stature with classical music’s current marginality. But over the past decade, the “Maestro of the Resistance”—to cite the title of a recent article by Sachs—has also come to represent something more. Surveying a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in 2017 during the G-20 meeting in Hamburg, attended by Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, The New Yorker’s Alex Ross mused that Toscanini “might have had something to say.” He now stands for a brand of liberal heroism that many would like to revive. The classical music industry, looking for someone to lead the way, has pinned its hopes on the Russian-born pianist Igor Levit.

Levit, still in his thirties, is one of the most visible figures in the classical music world today. A prolific recitalist and soloist, he has a virtuoso technique and an artistic restlessness that many virtuosos lack. He claims to prefer music that is “bigger than the piano,” ranging from the German warhorses—he is a widely admired Beethoven interpreter—to arrangements of Wagner operas and Bach organ works, to the postmodern compositions of Ronald Stevenson and Frederic Rzewski. He brings to this repertoire a sense of showmanship tempered by keen musical intelligence. In Rzewski’s The People United Will Never Be Defeated!—an hour-long set of variations on a Chilean protest song by a veteran of the 1960s avant-garde—Levit moves effortlessly through an encyclopedic range of styles: in the opening theme and the Webernesque first variation, he alternates between swaggering bravado and brittle delicacy; in the piece’s pyrotechnic climax, he summons an alarming force and intensity. He has an assured sense of dramatic pacing, uniting Rzewski’s variations—which can sound like a series of brilliant fragments—into an inexorable arc.

The People United also hints at the political outspokenness that has made Levit a prominent public figure. He describes himself, variously, as a Jew, a “committed” European, and a “citizen of the world.” In his adopted Germany, he is a vocal critic of the right-wing nationalist party Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) and of the “neo-fascists and historical relativists” who downplay the country’s antisemitic past. He has also trained his sights on nativism abroad, denouncing Brexit and Donald Trump from the stage. This stance has earned him a reputation as the spokesman of an embattled liberalism—“The Pianist of the Resistance,” in the words of TheNew York Times. As Levit’s stature has grown, his performances have become ceremonial occasions of a sort once common in classical music but now relatively rare. In 2018 he played the Ode to Joy—anthem of the European Union and hallowed emblem of Enlightenment ideals—at the annual conference of the German Green Party. During the pandemic, one of his online house concerts was broadcast from the presidential palace.

All of this has raised extravagant hopes in some corners of the classical music world. Levit’s appeal, writes Ross, reaches beyond the narrow world of classical music devotees to a “broader population that shares his leftist, internationalist world view.” Some of his peers may enjoy greater commercial celebrity, but none matches his “stature as a cultural or even a political figure.” In interviews and profiles, Levit is presented as a harbinger of the art form’s future, or perhaps an emissary from its past—a modern-day Toscanini, here to save it from its self-imposed irrelevance. The journalist Florian Zinnecker calls him the “pianist of the century.”

Zinnecker is the coauthor of House Concert, a chronicle of Levit’s activities during the pandemic. It is characteristic of the book that he cites this label on page three, disavows it, then repeats it like a leitmotif until the end. House Concert is a curious hybrid: Levit is billed as its author and quoted extensively throughout, but it was primarily written by Zinnecker under the watchful eye of Levit’s PR team. Zinnecker’s tone is hagiographic, while Levit largely speaks in clichés: “For years that gang has been normalized…. The genie is out of the bottle, the dam has broken.” In attitude and tone, the book resembles the campaign trail profile of a young candidate preparing for the leap to higher office. It is a revealing portrait, if not of Levit, then of the classical music industry, whose hopes and anxieties it reflects.

The story opens with two crises, one artistic and the other political. After a sketch of Levit’s education and early career, Zinnecker finds him in Berlin in 2019, “not fully stretched by being the pianist of the century” yet “completely exhausted by it.” Exhaustion is a recurrent theme: the book’s second sentence is “Igor Levit is tired.” This fatigue is not just a product of his workload. The AfD is gaining ground in regional elections; someone has just tried to shoot up a synagogue in Halle. And the antisemitism Levit first encountered in his twenties, when a dinner companion told him Jews weren’t “expected to live here anymore,” has given way to something less genteel. A reporter tells him that “it must be special for me to play in Israel, after all it’s my home.” Before a performance in Hamburg he gets an anonymous email calling him a Judensau (Jewish pig); the sender threatens to kill him in front of the audience. He proceeds with the concert under police protection.

In Zinnecker’s telling, the political crisis offers a solution to the artistic one: Levit finds his true calling (as “the politically committed pianist of the century”), and with it a way out of his malaise. In the final chapter he is cycling through Berlin at night, “free of fear” and “full of coincidence [sic] that he’s going to get there unscathed.” This tale of self-discovery is sketched in half-heartedly and fits rather awkwardly with the facts—Levit’s reputation as a political artist long predates 2019—but then House Concert is not meant as a factual biography. It is meant as a parable. “Why,” Zinnecker asks, does Beethoven’s Waldstein Sonata “so often sound merely exhausted, overplayed, competent?” He answers this question with another: “Does Igor sound as interesting as he does because he doesn’t just play a piece of music, but at the same time—with complete commitment, and a complete sense of risk—brings himself on stage?” The book’s description of Levit is really a prescription for his field: classical music is tired; what it needs is a dose of commitment.

Here House Concert echoes the industry’s self-diagnosis, one often repeated by the press. “Most of [Levit’s] colleagues avoid day-to-day politics…out of fear for their careers,” claims the Süddeutsche Zeitung. Political engagement is “still quite rare in classical music,” according to the Times, but Levit “has little in common with the stereotypical nose-to-grindstone soloist, living alone in hotel and practice rooms…. ‘The idea that art is an excuse for not engaging,’ he said, ‘is utterly ridiculous.’” In these profiles, as in House Concert,Levit serves as the industry’s idealized self-image: young, charismatic, engagé,and influential, he is classical music as his admirers want it to be.

What relationship does this image bear to the real Igor Levit? It’s not clear, to me at least, that he is the epochal talent he’s made out to be. The first movement of his Waldstein—at ten minutes, one of the fastest on record—is forceful and well crafted, capturing both the work’s febrile energy and its moments of violence and grotesquery. It is also a bit monolithic. András Schiff’s live recording on ECM from a decade earlier has more light and shade, allowing moments of grief and wistfulness to emerge from the sonata’s relentless onward flow. Levit’s recording is playful, restless, sometimes immensely exciting; but rarely do I find it, like Schiff’s, touching. In The People United—particularly variations 19–24, the bravura climax of the cycle—I prefer Marc-André Hamelin, whose force and precision make Levit’s rendition seem tame. Neither of these choices is clear-cut; in both cases Levit’s recording has virtues the other lacks. But in both, he seems more like a strong competitor in a crowded field than someone poised to transform it from the ground up.

Politically, too, Levit is less of a revolutionary than his press suggests. Despite his firebrand self-image (“I’m extra-extra-extra left”), his closest political associates in Germany are establishment journalists and moderate Green MPs, hardly members of the radical fringe. Few of his pronouncements would be out of place at a Democratic Party convention: “We’re citizens of our countries, we belong to Europe, we have friendly connections with the United States,” he tells an audience in Brussels. “Let us fight for humanity, for trust, for mutual respect and for belief in other people.” Levit is also a dogmatic Zionist. This has become increasingly evident since the October 7 attacks, whose goal he sees as “the total annihilation of the Jewish people worldwide.” But it is clear enough from House Concert,which credits the journalists Georg Diez and Maxim Biller—the latter the author of an article in Tablet titled “A German-Jewish Zionist Explains Why Anti-Semitism Is All the Same”—for teaching Levit “what anti-Semitism really is.”

It is unsurprising, then, that Levit is viewed with skepticism by many musicians, particularly those to his left. (When I told one pianist I was writing a review of House Concert,he rolled his eyes.) Their skepticism is directed not so much at Levit the individual as Levit the media event—at what the critic Hartmut Welscher calls his “self-stylization as the only political classical musician” and his credulous reception by the press. That reception has a self-serving side. In reality, classical musicians as a group are no more apolitical than anyone else: András Schiff recently canceled all his concerts in the United States; the Argentine Israeli conductor Daniel Barenboim founded an orchestra made up of young Arab and Israeli musicians with Edward Said and caused a scandal by performing Wagner in Israel; Paderewski signed the Treaty of Versailles. By perpetuating the myth that they are—depicting most musicians as unworldly snobs and one celebrity pianist as the noble exception—the classical music industry lends a progressive sheen to its oligarchic star system and distances itself from its reputation as a servant of wealth and power.

In this respect, Levit’s career has been a public relations triumph, and some critics understandably assume that it’s nothing more. To Welscher, Levit embodies the “attention economy,” a cultural space in which the “boundaries between art and commerce, journalism and public relations” have dissolved. His politics are a mixture of moral grandstanding and straw-man arguments (who really thinks that “art is an excuse for not engaging?”), which have little effect on the world. But, then, they’re not meant to: their real purpose is to differentiate him in a crowded market—to make him “singular.” While most musicians sink into obscurity, Levit’s posturing keeps him safely in the public eye.

To his admirers, he represents the progressive meritocracy classical music is supposed to be; to his detractors, the Hobbesian struggle for recognition that it is. This picture isn’t exactly wrong. There are revealing glimpses in House Concert ofthe way that struggle has shaped Levit’s character: his first impulse, on receiving his death threat, is to confront the sender with a camera crew. But there is more to his behavior, and to the industry’s investment in him, than attention-seeking and self-interest. When Zinnecker remarks that some people find Levit “stage-managed,” his press agent responds with indignation, as if trying to calm her own nagging doubts: “But that’s not how it is…. Igor isn’t a manufactured star; people sense that. He’s authentic.” What worries her—what worries many of Levit’s admirers, I think—is not the question of his personal authenticity, the sincerity or insincerity of his beliefs. It is the authenticity of his social role: the Toscaninian cultural hero who defies dictators armed with only the moral authority of his art. That role has been vacant for over half a century, and no one since Leonard Bernstein has even tried to fill it. The question that Levit’s career raises is whether he, or any classical musician, still can.

What that role has meant, and what it means for us, are bound up with the broader iconography of classical music in the fascist era. This has been faithfully reproduced by Fred Brouwers in Beethoven in the Bunker,a collection of biographical sketches of the period’s leading musicians. Most of the famous images of antifascist heroism are here: Toscanini standing up to Mussolini; Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, premiered during the German siege of the city; the use of Beethoven’s Fifth in Allied propaganda and during the London Blitz. Set against these images is a rogues’ gallery of moral failures. In one memorable scene, the young Herbert von Karajan conducts the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” with its “exuberant lyrics about ‘Jewish blood spattering our knives.’” In another, the aging Strauss—who had accepted the presidency of the Reich Music Chamberin 1933—drives to the Theresienstadt ghetto to plead in vain for his relatives’ release.

It is to this iconography that Levit appeals, in both positive and negative ways. The theatrical self-assurance of his onstage gestures—braving death threats, denouncing right-wing leaders, serenading Green Party delegates with the Ode to Joy—looks back to a time when classical musicians and their audiences could still claim to represent the body politic. The performance of the Ode to Joy in particular recalls its long history as a utopian rite: a symbol of collectivism in Soviet villages, of German supremacy in wartime Berlin, and of liberal triumphalism in the same city decades later, when Bernstein led a performance to commemorate the fall of the Wall.

Not only does Levit invoke onstage a cultural authority that classical music no longer has; his offstage rhetoric is also part of an old argument about how that authority was lost. Hitler’s conquest of German music was abetted by the passivity of its leading figures. The conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler detested the Nazis and protected Jewish colleagues but stayed at the helm of the Berlin Philharmonic, lending the regime his prestige. Other artists, like Strauss, remained serenely focused on their art until Nazi policies touched them personally. They all comforted themselves with the Romantic credo articulated long before by E.T.A. Hoffmann: music disclosed an “unknown realm,” autonomous and transcendent; it soared far above the “external, empirical world,” which was collapsing around them. Recent critics, most influentially the musicologist Richard Taruskin, have implicated that creed in classical music’s wartime failures and blamed it for its postwar decline. Who thinks that art is an excuse for not engaging? Strauss did.

It is tempting, therefore, to view Levit’s career as a nostalgic fantasy, a vain attempt to recapture classical music’s heroic past. If this is a fantasy, though, it is widely shared. Contemporary political discourse is full of analogies to the 1930s and 1940s, not just as a shorthand for disaster—Weimar decadence, Reichstag fires, Munich moments—but for courage and renewal as well: the Resistance, the New Deal, the Popular Front. Most of those analogies, however pessimistic, carry an undertone of excitement: a sense that History, once declared dead, is alive and moving again; a hope that liberalism might rise to meet the crisis, becoming once more a fighting creed. House Concert’s account of classical music—exhausted and moribund, compromised by a fetish for neutrality, finding new life in the struggle with fascism—echoes a common account of the liberal order itself.

This story also has its atavistic side. It is presented as an admonition: remember the lessons of the past. But at a deeper level, it reflects a desire to unlearn those very lessons: to reach back to an earlier moment and recover an earlier, heroic form of the faith. In the calls for a renewed liberal nationalism and the vicarious nationalism surrounding Ukraine, in the fascination with charismatic leaders like Volodymyr Zelenskyy, in the growing impatience with bureaucratic norms, we can see how the old postwar taboos have begun to weaken. Ideals once rejected as inimical to liberalism are now being invoked in its defense.

Levit’s career can best be understood against this background. Among those ideals, there is one that classical music reluctantly abandoned in the postwar years and without which it has always seemed a little lost: the Romantic cult of genius, which the industry now hopes to revive.

The suggestion may seem counterintuitive. Most classical music critics, including those lining up to canonize Levit, would insist that the cult of genius hasn’t gone anywhere, and that if it had, the last thing they would want to do is bring it back. Zinnecker’s disclaimer is typical: Levit, he writes,

doesn’t present himself as the genius of the century, he doesn’t have the manners of the great artist who lives only for music, in a world in which the most important laws are related to dominant seventh chords and suspended fourths, but in the same world as his audience.

Yet this description of genius—apolitical, insular and elitist, hermetically isolated from the outside world—captures only a shadow of what the word used to mean. To the Romantics, the musical genius was linked, even in solitude, to the deepest layers of collective life. As personified by Beethoven, he was a figure of charismatic authority: like the Napoleonic dictator, he ruled not through law or tradition but through force of personality, discarding old artistic rules with sublime self-assertion. He was singular: as Beethoven supposedly told an aristocratic patron, there were “thousands of princes” but only one of him. And he was transformative: an artist who suffered on behalf of his people and whose music—like the Ode to Joy, with its promise that “all men will be brothers”—renewed the community and bound it together.

All these qualities are now routinely ascribed to Levit. In a field dominated by “rules, conventions and traditions,” Zinnecker writes, he stands for “something completely new.” He is “Like No Other Pianist” (The New Yorker).As the “Pianist of the Resistance,” heis attunedto “‘suffering [and] the state of the world’” (The New York Times).

At times, however, a note of embarrassment creeps into the praise. “Sometimes he seems…poised and oracular,” writes Ross; “at others…[like a] member of his digital-native generation.” “Away from the piano he’s no better than the rest of us,” Zinnecker insists. These equivocations recall the Toscanini of the 1940s, as imagined by American journalists: on one side, the autocratic genius, with his implacable standards and iron will; on the other side, what Reader’s Digest called “the other Toscanini,” who “does not carry on about music like the highbrows”but enjoys a “quiet conversation” or “a spot of swing.” In accounts of “the other Toscanini,” as in depictions of Levit today, Romantic myth-making fades into the familiar two-step of celebrity culture—the stars, they’re like us.

Those equivocations persist today, for the same reason “the other Toscanini” was born. Despite an enduring attachment to the cult of genius, we can’t quite forget what that cult became. To Beethoven’s contemporaries, it stood for human brotherhood, but after his death it came to mean something narrower. “I am the German Spirit,” Richard Wagner declared in 1865. From nationalism, it was taken over into fascism, with figures like Hitler and Gabriele D’Annunzio styling themselves the geniuses of blood and soil. To some observers, by the war’s end the ideal had become inseparable from its perversion. Toscanini’s rule over the orchestra, wrote Adorno in 1938, resembled the reign “of the totalitarian Führer.” The dual role in which the classical music industry has cast Levit—a singular, charismatic leader and a liberal everyman—represents an attempt to evade this history: to recapture the authority of genius without reviving its authoritarian past.

It is possible to sympathize with this ambition while wondering if it will ever amount to much. The decline of classical music and the discrediting of the ideal of genius are clearly linked, but that doesn’t mean the ideal can be recovered, or redeemed, simply through an act of collective will. In Levit’s case, at least, the attempt has had ironic results. Since October 7 he has behaved more like a national icon than the world citizen portrayed by the press. His first response to the massacres was a performance of “Hatikvah,” the Israeli anthem;in a January 2024 interview with The Telegraph,he warned that “dangerous radical Islamic movements” were flourishing in Europe, abetted by “the intellectual derangement of part of the progressive left.” Yet if Levit is an icon, he is an icon without any real responsibility. Asked by The Telegraph about the destruction of Gaza, he responded with a Strauss-like shrug: “I do not like to speak about things about which I don’t have enough knowledge…. All I can do is speak out against anti-Semitism, and also help the pain of my people through music.” It turns out art can be an excuse for not engaging after all.

Perhaps Levit is simply the wrong man for the role—perhaps someone else, more thoughtful and morally serious, could play it better. But the point is not that Levit dropped the pose of responsibility; it is that hardly anyone seemed to notice. The role today is just a period costume, lightly put on and as lightly cast off. It will not assume weight and substance simply because the right person picks it up.

The question, in that case, is under what circumstances it could. How might classical music’s importance be recaptured, if not through the triumphs of individual artists? If musical genius is a myth, as is often claimed, it’s worth remembering that a myth is more than a falsehood. It is a story through which people try to articulate what they can express in no other way. The stories surrounding artists like Strauss and Toscanini are myths in this sense, even when factually true: in telling them, we are really trying to make sense of something deeper, a change in the way classical music is felt and heard.

A work like Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony cannot help but mean something different for us than it did for the Romantics. “Beethoven’s music,” wrote Hoffmann, “moves the levers of awe, terror, dread, and pain, and awakens that infinite yearning that is the essence of Romanticism.” In the Ninth Symphony and its descendants, from Wagner to Shostakovich, that terror is the prelude to ecstatic belonging. The finale of the Ninth opens with an eruption of dissonance that Wagner called the Schreckenfanfare—“horror fanfare”—with a shrieking B-flat in the woodwinds cutting through the tonic D minor chord like a knife. Then comes a brief reprise of the previous movements, followed by an instrumental anticipation of the Ode to Joy; then the fanfare returns, as if to signal a final break with the past. Only after that break has been ratified by the bass—“Oh friends, not these sounds!”—can the Ode truly begin. Its vision of universal brotherhood is preceded, is made possible, by the symphony’s spasms of obliterating violence.

Before World War II was even over, that vision had become an object of suspicion; in postwar literature, from Doctor Faustus to A Clockwork Orange,it is associatedwith the subsumption of the individual in the fascist crowd. In much of the world, it was no longer possible to hear the Ninth Symphony or its successors the same way. Such music could be rejected, sanitized, or held at an ironic distance, but it no longer spoke to listeners of their collective destiny, if there even was such a thing.

Classical music’s place in postwar culture was thus secured at the cost of its political impotence. Having been “promised Elysium and given…Gulags and gas chambers,” wrote Taruskin in 1989, we could “respect [Beethoven’s] naiveté” but “hardly share it.” When Bernstein performed the Ninth Symphony in Berlin that year, the word “joy” was replaced by “freedom”—as if to say that among all of the symphony’s great ideals, this one alone remained standing. As for the promise of human brotherhood, it was time for such utopias to be laid to rest.

The forces at work in the Ninth run, in more or less tangible ways, through much of the classical repertoire. If that repertoire sounds tired today, that’s not just because it is overplayed but because we no longer expect to encounter those forces outside the concert hall. The music’s idealism, its promise that our struggles can lead to a better future, still strikes many of us as naive, though for rather different reasons than it did forty years ago—not because we dismiss that future as a totalitarian delusion, but because it has never seemed further off. In an era of genocide, dictatorship, and war, aren’t such dreams an idle luxury?

I think the reverse is the case: we are discovering what happens when those dreams are allowed to fade. In “The Death of Utopia Reconsidered” (1982), the philosopher Leszek Kołakowski—no utopian himself—wrote that “the idea of human fraternity is disastrous as a political program, but is indispensable as a guiding sign.” It would be a calamity to replace “this optimistic fantasy with the opposite one”—to assume that human relationships express “nothing but hostility, greed, and the lust for domination” and that we must resign ourselves to all the “man-made monstrosities of social life.” This is the defining fantasy of the present, common to both the sclerotic establishment and the Hobbesian right. The establishment parties support one set of monstrosities, from repression at home to ethnic cleansing abroad, while presenting themselves as the only bulwark against others still worse. Their neofascist opponents are not totalitarian ideologues but a coalition of kleptocrats and petty gangsters, fighting for control of a shrinking world. Together they are ringing out the era that was rung in by Bernstein’s performance of the Ninth; yet in their narrowness of vision, they are unmistakably its heirs. We build gulags not because we believe in Elysium, but because we don’t.

Some critics have held out hope that classical music, whose decline mirrors the decline of the utopian imagination, might play some part in its recovery as well. In Time’s Echo (2023),his study of music composed after World War II, Jeremy Eichler writes that music “remembers us….[It] can fleetingly reorder the past, bring closer that which is distant, and confound the one-way linearity of time.”^* For that reason, it may also help us reclaim forgotten futures, “the Enlightenment dreams that are no less precious for having been buried in the rubble.” If so, there is still a chance that classical music in fifty years will mean something more to us, something deeper, than it does today. But musicians, while they may help dig that future out of the rubble, are unlikely to reclaim it alone.

To his credit, Levit the artist seems to recognize this, even if Levit the public figure does not. On YouTube there is a video of him during the pandemic, seemingly in isolation, performing the Ode to Joy. The opening hymn is somber and introspective; the succeeding variations gather power and resonance without losing a luminous warmth. At last the music sinks back into contemplative quiet. In its modesty and essential privacy, the performance contrasts starkly with our traditional image of the Ode. Placed alongside the massed spectacles of the 1930s, it encapsulates the story of classical music over the past century: from a thousand bodies joined in menacing celebration to one man alone in a room.

Beneath the video is a comment from an admirer: “I just watched this with my 3 year old daughter…she loved it! She is a big fan, and loves your recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas to fall asleep to.” I wonder how many of us might say the same. We have learned to sleep safely through this music, untouched by its joys and its terrors. But what, if not these, will wake us up again?