Martha Argerich and the Queer Histories of Feminine Pianism

Abstract

Charges of eccentricity have long clung to the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich. Flouting many of the conventions governing classical performance, Argerich has openly resisted professional and identitarian confinement, admitting that she “[doesn’t] want to be a pianist” and has never “felt like a woman.” Indeed, reviews of her performances are littered with impressions of disorientation attributed to the subtleties of her gendered transgressions coupled with her corporeal stillness in performance. This fixation on stillness invokes a history traceable to eighteenth-century music criticism, wherein descriptions of stillness policed the borders of palatable gender expression. This phenomenon of stillness would come to condition the figure of the “virtuosa” and, persisting into the twentieth century, complicates prevailing narratives centering the great men of piano performance history. This article takes Argerich’s performances as invitations to look back toward the tradition of feminine virtuosity to which she belongs, while exploring the ways in which she challenges its gendered limitations. I argue that the tensions underpinning her self-professed gender ambivalence and professional dissatisfaction are enacted through the virtuosic choreography she fashions in performance—a choreography that both reinscribes and traverses the borders of feminine virtuosity. I thus read her performances as queer enactments of her gender disidentification. I then turn toward Argerich’s world of artists misaligned with the demands of classical performance. Her commune has provided refuge not only for this community of outcasts but also for those who have never shared a space with Argerich, yet nonetheless stumble upon the traces of her aberrant desires.