THE BBC MUSIC MAGAZINE INTERVIEW
Lars Vogt
‘‘I’m immersed in music and forget about everything – but then one melodic line can move me to tears”
Shortly before his death in early September, the pianist spoke to Jessica Duchen about living with cancer and grabbing every chance to record, perform and conduct while he could
PHOTOGRAPHY: JEAN-BAPTISTE PELLERIN
About a week before this issue went to press, there came the news we had been fearing: Lars Vogt had died from cancer at the age of 51.
I had spoken to him in July 2022 while he was in hospital near his home city of Nuremberg, and found him in good spirits. He was undergoing an experimental gene-therapy treatment, part of a new pharmaceutical study. ‘Being told I could participate in it was a little bit like winning the lottery,’ he remarked. Well aware that it might not be a cure, he hoped it could ‘at least win some time’. I asked whether he was feeling up to being interviewed. ‘Sure,’ he joked. ‘I’m not doing anything else…’
The illness was diagnosed following tests in February 2021: the doctors found secondaries in Vogt’s liver, then traced the origins of the metastasised cancer to a small tumour at the base of his throat. It was an aggressive form of the illness and the liver tumours were inoperable. Vogt decided to be open and upfront about the disease and its impact upon him, speaking out on Twitter, Radio 3’s Music Matters, in Van Magazine and, about a month before his death, a heart-rending film in Zsolt Bognár’s series Living the Classical Life.
Vogt was aware his choice to go public might not suit everyone facing a lifethreatening illness. ‘Some would maybe feel they need to keep it private,’ he reflected. ‘But for me it was clear from the beginning that it’s part of my life now and I wanted people to be able to talk openly about it.’ It also made handling the situation easier for his family – his violinist wife, Anna Reszniak, and their small daughter, Emma. Vogt also has two older daughters from previous relationships; the eldest, Isabelle, is a budding actress (father and daughter have recorded a CD of melodramas, including Strauss’s Enoch Arden).
Born in Düren, Germany, in 1970, Vogt was always forthright and down to earth, his all-encompassing musicianship powered by his tremendous physical and mental energy. In boyhood he was a keen footballer until his piano studies intervened. He became a pupil in Hanover of the piano guru Karl-Heinz Kämmerling. At 19 Vogt won second prize in the Leeds International Piano Competition. Simon Rattle conducted the final – and both the prize and Rattle’s enthusiasm, friendship and musical partnership thereafter helped to propel the young pianist to welldeserved prominence. Accolades, awards and treasurable artistic partnerships followed apace, while Vogt clocked up a substantial discography as soloist, chamber musician, festival director and conductor. His eclectic repertoire ranged from Bach’s Goldberg Variations to Brahms’s two piano concertos, and from Schumann to Aribert Reimann. His versatility and calmness stood him in good stead, eventually paying further dividends as he navigated through the maze of his condition.
There were some alarming moments, especially when he was warned that the side-effects of a particular chemotherapy ingredient could potentially affect the nerves in the fingers, making him unable to play the piano. ‘So far, the feeling has always come back, with a bit of practice, so I’ve been lucky,’ Vogt told me, undaunted by the prospect – which seemed realistic at the time – of playing Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in London this autumn.
Musical effects of a more psychological nature were harder still to predict (see ‘Musical Catharsis’, opposite page). When we talked, Vogt had recently played the Brahms C minor Piano Quartet in his chamber music festival, Spannungen, in Heimbach (near Cologne), after missing all but two days due to his ongoing treatment. He founded the festival in 1998: its name means ‘voltages’, derived from its setting in a converted electric power station. After the enforced break of the pandemic in 2020 and a ‘ghost’ festival held in Berlin for 2021, this was the first time its live attendance had been restored on location.
‘It was an amazing feeling suddenly to be there with the Heimbach audience again – they gave me a standing ovation as soon as I came in – and somehow there is a new emotional urgency about certain things,’ Vogt recalled. ‘I remember working on some pieces with my teacher [Kämmerling] just weeks before he died, and he gave me a really hard time. He said, “Lars, when you’re getting old, things become urgent.”’
It was pure coincidence, he said, that as he awaited his diagnosis, he was scheduled to record, of all things, a programme of Schubert chamber music with his close friends, the Tetzlaff siblings Christian and Tanya. Schubert’s two great piano trios, among the most emotionally intense and challenging in the repertoire, were written when their composer, aged 30, was facing the devastation of then-incurable syphilis.
‘When I was doing the edits, I was so moved that I had to put my pencil down’
‘On the way to the first session,’ said Vogt, ‘I talked to my brother-in-law, who’s a doctor, and told him they’d found something on my liver. He said he didn’t like the sound of it, and that I should do the studio recording, but then come back, go to hospital and have it checked. It wasn’t clear yet,’ he added, ‘but I basically knew.’
The Schubert was ‘a labour of love,’ he said. ‘When I was doing the edits, I was so moved that I had to put my pencil down and just listen, because there’s a lot of soul in there. In the E flat Trio’s second movement, Schubert gives an indication: pianissimo then appassionato while still pianissimo. It’s the most beautiful thing.’
He and Christian Tetzlaff first met by chance on a train when Vogt, then 18, was en route to Hanover for his piano lesson, noticed a fellow musician with a violin case and struck up conversation. A few years later they worked together and became regular chamber music colleagues, recording substantial tranches of the violin sonata repertoire together. Vogt termed the Tetzlaff siblings his ‘musical family’.
‘I regard Christian as one of the most spectacular musicians of the century,’ he said. ‘Whenever I’ve heard him in concert, he’s a force of nature. Tanya is also such a special musician. We’re very close friends and she’s been almost a personal example to me: you will always find trust and an incredible sense of humour. My God, how we have laughed together over the years!’ Had fate taken a different turn, he would have been touring the US with the Tetzlaffs this season: ‘If I’ve got my energy, why not have ten days with my dear friends, zooming about playing music?’
Where orchestral works were concerned, Vogt not only directed from the keyboard, but also conducted, to excellent effect. He spent five years as music director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia, and recently had assumed the equivalent post with the Orchestre de chambre de Paris. ‘This orchestra is a total joy,’ Vogt enthused. ‘They’re a fantastic group, a very young and motivated orchestra. We’ve reached the point where we’re willing to jump through the fire together. I love that!’ With them he recorded scintillating performances of the two Mendelssohn Piano Concertos (sleeve above). ‘That was an astonishing project for me,’ he says, ‘in that physically I was still able to do it, after the doctors had told me I might not be able to play.’ A disc of two Mozart piano concertos, the E flat K271 and C minor K491, is also in the can.
As for solo repertoire, Vogt’s recordings often had tremendous success. Last year his album devoted to Janáček piano works was termed ‘breathtaking’ by our critic at BBC Music Magazine. Back in 2015, his account of Bach’s Goldberg Variations captured listeners’ imagination; our reviewer wrote that it had ‘a limpid, unfussy directness at a tempo that gives no quarter to over-expressive navel-gazing. And when [the Aria] eventually returns, the effect is not so much “journey’s end” as a reminder of where we started from.’
When we talked, Vogt had accepted that he was unlikely to fulfil his dream of playing all Beethoven’s sonatas; but true to form, he had been tackling the biggest of them all. ‘The “Hammerklavier” was my Corona lockdown project,’ he said. Having studied this gargantuan masterpiece in earnest for the first time, he performed it five times in May.
The new treatment had brought hope for a while, but Vogt remained realistic about the prognosis. ‘We’re all going to die eventually, so that journey is ahead of all of us,’ he said. ‘But even if I don’t have more years ahead of me, it’s been such a rich life. The number of wonderful people I’ve met; the privilege to be in this profession, to have making music as the main thing in your life; the three children I’ve had, and so many wonderful memories. It’s been really a full barrel, this life, and if it were to be over, then that’s what it is. I don’t want to make the rest of my days miserable by lamenting “It’s all over”. I want at least to enjoy it as much as I can.’
Musical catharsis
Finding comfort in Brahms
Since falling ill, Vogt remarked, he could not predict exactly how the emotional side of music would strike him. ‘Sometimes it’s absolutely fine,’ he said. ‘I do my work, I’m immersed in music and I forget about everything. And then something, perhaps just one melodic line, can suddenly move me so much that I burst into tears.’
He found perhaps the greatest solace in the music of Brahms (above). When feeling well enough, Vogt would go to the hospital library and play on its upright piano some of the Op. 116 pieces, which he was learning for the first time. ‘Then at my festival, Spannungen, they played the Brahms G major String Sextet. The opening melody is in G major, but straight away tainted with darkness. That was one of those moments that hit me so quickly that I couldn’t get out of my tears for the rest of the piece.
‘But it’s also cathartic. The effect of the music becomes even stronger and more direct. In Brahms there’s a basic melancholy, but one that can still see all the glory of life, all the love and the beauty also within the melancholy. These things are very close to me.
‘It can seem like the great composers knew everything. They know all about love and they know everything about death. It’s nice to give yourself over to them, to have them take you by the hand and guide you through.’