At his youngest age, Christian Zacharias developed a real passion for visual arts, particularly for modern artists like Klee, Miró, Tàpies, or Chillida, he emphasizes. But when it comes to music, he firmly resists any attempt to describe it with images. “I am against all words that sound visual. Footsteps in the snow, is that an image? No! No colors! The word ‘colors’, that’s the worst,” he exclaims vigorously. For him, this type of vocabulary betrays the essence of music: “Harmonies, melodies, these are actions, characters!” Without appeal, he concludes: “To understand, you must listen to the music. You cannot say it, or see it.”
The music, as he conceives it, thus escapes the usual categories of language. It is neither representation nor translation, but a direct experience of the present moment: “My sound, for example, cannot be learned or taught. It is like with a singer: their timbre is unique. Of course, we can talk about pedals, technique… but it all comes from the ear, from what the pianist hears internally and seeks to reproduce.” He does not hesitate to come back to Chopin later. But at the heart of his artistic maturity, when he discovers Mozart, Schubert, and Haydn, he abandons Chopin, his first musical love. He considers it incompatible with the quest for stylistic purity required, according to him, by the repertoire of German composers. “Mozart, Schubert, it’s more difficult, because it’s more demanding,” he affirms. Yes, he will return to Chopin later. But at that time, Chopin appears to him too immediately seductive, almost magical, a music that “resonates immediately”, whereas Mozart, on the contrary, requires time, attention, and merit.
The demanding, meticulous, precise nature does not scare him. The pianist particularly revisits his collaboration with conductor Sergiu Celibidache, a terror to some soloists for his slightly “exaggerated” sense of detail. Christian Zacharias acknowledges, “His approach is disconcerting, I know many pianists who have been literally blocked. Still, his cosmic vision of music has brought me a lot. He teaches how to follow where the harmony comes from, where it resolves. We totally decenter ourselves, there is a real deconstruction work between the orchestra and the soloist, with a lot of repetitions in the work.”
