Frederic Rzewski, pianist and composer whose works often had political themes – obituary

Frederic Rzewski,who has died aged 83, stood in an honourable line of maverick pianist-composers stretching from Liszt and Busoni to Rachmaninov and Prokofiev; one of his best-known piano works was The People United Will Never Be Defeated (1975), based on a Chilean protest song by Sergio Ortega that became popular after General Pinochet’s overthrow of Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in 1973.

An immense set of 36 variations ranging in style from jazz to atonal, The People United requires the soloist not only to strike a bewildering array of notes on the keyboard but also to whistle and slam the piano lid. It was premiered by Ursula Oppens at the Kennedy Centre, Washington, in 1976 and has since been championed by Igor Levit, whose recording, coupled with Bach’s Goldberg Variations and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations won recording of the year at the 2016 Gramophone awards.

Much of Rzewski’s music revolved around political themes, including Coming Together (1971), a setting of letters from Sam Melville, an inmate at Attica State Prison who was killed during a prisoners’ uprising; The Antigone Legend (1983), based on a poem by Bertolt Brecht; and De Profundis (1992), a musical melodrama using spoken quotations from Oscar Wilde’s prison letters to Lord Alfred Douglas spread over a tangled piano accompaniment, again with a rich array of additional sound effects.

“People tie themselves up in knots asking how music can be used to express political ideas,” Rzewski told a British interviewer in 1976, when his works were featured in a concert of progressive music at St Pancras Assembly Rooms in London. “But all music is political and most is progressive.”

He made a rare foray into orchestral music with a witty, learned and light-footed piano concerto that he premiered at a late-night Prom in 2013 with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov. “It wasn’t completely focused, but just to witness such an ambitious, unfashionable thing attempted was invigorating,” observed Ivan Hewett approvingly in his Daily Telegraph review.

Frederic Anthony Rzewski was born in Westfield, Massachusetts, on April 13 1938, the son of Anthony Rzewski and his wife Emma (née Buyniski), pharmacists of Polish descent who both encouraged his music. “There was a sense that for a Pole being a pianist was like fate,” he said. “One of our first presidents had been a pianist, and I had the same name as Chopin.”

It was Charles Mackey, his early piano teacher, who suggested that music should not sit safely on the side lines but engage with political and ideological issues. Rzewski’s tastes soon gravitated towards Dmitri Shostakovich, yet to admit such a thing to the modernists he mixed with during the 1950s was considered heretical. He recalled attending a lecture by Pierre Boulez who “gestured like the Christ-figure in a medieval Last Judgment, sending all the wicked folklorists and tonal composers like Shostakovich down to Hell”.

He was educated at Harvard and Princeton, studied with composers such as Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, and became known as a performer of fearsomely difficult avant-garde music. From 1960 to 1962 he was in Italy on a Fulbright scholarship, working with Luigi Dallapiccola in Florence and becoming acquainted with the latest European ideas on modernism, before spending a couple of years in Berlin. In 1966 he cofounded the experimental electronic group, Musica Elettronica Viva.

Rzewski learnt early in his performing career that he was not cut out for formality, recalling that the first and last time he wore tails was for a BBC invitation concert in 1964 in which he played a piece of Stockhausen that involved several painful glissandi up and down the keys. “So I put lots of talcum powder on to make things easier,” he said. “Unfortunately, when I did the forearm smash that begins the piece a mushroom cloud of talcum powder rose up and everybody burst out laughing.”

By his mid-thirties he was forging his characteristic idiom as a composer, combining a rugged celebration of “humble” song, craggy abstraction and an almost romantic grandiloquence of which The People United is a fine example. He and his music were regular visitors to British shores and were featured in the London Jazz Festival in 2013. He marked the First World War centenary in 2014 in characteristic fashion, setting to music memories of deserters in Ode to the Deserter that was written for amateur choruses, reinforcing the sense of communal solidarity.

Rzewski, who looked somewhat like the older Freud, especially when champing on a cigar, had a mischievous sense of humour; asked if he was a Marxist, he shot back: “Harpo, Groucho or what?” He met Nicole Abbeloos, a Belgian student, while studying in Florence. They were married in 1963 and had four children. For the past 20 years he lived with Françoise Walot, an actor and director, with whom he also had two children.

Frederic Rzewski, born April 13 1938, died June 26 2021