At his youngest age, Christian Zacharias developed a real passion for visual arts, especially for modern artists like Klee, Miró, Tàpies, or Chillida,” he points out. But when it comes to music, he strongly 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!”
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’s like for a singer: their timbre is unique. Of course, we can talk about pedals, technique… but all of this comes from the ear, from what the pianist hears internally and tries to reproduce.” He concludes unequivocally: “To understand, one must listen to the music. It cannot be said or seen.”
Faithful to his convictions, the pianist is uncompromising about music. At the heart of his artistic maturity, when he discovers Mozart, Schubert, and Haydn, he abandons Chopin, his first musical crush. He considers it incompatible with the quest for stylistic purity that, according to him, the repertoire of German composers demands. “Mozart, Schubert, it’s more difficult, because it’s more demanding,” he asserts. Of course, he will return to Chopin later. But at that time, Chopin seems too immediately seductive, almost magical, a music that “sounds right away,” whereas Mozart, on the contrary, requires time, attention, and merits.
The demand, meticulousness, and precision do not scare him. The pianist notably recalls his collaboration with the conductor Sergiu Celibidache, a terror to some soloists for his sense of detail “a bit exaggerated,” admits Christian Zacharias: “His approach is bewildering, I know many pianists who have been literally blocked. However, his cosmic vision of music has brought me a lot. He teaches how to follow where harmony comes from, where it resolves. We completely decenter ourselves, there is a real deconstruction work between the orchestra and the soloist, with a lot of repetitions in the work.”
