Pianist's death has left a void in my life

Andre Watts was an electrifying performer — and my hero for six decades

Cynics among us say that all the heroes are dead, lost to the pursuit of fortune, fame and other false allurements. 

I don’t believe that, but I just lost my greatest hero from outside my circle of family and friends. He’d been an inspiration and example to me nearly all of my 67 years, while I aspired as a teenager to emulate him and in later years for the sheer mastery of his art. His legacy continues to drive me to this day.

I learned last week that Andre Watts, who was one of the greatest classical music pianists of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, died on July 12 of prostate cancer.

I knew that Watts, 77, had been ill. However, I didn’t learn about his death until I read about it on my cell phone while waiting in a doctor’s exam room. “Andre Watts was …” read the first words of the entry. 

I broke down. There are some people in human history who should never have been born, and some who should never die. Andre Watts belongs in that second group. His death for me was akin to the loss Beatles fans felt following the fatal shooting of John Lennon. There’s a void that can’t be filled.

As a pianist and performer, Andre Watts was often electrifying. So he was when I heard him perform Tchaikovsky’s majestic and titanically difficult piano concerto in September 1989 with the Oregon Symphony. I had heard that old warhorse performed many times, but I and the rest of the audience ignored concert decorum and jumped into a standing ovation — after just the first movement.

He especially liked to perform the works of Franz Liszt, which showcased his prodigious keyboard skills. Under his long fingers, the piano would thunder with immense chords and complex arpeggios or whisper in perfectly even, extended trills that he could modulate from pianissimo to fortissimo.

But he was not just technically brilliant. His interpretations were always fresh and often profound — even if some critics refused to recognize that. I don’t much care for the music of 19th century composer Leos Janacek, and I groaned when I saw that Watts had programed an obscure and complex sonata by the Czech composer on a recital program. But the performance was deep and rich and became the highlight of the evening.

Like all great musicians and performers, Watts was a medium, a channel through which music came alive. Sometimes to distraction, he’d hum the melody, stomp his feet to the rhythm and make bold facial gesticulations as he played.

He simply loved to perform, and he was no “long-hair.” His recording of some of George Gershwin’s most famous piano scores — dubbed “Watts, by George!” — showcases the composer’s unalloyed joie de vivre, as well as that of the cigar-toking pianist. Watts was soft-spoken but had an infectious, natural magnetism.

You’ll get the idea by now that I often heard Andre Watts live. I believe I saw him every time he performed in Portland during the last 40 years — as a soloist, in concert with the Oregon Symphony or with Chamber Music Northwest. As a teenager, though, I got to sit on stage, at the very left end of the keyboard, to watch and listen to him play at Lincoln Center in New York.

How my father snagged those recital tickets I will never know. I’ll always be eternally grateful that he did. At the time I was studying piano seriously and aspired to become a concert pianist like Andre Watts. I had admired him since I was 7, when at age 16 Watts made his national TV debut by performing Liszt's Piano Concerto No. 1 in a 1963 New York Philharmonic Young People's concert conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

“Look, Andre, here’s a boy with your name,” my mother said to me as our family watched the live performance.

I suppose our shared given names helped cement a connection for me. Alas, I didn’t have the talent or level of dedication to even hope of approaching Watts’ mastery. Even so, his recordings and recitals over the years have helped keep me practicing and performing even as an adult. 

And I’ve taken other inspiration from him. Watts, the son of an American GI and Hungarian woman, was the first notable black American classical music pianist and helped pave the way for innumerable African-American artists, even if he never made race a major preoccupation. He made a difference in the world through his passion, talent and basic humanity. He exuded modesty and basic goodness. Everyone who knew him loved Andre.

During the last 10 years of his life, health problems drastically curtailed his performance schedule. (In his prime, he played all over the word, giving 150 concerts annually.) Yet at the time of his death he was still at it, preparing Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in D Major for the Left Hand . He was reconfiguring it for the right hand because of nerve damage to his left hand. His body gave out before he could complete that last calling.

There is a heroic if tragic lesson in that: If you have a talent, you have a duty to continue sharing it. When you’re still selling out, you’re obligated to continue performing, said Tony Bennett, the pop singer who died just nine days after Watts.

It seems obvious that world-class talent should always be shared worldwide, and get spent to the last drop. But even people with mortal levels of ability should not simply retire and gather rust. They should continue to share their gifts with their communities and the world.

That can make heroes of us all.