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Lucas Debargue

4 weeks ago

It is quite rare—perhaps even unique—for me to meet an interviewer as perceptive as Petruș Costea 🙏. You can find the link to our full exchange in the comments.

Here’s an excerpt, which in many ways follows on from a post I shared here last November. Enjoy !

“Petruş: In November 2025 you published a text that sparked serious controversy: “Classical music is not dying, it has never been alive.” You question the very notion of “classical music” and denounce the harmful influence of music criticism. To what extent can music criticism inhibit interpretative freedom under the pretext of fidelity to the score?

Lucas: When I speak about music criticism, I am not referring to the wonderful texts written about music by artists or writers. I am referring to evaluative criticism—the kind of criticism that sits in a concert hall or listens to a recording and evaluates a performance.

I believe it is a form of parasitism that simply drains the sap of music and ultimately kills our living relationship with it. Why? Because this evaluative criticism ends up influencing the entire musical ecosystem: teachers, concert organizers, the performers themselves, who begin to relate to their own music exactly like critics. “It was too much like this,” “not enough like that,” “too much of this,” “too little of that.” But music cannot be evaluated quantitatively or qualitatively in this way. Critics try to behave like gastronomic critics who assign scores to a dish.

We must stop giving scores to artistic achievements. Can anyone imagine giving 4 out of 10 to a painting by Rembrandt? Or to a work by Pablo Picasso because “the drawing here isn’t good”?

In living arts such as music, making an evaluative critique of a performance means stopping the flow, creating “frozen frames,” pausing at a moment to say: “Here this happened.” But that moment has already passed; music is continuous movement. When evaluative criticism comes to govern our relationship with music, we no longer live in musical time but in a time fragmented into small segments. This also leads to a certain way of studying: fragmentation, obsessive repetition of the same passages in order to make them “perfect.”

Yes, I believe there is something almost criminal in evaluative music criticism. When someone takes another person’s life, we call them a criminal; evaluative criticism takes the life of music. The performer begins to think: “Don’t make a mistake here, play this in a certain way…” At that moment, they stop living, they stop breathing with the music.

The title of my essay—“Classical music is not dying; it has never been alive”—has several explanations. Around classical music there circulates an alarmist discourse: “Go see it quickly, like Venice, before it is covered by water.” People say audiences are disappearing from concert halls, but this is false. In reality, more and more halls are being built, money is being invested, and in certain parts of the world the audience for classical music is growing.

If I say it has never been alive, I am referring to the concept of “classical music” itself. It is a ghostly concept that is defined not by what it is, but by what it is not: it is not the music played on popular radio stations, not music with major commercial success, not music people dance to. It thus becomes a niche that its devotees keep to themselves, like a museum.

I invite everyone to read the work of Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, in which she discusses this museification of works—the way we fossilize them. A sonata by Ludwig van Beethoven is treated as something written at a particular moment in history, fixed forever, and we performers are supposed simply to reproduce that historical object “correctly.”

I do not believe that. A Beethoven sonata, performed today by a musician of the twenty-first century, is a musical moment of the twenty-first century. It is not a historical reconstruction of the nineteenth century. If we live music in the present, evaluative criticism becomes impossible. It can survive only if it perceives music as a dead museum where there are fixed references against which to compare: “Does it approach or move away from such-and-such a version?” But if we receive what the performer offers here and now, we can discuss critically—even negatively—what happened at that moment, without comparing it to a recording or to a supposedly “correct” way of playing.

I am very firmly opposed to evaluative criticism because I consider it a major drawback for musicians in what we call “classical music”—a term I would prefer to replace with “musical literature” or “written music.” What distinguishes this music is the existence of a literature of scores. We performers are like theatre actors: we have a text that we must embody.

Yet evaluative critics, most of the time, do not have the competence to see whether a performer truly executes the text. They simply compare it with a recording they already know. That is all.
Most classical musicians avoid these subjects; there is a reluctance to criticize. I think it would be healthy for musicians to criticize the critics—not in a polemical sense, but in the noble sense of the word: selection, discernment, distinction. We should distinguish between a genuine concert review and what is often, in fact, merely a simple grading system: a mark for technique, a mark for musicality.

These things are absurd. It would be good for us to become more aware of this.

Petruş: Can one speak, in some cases, of elitism—even arrogance—in classical music?

Lucas: Yes, obviously. It is a music that considers itself superior from the outset and defines itself by differentiating itself from others. In reality, however, the masterpieces we perform are deeply inspired by popular music. They have their roots in what the Germans call Volk—a term that does not simply mean “the people,” but refers to a cultural matrix, to local or exotic folkloric accumulations.

If we think of eighteenth-century Vienna, it was a cosmopolitan city: Bohemian, Jewish, Oriental and many other influences coexisted. Joseph Haydn, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert all fed directly on these influences.

The arrogance and elitism associated with classical music appear mainly at the end of the nineteenth century and in the twentieth century. It is a form of appropriation by a very wealthy bourgeoisie that wanted a type of music corresponding to its own vision of life: discipline, merit, the idea that through intense work and rigor one achieves success.

The way classical music is taught—especially music composed during that period—is imbued with this ideology of discipline and meritocracy. Yet when we look at that privileged social class, we see that success is not based solely on merit but also on inherited wealth, belonging to already wealthy families, accumulated capital, and networks of influence.

In fact, what is quite amusing is that even in classical music, the artists who reach the highest levels, with very visible careers, are not necessarily the most talented or the hardest-working, but those who come from the “right” families, who have the right connections, the right recommendations, the right contacts.

On the other hand, there is also luck—there is kairos, the opportune moment, the meeting with the public at the right time. In my own case, what happened at the International Tchaikovsky Competition also involved chance: a moment when what I was doing corresponded to a collective expectation. It is important for me to remain honest and not believe that I arrived there only because I “deserved” it.

I love this music—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Gustav Mahler, Frédéric Chopin—and I am becoming more and more sensitive to it. But the way it is played and transmitted today does not always correspond to its deep humanistic and philosophical message. It is not a gastronomic message, nor one of luxury or pseudo-intellectual glitter. Classical music is not a luxury. It speaks about what is essential and is meant for everyone. The great works are gifts for all humanity, not for a privileged elite.

Yet today classical music functions within a system largely based on evaluative criticism, which claims to select what is good and what is not. All this creates great confusion among both artists and audiences. The public sometimes ends up feeling guilty for liking artists whom critics consider insignificant, and conversely guilty—or simply bored—by artists whom critics have declared extraordinary. In the end, all this only distances us from the works themselves and from a direct relationship with them.

Petruş: If you had to choose between freedom and perfection, which would you sacrifice?

Lucas: Without the slightest hesitation—even for a second—I would sacrifice perfection in favor of freedom. Music is synonymous with freedom, with love, not with engineering perfection. Music is a language; it has a message. What matters most is that this message passes through and reaches the other person—not that every sign in the score is reproduced by the pianist.

As far as I am concerned, I do not believe I play anything in my repertoire exactly as it is written. Sometimes I add things, sometimes I remove them. I do not play scrupulously what is notated. I am also a composer, and I have often seen that what I write in my own score is only one possibility. I could just as well have written it differently.

If we look, for example, at Frédéric Chopin and the Fontana edition, or the various editions of certain pieces, there are sometimes very large differences from one edition to another. In that sense, I believe there is no absolute source when it comes to a score.

The score remains an open field. I do not believe at all that the work, in its perfect and definitive form, is the score. To believe that is almost sectarian, almost fanatical—like reading the Bible and saying that the text as written is exactly the message of God. For me that has a name: dogmatism. A text is a series of signs and symbols that transmit a message. What matters is the message, but the message is not the sign. Therefore, music is not in the notes on the page.” ... Voir plusVoir moins

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