By Matthew Gurewitsch

Some artists “specialize,” others graze. Anne-Sophie Mutter grazes, but with an intensity and a dedication at times surpassing those of the avowed specialists. Her attitude toward Mozart is revealing in this regard. In observance of the 250th anniversary of his birth, she spent a full season exploring the catalogue of his works for violin, from the five concertos and the stately Sinfonia Concertante for violin and viola (in partnership with Yuri Bashmet) on to the 16 violin sonatas (with Lambert Orkis) as well as selected piano trios (with André Previn and Daniel Müller-Schott). In the process, she removed layers of varnish from a handful of symphonic masterpieces too often dulled by overexposure and cast a spotlight on a treasure chest of chamber music seldom taken out of storage. In an interview at the time, she remarked in passing that no one since Arthur Grumiaux and Isaac Stern had come up to the composer’s mark.

Five years later, over a cup of morning tea in the hushed breakfast room of a discreetly palatial hotel near her home in a quiet corner of Munich, Musical America’s Musician of the Year stands by that assessment. “With Mozart, I’m rather relentlessly critical,” she remarks, “because I struggle with him a lot. The sonatas and the trios are full of challenges of phrasing, of narrative, of directional playing. Each one is an opera in miniature. There aren’t so many players willing to dedicate their thought and time and passion to these pieces. They’re not mainstream repertoire any more. String players think that Mozart is easy to play because there aren’t a lot of black dots on the page. But the writing is so exposed. The craftsmanship is so refined. Every detail counts. It’s mind-boggling.”

From Mutter’s earliest days, Fortune has smiled on her, not least in giving her the discipline to embrace the hard work and make the brave choices that have won her a place of singular privilege within her profession. An apparent ideal she mentions often in speaking of her work—though seldom with the pointed emphasis that makes for striking sound bites—is modesty.

Given her remarkable history—her adolescent years as Herbert von Karajan’s soloist of choice in his late recordings of keystones of the concerto repertoire, her subsequent emergence as the glamorous muse of composers from the cosmopolitan André Previn to the monastic Sofia Gubaidulina, her landmark explorations of Bach, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms—Mutter would seem to have little to be modest about. The list of her world premieres, actual and planned through June 2011, stands at 17 pieces by eight composers, including concertos, a sonata, and chamber music. (The notorious procrastinator Pierre Boulez claims to be actively at work writing a piece he committed to a decade or more ago.) What lengths would a composer not go to to secure a commission from Mutter? Yet she speaks of her immodesty in approaching a composer to write for her. In her early years, the expression that marked her harmonious features was chiefly one of intensely focused sobriety that disclosed no subtext.Today, without contradicting what she says, the radiant smile and sparkling eyes add layers of elusive nuance. To dwell on her humility is to forget her joy, her playfulness, her spirit of adventure.

While no maestro’s services are required when she joins chamber orchestras for the concertos of Bach, Vivaldi, or Mozart, she insists on a fine distinction: “I lead,” Mutter says, “I don’t conduct.” Such excursions are strictly limited to repertoire conceived without a stand-alone conductor in mind. “It’s like playing chamber music. I like to brainstorm and be brainstormed as well.” Improvisation was never part of her musical education, and she wishes it had been. But assuming the firstamong-equals role may approximate what she missed out on. “It’s rare to be so close to one’s colleagues in the orchestra and to have a dialogue that’s so uninhibited. Things can rub off positively on both sides. But you need players who are comfortable with that very special responsibility.”

She’s practical. The strapless Gallianos that have helped define her image since she grew up have the functional advantage of leaving her the freedom to move. She puts them on to go to work, she has said, the way a plumber puts on his uniform, and keeps them until they wear out or no longer fit. Some favorite dresses are still in service after 15 years. (Has she ever outgrown one, I wonder. “Not yet,” she says.) Additionally, her wardrobe enhances the sensuality of the concert experience, as much for the performer as for everyone in the hall, no trivial factor in her continuing hold on the public. Siren that she is, Mutter uses neither chin rest nor even a patch of fabric or doeskin to hold her instrument in place. Why? Because, as anyone who has ever read about her knows, she loves the feel of her Lord Dunraven Stradivarius against her skin.

They treat each other lovingly. Perhaps alone among violinists, Mutter bears no bruise on her neck, no scab, nor any visible mark at all. Her tone lingers in the ear as much for its distinctive, richly cultivated, and burnished finish as for the vast palette of colors she draws on, never painting by the numbers, always allowing for the inspiration of the moment. Yet when occasion demands, she engages like a lion, or rather the more warlike lioness. Admired as she is for immaculate technique, she has no fear of mixing the rough with the smooth.

“I’m of the philosophy that the struggle has to come across,” she says. “My beloved chamber-music partner Mstilav Rostropovich always said not to worry about what things sound like close up. The audience doesn’t hear what you do. He was one who made a lot of extra sound.” So no, though her stage presence rarely if ever departs from cool poise, the rip and ratchet of horsehair against wire are not intrinsically taboo. Nor are such effects confined to craggy fare like the Sibelius violin concerto or progressive contemporary scores. In her recording of Sarasate’s spitfire Carmen Fantasy, one of Deutsche Grammophon’s all-time best-sellers, Mutter revels in throaty, even demonic, low notes that smoke and smolder. “Making music isn’t about creating superficial beauty,” Mutter says. “If the element of struggle and despair is called for, I wouldn’t hesitate to use what you might call ugliness.”

A particular glory of Mutter’s playing is her ease in the heights. Ask the German composer Wolfgang Rihm whose concerto Time Chant (Gesungene Zeit) Mutter introduced with Paul Sacher and the Collegium Musicum in 1992, six years after breaking into contemporary music with the premiere of Witold Lutosławski’s Chain II in the same company. “Time Chant moves from the middle range to extreme heights,” Rihm says. “It’s a trail atop a ridge. I wrote it high because of something I’d discovered about her playing. In the very highest range, her tone still has fullness and power. It doesn’t thin out. It retains its substance. I had to exploit that. No other contemporary violinist has that quality.”

As is her wont, Mutter has championed Time Chant around the world. She played it again this summer with the Vienna Philharmonic under Riccardo Chailly at the Salzburg Festival as a highlight of a ten-program series billed as a Kontinent Rihm. (The format—partly retrospective, partly contextual—was pioneered with tributes to the imaginative worlds of Salvatore Sciarrino and Edgard Varèse.) The morning after the opening of his new opera Dionysos, the prolific composer was thinking about two new works on Mutter’s agenda for her 2010-11 season as Artist-in-Residence with the New York Philharmonic. One is the single-movement concerto Lichtes Spiel, scored for the Mozartean complement of two flutes, two oboes, two horns, and strings and scheduled to premiere in 2010 on a bill with three Mozart concertos. Among plausible translations of the ambiguous title, two of the closest would be Play of Light and Airy Game; Rihm says it takes the form of a walk on a summer’s day.

An untitled duet, due in April 2011, will team Mutter up with Roman Patkoló, a 28-year-old Slovakian double-bass virtuoso who has for several years been receiving the support of the Anne-Sophie Mutter Circle of Friends. “I haven’t started it yet,” Rihm, a very fast worker, confessed in late July without apparent anxiety. “I told her that I’ve been thinking about a postcard showing a painting by Max Klinger. There’s a nymph sitting on a high branch, pursued by a bear. I don’t know how the piece will turn out, but the double-bass player has a beautiful upper register, so it might happen that at times her line will dip lower than his.” It occurs to Rihm, though, that the dizzying elevation of Time Chant may have pointed the way for others.

Mutter has noticed. “What’s with the heights?” she asks with a toss of her head. “It seems every piece written for me flies way up. There might be the downside for the composers in that not everyone will embrace them. I’m very comfortable in the highest regions, but not every violinist is, so the number of artists willing and able to take on such challenges is limited.”

Mutter for her part has confined her adventures in contemporary music to the scores she was the first to play. No John Adams, in other words, and no Philip Glass, though American patriots may bask in a quartet of works by Previn, her devoted ex-husband, and a pair by Sebastian Currier, whose concerto Time Machine receives its premiere in June, with Alan Gilbert conducting, as the fourth and final world premiere of Mutter’s New York Philharmonic residency. Though long attracted to Krzysztof Penderecki, she passed on the available Violin Concerto No.1 (written for Isaac Stern) and held out for his Violin Concerto No. 2. Likewise, rather than compete with Gidon Kremer’s preemptive account of Gubaidulina’s Offertorium, she waited (a very long time) for In Tempus Praesens, which she premiered at the Lucerne Festival with the Berlin Philharmonic under Simon Rattle. She has recorded the work with the London Symphony Orchestra under Valery Gergiev and will introduce it in New York with the New York Philharmonic under Michael Tilson Thomas.

Is such avoidance of other artists’ “property” a conscious policy decision? “It’s mostly a conscious decision,” Mutter says. “After all, I don’t know all the violin concertos written in the last 25 years. The decision to concentrate on pieces written for me starts when I become intrigued by a living composer’s work. Gubaidulina fascinated me from the moment I heard Gidon Kremer play her Offertorium, but he was and remains the only interpreter I can think of for that score. In the standard repertoire, you accept
it that there can be hundreds of interesting interpretations and look for them. But when a new piece has been premiered with the help of the composer, the range is narrower. I would feel immodest playing a work written for another violinist in front of the composer. That may be the subliminal reason I’ve waited, even when a composer has taken a very long time.”

Mutter’s exquisite proprietary sensitivities extend to her instruments, including the Gagliano she played for her first two Karajan recordings, the Emiliani Stradivarius she played on most of the rest, and that long-time favorite, the Lord Dunraven, heard on their account of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto. No, others may not play them. “They’re part of my life,” Mutter says, “part of my body.” In a change of heart,
Mutter recently loaned the Gagliano to her protégée Ye-Eun Choi. “She played it a few months, but it didn’t take off in a way that made her happy,” Mutter says. “In the meantime, we’ve found her a Pietro Giacomo Rogeri that’s a better fit.”

Colleagues of a mind to explore scores written for Mutter have her blessing, though she keeps them out of earshot. She will make an exception when Kremer plays In Tempus Praesens with the Munich Philharmonic under Christian Thielemann in March. “I’ll listen to rehearsals and help with balances if needed,” Mutter says. “It will feel very strange to me. I couldn’t do Offertorium that way.”

What is the meaning of the title In Tempus Praesens? On this apparently rather basic point Mutter has no wisdom to offer. Propose the translation In the Present Time, as you naively might, and your Latin teacher, if you had one, would rap your knuckles smartly. The Latin construction—preposition plus the accusative case—describes directionality, movement towards a destination.

“Gubaidulina said it refers to the time we live in,” Mutter says. “That the orchestra represents society, that the violin represents the individual, and that the piece represents a struggle between darkness in the depths and light on the heights that’s as vital to our time as it was in ancient time.

“I highly recommend you ask the composer.”

In a program note, Gubaidulina offers “for the present time,” an untenable gloss.

But in the end, the answers that enlighten most lie less in anyone’s words than in the hands of an authoritative interpreter. Authority worn lightly, as Mutter wears it—that’s the best kind. •

Matthew Gurewitsch, a writer and speaker long based in New York, will shortly be settling in Maui. His profiles and essays on cultural subjects appear frequently in the New York Times and Smithsonian, as well as on his Web site beyondcriticism.com.