HIROSHIMA, Japan — It was a great joy to finally witness a performance by the legendary pianist Martha Argerich. My brother and I grew up listening to her renditions of the masters — Beethoven, Mozart, and Chopin most especially — and I tried, but failed, to watch her in Berlin back in 2023, when she pulled out at the last minute due to illness. The late Pablo Tariman, the Philippines’ foremost music journalist, would have shared my excitement, as he was my sounding board whenever I watched a concert and he had long admired the Argentinian legend, even writing about her Filipino connection. 

At her age of 84, it is achievement enough that Argerich is still on active tour. But what she has done of late is to involve other musicians in her concerts, probably to conserve her energy, in the same way that her compatriot Lionel Messi has played a lesser but still significant role in the football field. Surely any pianist would be honored to be part of “Argerich and friends” (as some of those concerts are called). Here in Hiroshima, she was joined by Hayato Sumino, a Tokyo-based pianist whose career has flourished since the pandemic due to his viral YouTube videos. Another pianist, the Nagoya-born Akane Sakai, was on board.

The real star of the concert, however, was a girl named Akiko Kawamoto, whose piano is the centerpiece at the stage. Born in Los Angeles to Japanese parents in 1926, she grew up loving music, practicing daily with the piano that her parents had brought from the United States to Hiroshima, to where they moved back when she was six. She was killed in the fateful atomic bombing of August 6, 1945, dying of radiation a day later, but her piano survived. Restored 60 years after the bombing — and with the scars from the blast still visible on one side, as I saw for myself — the piano has become a poignant symbol of how peace is a precondition to music and how music can be an instrument of peace. 

Throughout the concert, an emcee read some parts of Akiko’s diary, and while most passages were as innocent as a Mozart sonata, there was also a reminder — perhaps unwitting —  that one’s victimhood does not erase those of others, as when Manila was suddenly mentioned:

January 3rd, 1942: The Imperial Army has captured Manila, the capital of the Philippines. Such joy! Fallen. Fallen. Manila has fallen.

Annie Dutoit-Argerich, Argerich’s daughter and collaborator, read quotes from philosophers and musicians — from Beethoven to Camus — to reflect more deeply on the intersections between peace and music. The concert itself — held within the epicenter of the bomb — was being held to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the atomic bombing. 

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before,” she quoted Leonard Bernstein as saying.

And then there was this quote attributed to Hannah Arendt; I wasn’t able to trace its original source but it resonates with her thinking and is worth quoting in full*:

Peace is not the natural condition of humankind.

People are not born into peace, but are born into the possibility of violence.

If peace is required, then it must be made. It must be constructed.

That very task is the true mission of politics.

It is the task of all humanity to live together with dignity.

The music itself took a back seat (or three seats, as in the case of Rachmaninov’s “Trio for Six Hands,” when all three pianists played on Akiko’s piano), but there were moments of magic, mostly from Sumino, who played his own composition, “Recollection,” followed by Chopin’s “Berceuse, Op. 57.” (There was a bit of Argerich’s virtuosity when she and Sumino played Shostakovich’s “Concertino, Op. 94,” for two pianos, but it would be days later, in Iwakuni, where I would be enthralled by her performance of Beethoven’s “Piano Concerto No. 1” alongside Sumino’s dazzling interpretation of Chopin’s “Piano Concerto No. 2.)

Japan has excelled in the politics of remembering, and to a great extent, for good reason. Some years back, in Nagasaki, I attended a commemoration of the atomic bombing on August 9 itself, and hibakushas (atomic bomb survivors) gave poignant accounts of their life experiences — including the stigma they faced after the war. Their message remains relevant today, with both Trump and Putin talking about resuming nuclear tests, and the threat of nuclear weapons still looming large in many parts of the world. Indeed, as in 1945, there are those who continue to think that might makes right, and today’s geopolitical developments leave no reason for confidence that our future will be any different.

Yet beyond the act of remembering the spectacular horrors of atomic bombs, lay an unspoken —  but perhaps even more significant — point about the horrors of war itself; horrors to which we have sadly become desensitized. The real terror, indeed, lies not in destructive power of atoms but the genocidal darkness of humanity, the same darkness that Palestinians encountered when they recently returned to their homes: 

The house cannot be repaired at all. It’s completely destroyed. Not a single concrete column remains intact. Even the stones are shattered into small pieces. What shocked me was the scale of destruction across the entire neighbourhood. I had never seen anything like it before. It felt as if a nuclear bomb had hit this place.

Indeed, as I left the concert hall and wandered around Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, with the Atomic Bomb Dome illuminated in the background, I cannot help but think of the thousands of Akikos today — including in Gaza amid a fragile ceasefire — whose musical instruments, schools, and concert halls lie in ruins, and whose voices are deafeningly silent.

* In the original program: ”平和は人類の生まれながらの状態ではない。人々は平和のなかではなく、暴力の可能性のなかに産み落とされる。平和が必要なら、それは作られなくてはならない。構築されなくてはならない。” – ハンナ・アーレント 『暗い時代の人々』(1968)

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