Opus Gelber
Leila Guerriero
NON FICTION | 2019 | 339 pages
Argentine pianist Bruno Gelber is considered to be one of the best 100 pianists of the 20th century. He started playing when he was three years old, and his vocation was so strong that when he was seven and got poliomyelitis, he asked his parents to install the piano in the bed, which he didn’t leave for a year so he could study. The illness left him permanently paralyzed in his left leg, but this didn’t stop him, at nineteen, from going to Paris to study with one of the best teachers of the time, who declared: “You will be my last student, but you will be the best.” Soon after, Gelber started to shine on some of the best European stages, where critics hailed him as a “miracle.” He lived in Paris for 25 years and spent 23 years in Monaco, playing with the best orchestras and directors in the world, rubbing shoulders with kings, princes and emperors. In 2013 he returned to Buenos Aires, where he lives in in a monumental building located in the popular neighborhood of Once. That is where journalist Leila Guerriero went to interview him in 2017. She found a complex and fascinating man, with an awesome strength, great intelligence and sense of humor, devoted to piano but also interested in celebrity gossip TV shows, in love since childhood with Argentine actress Laura Hidalgo (whose portraits are all over his apartment), deeply worried about aesthetic and protocol rules, which he commands to perfection.
Guerriero paints a portrait of Gelber today; the visits from orchestra directors, musicians and ambassadors; his very long telephone conversations with his best friend, the Duchess of Orleans; the lessons he teaches to his selective list of students. All in the context of a past strongly inhabited by his mother, Ana, and his brilliant and frightening teacher Vicente Scaramuzza.
Guerriero sheds light on the life of Gelber through several testimonies. The result is a book in which the author and her subject establish a disturbing game of seduction. Opus Gelber reveals itself to be as a wonderful exercise in journalism, the stunning portrait of a complex musical genius, both seductive and mysterious.
RIGHTS: spanish LIBROS DEL ASTEROIDE
“He, Bruno Gelber, is one of the best pianists to come out of the 20th century, and she, Leila Guerriero, one of the journalists who has worked hardest to dignify the profession in recent years. In Opus Gelber, they come together without the constraints of a timed interview and after starting as strangers get to know each other through conversation. A raw, literary, and beautiful portrait. A gem.”
“Leila Guerriero assembles verbal structures that make you want to move into them. (...) Guerriero’s craft often unearths the endless conflict regarding the fine line between journalism and literature. In Opus Gelber, as in the rest of the books, that line disappears. We read it like a long chronicle (perhaps a biography) because that’s how it’s sold, but we would read it as a novel if it were marked as such. And yet another thing: if you approach the book by listening to what the narrative voice (which coincides with the author’s) is saying about itself instead of merely focusing on the described events, you’ll note that despite her discreetness the author’s personality seeps into the book’s atmosphere from start to finish. She, Guerriero, is the secret protagonist, the hidden character that knocks on the reader’s mind and who leaves you hoping to know more. The construction of this veiled character is what reveals a literary prowess of the highest degree.”
“You may not know it yet, but you need to read Leila Guerriero.”
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