Nothing lasts forever. A hard lesson repeated since time immemorial which each generation, each individual must learn as if it were new. Not only is our personal existence an impermanent thing, but as the burning of the Notre-Dame de Paris illustrated to a horrified global audience, the very world upon which we hinge our existences, too, is a transient one.

The death of Jörg Demus last month was, perhaps, a similar reminder of the ephemerality of our existence, as well as a loss of comparable magnitude.

Not that his was a household name even among the rarefied coterie of admirers of Western musical arcana. It is a testament to the man’s humility that his best-known work is, paradoxically, not as glamorous soloist, but as the eloquent and unassuming partner to such performers as Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Elly Ameling. Not that he had anything to hide. As these or the number of solo recordings which remain highly prized amongst record-collecting congnoscenti readily testify, Demus was a musician devoted to the cultivation of beauty. His cycle of Schumann’s piano works—the first ever integral set—remain a model of poetry and poise.

But it is, perhaps, in the work of the composer whom Wilhelm Furtwängler once referred to as a “modern Schumann” where the breadth of Demus’ art is unfurled to its fullest.

That some of the greatest interpreters of Claude Debussy’s piano music were German or German-trained would have been a rueful irony to the great musicien français. Pianists like Gieseking and Arrau were among the few who most closely approximated the composer’s velvety ideal of a piano without hammers. (Comparatively, French pianists often seem to equip their instruments with ice picks.) In his own traversal, Demus follows in that Teutonic tradition, conjuring through his fingers a Debussy of poetic reveries on the verge of becoming mist.

Listen, for example, to the panoply of veiled hues he elicits in Voiles; his Des pas sur la neige of soft-focus blurs slowly coming into focus; the simple charm of his Arabesques or Rêverie; the warmth and human scale of his Études. Threading through it all are those sensitive hands carefully constructing subtly variated textures, drawing long-breathed singing lines, and shaping a dynamic flow as natural as breathing itself.

Here, as in all his best recordings, is the illusion woven by the greatest musicians, who by dint of their virtuosity of body and mind, subsume themselves seamlessly into the composer. In our time when classical music is beset by crude, egomaniacal keyboard-bangers and hair-tousslers who treat their art as merely a prop to frame their Botox-infused, PR-managed “sex appeal,” the plain sincerity of Demus’ art seems not so much as from another time, as it is from another planet. Would that more of his kind light up ours.

The late Jörg Demus at the piano. [Image credit: International Jörg Demus Festival]