“At the end of last year, pianist Igor Levit was about to give a concert in the south of Germany when he received an anonymous email. Were Levit to play, the email’s author warned, ‘the Jewish pig’ would be killed in front of his audience,” writes Ivan Hewett in Friday’s (1/17) Telegraph (U.K.). “Not only did Levit go ahead with the concert, he also wrote a blazing denunciation … in a German newspaper (Der Tagesspiel), warning of the deep-seated anti-Semitism in his adopted country (the 32-year-old Russian moved there with his family when he was eight)…. Levit is only the latest in a long roll-call of Jewish musicians who’ve suffered from anti-Semitism…. Recently the pianist András Schiff … has received death threats for speaking out against anti-Semitism in Hungary…. Levit admits to a love-hate relationship with the social media that he believes make death threats so easy to inflict. He refuses to use Facebook … but he is a constant presence on Twitter…. He says being a musician ‘is not an excuse for not being a responsible citizen.’ ” Levit says, “We always talk about defending democracy. We—both citizens and the democratic state—must finally do it.”
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