Distinguished representative of the Romanian music school in the first half of the 20^th century, Dinu Lipatti polarises still the attention of contemporary pianists, critics and listeners. If unjust fate allotted him only a short span of life, his exceptional qualities as performer, composer and teacher promoted him in "that Pantheon where Music has surrounded herself with her chosen ones”. The invaluable lipattian pianism and the artist’s musical activity of many features and forms are even today the subject of passionate musicological debates and the object of an exceptional interest worldwide. My endeavour tries to capture, and to offer a fresh perspective on, several aspects of this exceptional artist’s personality and interpretative style – even if the numerous writings dedicated to Lipatti make it almost impossible to bring something new. His unparalleled interpretations reveal more and more facets, more and more nuances. Mihail Dragomirescu’s theory, adopted and developed by Tudor Vianu, demonstrates that the aesthetic emotion a masterpiece produces distils and intensifies with the passing of time; its content becomes more beautiful, more fascinating, more brilliant. A single researcher, or a research conducted within a single generation, cannot discern all relations and nuances connecting its constitutive elements. A masterpiece, therefore, remains eternally alive, through the very infinity of nuances to be discovered in the future.

When we evoke the personality of some of the masters we owe our professional development to, we recall their gestures, the way they played, their voice and its inflexions, their attitude and their facial expression, what they said and what they wrote. All this helps us build the image of the musician-cum-teacher, an image which stands up to the passing of time and prevents it from covering, in its hurry to make everything forgotten, the real person. The picture we have of Lipatti is mainly one received by the agency of his exceptional recordings, his valuable compositions, of several musicological studies and of the testimonies some of his contemporaries (coevals, friends, partners, disciples) gave. Arthur Honegger believed that Lipatti’s pianism was a highly distinctive embodiment of "the qualities of the performative [traditional] typologies”, as well as of the modern pianistics’ tendencies, all, synthetized in an "admirable unity”. The refinement and poetry of his interpretation, the propensity for "transparent sonorities”, the nobility, the simplicity, the truthfulness, the avoidance "of any rhetorical and declamatory effects”, the preoccupation for bringing music to life are qualities of Lipatti’s unmistakable pianism. In his imagination, sounds and colours link up, combine and then split up according to a personal dialectics, and express each other in a singular poetical and chromatic synthesis. Motifs fill with new poetical and pictorial attributes, giving the original musical images access to multiple possibilities of individualization.

Lipatti’s personality aligns to the Romanian and universal cultural permanencies, representing a true benchmark and laying us under the obligation to re-examine and re-define it. Past his undeniable artistic value, his pianism established a new style and a new vision stemming both from a profoundly original musical sensibility and from an aesthetic conception in keeping with the period’s requirements and with his own principles. It is on this premise that we build our attempt to portray this Romanian musician in which superior human qualities, noticeable in the interactions with those around him and made apparent in his artistic output too, meet. For Lipatti, music was not just a vocation, not even a noble profession – it was way of life, and an attitude towards life. As a performer, he resorts to original, unmistakably personal, individualized locutions; his recordings reveal a typology different because of its noble, spiritually elevated standpoint. His last recital, in Besançon, on September 16, 1950, opened with Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita no. 1 in B flat major, BWV 825, where the spiritual dimension of his pianism is as evident as the impeccable rendition is perfect, homogenous and semantically dense.

Much has been written on the similitudes between the lipattian and the chopinian interpretative style and personal destiny, even if the two musicians lived a century apart: both reached maturity earlier than other artists, both led a tragic existence, both asserted themselves as performers of refinement and poetry, as promoters of beauty and truth.

With nobility, modesty, responsibility and dignity, Dinu Lipatti presented and established his creative personality on the firmament of music. The clarity of expression, the decisive reduction to essence and the firm logical controlling, in an intelligible manner and within human limits, of all stylistic elements, render valuable both the recordings and the compositions of the illustrious pianist. George Enescu, his mentor and occasional stage partner, closely followed his godson’s brilliant career as a performer and composer. To Lipatti’s activity as pianist and author joined that of a well-loved teacher: in 1944, Lipatti was assigned professor of piano virtuosity at the Music Conservatory in Geneva, remaining there until 1949.

Lipatti’s repertoire comprised numerous works, from the different periods in the history of music: from Bach, Scarlatti, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt or Chopin to Debussy, Ravel, Enescu - not forgetting his own compositions. His performances, remarkable for revealing Lipatti’s unaffected expression, authenticity and consummate skill,  are topical even today, thanks to their expressive depth and their artistic perfection: in 2010, the year of Chopin’s birth bicentenary, a survey among music specialists worldwide designated Dinu Lipatti as best Chopin performer of all times. The Polish composer had a privileged place in the pianist’s repertoire; we owe Lipatti some memorable renditions of important works such as the etudes, the nocturnes, the waltzes, the Barcarolle op. 8, the Fantasie in f minor, op. 49, the Piano concerto no. 1, op. 11 (for which he even proposed an alternate orchestration).

Lipatti’s exceptional recordings, standing out by their beautiful and refined sound and by the respect shown for the score, give proof of the artist’s value. He enjoyed the advantages of his double vocation, as a pianist and a composer, "the understanding of the text’s inner architecture” being at the forefront, his interpretative vision becoming "crystalized” and definitive "with the live contact with the instrument”. Without diminishing the importance of prestigious editions such as Urtext, Lipatti thought the "original spirit”, that is to say the idea carried by the score, to have "the greatest importance”. In his approach, he let himself be guided by an aspiration toward beauty and truth. The actual practice followed several stages. The discovery of the works’ content meant an assiduous labour, first on the mental level. Having drafted a particular artistic vision (by means of a musical thinking which analized exhaustively the particularities of that work’s form and content), Lipatti would then focus on the concrete, technical level, to which he would allot patience and sustained effort. Throughout his entire artistic life, and by his in-depth, responsible and modest work, put at the service of the music played, this unmatched pianist incessantly militated for the just highlighting of each and every detail. All details having acquired polish and elegance, Lipatti would move on to the final phase, which implied approaching the work from an architectural perspective. In his performances, he always combined the austere level of ideas with the creative imagination and artistic emotion.