'I get up with you and I go to bed with you,' I said jokingly. We stood in his kitchenette, where he made coffee for himself and tea for me. Reinbert's big startled eyes told me that my ironic remark had landed in the barren soil of his deadly seriousness. - It was not the first and not the last misunderstanding between biographer and biographer.
It must have been sometime in 2008 or 2009, when the oppressive realisation dawned on me that I had saddled myself with a monster task. After all, I had resolved to place the pianist, composer and conductor in the context of his time, in order to make the human of the myth separate. Had he really been the one in the 1960s to tear open the newsprint with which our country would have been glued shut in terms of modern music? Was Reinbert really the first to introduce composers like Kurtág, Ligeti, Ustvolskaya and Gubaidoelina?
Answering such questions required a thorough historiography of Dutch musical life from 1900 onwards. Many hours, days and months I spent in our patriotic archives, rummaging through his own inexhaustible cuttings folder, which he willingly made available to me. The carefully cut-out but often undated pieces drove me to despair, as did the countless gaps in archive records and the many damaged or missing microfiches.
At the time, I could not have foreseen that it would take more than seven years of research and countless conversations with Reinbert and some five hundred other, painstakingly tracked down interlocutors before I would put a stop to my manuscript. However, the seemingly endless, cluttered mountain of work that came my way did keep me up nights. So, yes, there was a grain of truth in my sigh.
And now Reinbert is dead.
He died on Friday, February 14, 2020. - Right on Valentine's Day. And exactly six years and two weeks after the world premiere of his orchestral work Der nächtliche Wanderer in the NTRZaturdayMatinee. I had just managed to include the jubilant critiques in my biography, which was published exactly a month later.
Although Reinbert had become increasingly frail in recent years and was only a shadow of his already spindly self, the news of his death arrived like a sledgehammer blow.
And no, I didn't have an obituary ready, because in my view that is asking the gods to hurry. And secretly I was convinced that Reinbert had eternal life. He was such a rock-solid presence in our national musical life, defended so many composers with such fervour, it was simply unthinkable that one day he would no longer be around.
But now Reinbert is dead.
I still can't quite grasp it.
And no, I am not going to list his many merits again; after all, I have already done that exhaustively. The fact that in it, to his annoyance, I also described his lesser sides was widely reported in the press. His dismissive reaction once again gave me many sleepless nights.
Nevertheless, I have always appreciated him. Thanks to Reinbert, I got to know the above-mentioned - and countless other - composers. And although he was not the first to perform their music, his interpretation was so penetrating that I was glued to my chair, with shivers down my spine and goose bumps on my skin.
And like others, I would hang on his every word when he told me about the composer(s) who was on his mind at the time. Without exception, they turned out to be the most extraordinary, adventurous, ground-breaking composer he had ever met. - He invariably expressed his unremitting enthusiasm in superlatives.
And now Reinbert is dead.
He was a great musician who enthused many people with modern music. In recent years, he reached an even wider audience with his romantic-swelling interpretations of the Matthew and St John Passion By Bach.
That he could also be rigid and unforgiving, as I experienced after the publication of my biography, was sometimes hard to bear. But I have always distinguished man from music and harbour the thought: 'He who is without sin cast the first stone.'
Therefore: sand about it. Reinbert is dead, long live Reinbert!
English (UK) 
Nederlands 
Français 
