In the fall of 2018, pianist Nicolas Hodges noticed his body was shaking. He took her to a regular doctor’s appointment in Tübingen, Germany, where she lives. The doctor said it was probably stress, but recommended that she make an appointment with a neurologist.
Hodges didn’t make that appointment right away. But then, in January 2019, a tremor caused him to play a wrong note during a performance.
“Immediately it became clear that I needed to know what was going on,” he said.
Dr. Klaus Schreiber, a neurologist and a classical music lover, observed Hodges perform several minor physical tasks — walking across a room, undressing and dressing — before he sent him for a series of tests that confirmed Hodges has Parkinson’s disease.
Dr. estimated Schreiber said Hodges has been battling Parkinson’s for three years.
Hodges, 53, is a leading interpreter of contemporary classical music. As a soloist and chamber musician, he premiered and recorded works by many important composers of this century, and the last. Recently, his symptoms forced him to scale back and prioritize his performance over commitments.
The worst symptoms, which are rare, can leave him feeling, he said, like he “can’t play the piano.” But the diagnosis also strengthened his dedication to his artistry and the contemporary repertoire.
Physical limitations forced Hodges to make “aesthetic decisions,” he said, to choose what music to commission and perform more rigorously. The diagnosis “forced me to focus more on what were many conflicting things that mattered most to me.”
Hodges has a formidable technique and ability to make even the most complex pieces sound clearly. His tone color on the piano can shift from vinegary to mellow in a matter of seconds. He was remarkably adaptable to the widely divergent views of various contemporary composers. At John Adams’s “China Gate” (1977), Hodges combined rhythmic propulsion and tiptoe delicacy. In the opera by Brian Ferneyhough “shadow period” (2004), he tackles a prismatically virtuosic solo while asking enigmatic questions, such as “What is the cube root of a counterfactual?” At Simon Steen-Andersen’s Piano Concertos (2014), he confronts a video projection of himself on a broken grand piano.
In 2020, Hodges recorded “A Bag of Bagatelles,” which weave together works by Beethoven and Harrison Birtwistle, a close collaborator. The juxtaposition illuminates the complexity, unpredictability and orchestral scale that have animated the music of the two composers for centuries. In retrospect, Hodges realizes that he recorded the album with untreated Parkinson’s disease.
HODGES IS BORN in London in 1970. His father was a studio manager at the BBC who later worked in computing, and his mother was a professional opera singer. Hodges began playing the piano at age 6 and composing at 9. Among his early pieces was the first scene of an opera based on the legend of Perseus.
Hodges attended primary school at Christ Church Cathedral School in Oxford, where he studied viola, oboe, harpsichord and organ, in addition to piano. He sang in the Christ Church Cathedral Choir, performing works such as Benjamin Britten’s “War Requiem” at the Royal Festival Hall under Simon Rattle.
“We wake up earlier than the rest of the school to practice,” Hodges said. Students who didn’t play music “got half an hour more sleep than I did in my entire childhood.”
For secondary school, Hodges went to Winchester College, in Hampshire, where Benjamin Morison, a pianist and composer who is now a professor of philosophy at Princeton University, introduced Hodges to contemporary music by playing an LP of his music. by Birtwistle and Gyorgy Kurtag. Hodges and Morison performed an arrangement of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring” for two pianos and Pierre Boulez’s restless “Structures II” for their teachers and fellow students at Winchester, to the delight of reaction.
“I remember him being very precise — and encouraging me to be precise — and very musical,” Morison said of Hodges in a phone interview. “He makes music speak as music.”
In 1986, Hodges took a seminar with composer Morton Feldman at the Dartington Summer School, where Feldman impressed upon him the seriousness of avant-garde experimentation. Hodges also played in a band that covered songs by the Sex Pistols and the Sisters of Mercy.
It was an exhausting and influential time. “I improvised; I listen to weird, dark, funky music, and play Debussy,” Hodges said.
For several years, he considered pursuing composition, to the dismay of his more traditional-minded mother. At the age of 23, he decided to refocus on the piano. “I was happier as a pianist,” he said. “Composing is very hard work.”
As part of that decision, Hodges began taking piano lessons Sulamita Aronovsky, which defected to Britain from the Soviet Union. A car crash shortly after the move ended his career as a performer. “He used to tell me, whenever I would go to his lesson and complain, ‘Mr. Hodges, you have to accept that everybody has these problems,’” he recalled. “‘People who overcome these problems have careers.'”
Hodges has since performed as a soloist with orchestras including the New York Philharmonic, the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the London Philharmonic Orchestra — often in contemporary repertoire and often with pieces written for him. He is a piano professor at the State University of Music and Performing Arts in Stuttgart, Germany, and almost always premieres new work solo and in chamber music formations.
“All these composers we idolized when we were teenagers, he commissioned pieces from,” said Morison, who remains close to Hodges. “It was a rare thrill to witness that.”
WHEN HODGES RECEIVED upon his diagnosis, the news came with mixed feelings. The first, Hodges recalls, was a certain nervousness. “I’m going to be a medical miracle,” he thought to himself. “I will continue no matter what.”
When that phase passed, Hodges felt a sense of relief. He had a clear diagnosis, and the dopamine treatments prescribed by Dr. Schreiber. “The drug makes it possible for me to sometimes feel and play like I don’t have it,” Hodges said. “When you’re suffering from something like this and you’re not treated, you feel like you’re getting old before your time, you feel like your children are wearing you out – and my poor children are to blame for that.”
Hodges had to make tough decisions while prioritizing the fulfillment of promises. Since 2012, he has been playing Trio Accanto, an ensemble consisting of Hodges, German percussionist Christian Dierstein and Swiss saxophonist Marcus Weiss. The group toured major European new music festivals and recorded six albums of contemporary music together.
When Dierstein and Weiss learned of Hodges’ diagnosis, they were shocked. “We’re scared, and we’re just as worried and sad as we were when we first found out,” Dierstein said in a video interview. “But we’ve always been clear that we want to continue playing with Nic and we’ll take the illness into account.”
After a period of reflection during the coronavirus pandemic, Hodges decided to leave Trio Accanto. He found the logistics involved in traveling to concerts and dealing with the complex instrumental setups required by many pieces too taxing. The 2024-25 season will be Hodges’ last with the group.
Playing with the Trio Accanto is “perfect chamber music for me,” says Hodges. But, he adds, “Parkinson’s makes my life simple.”
Hodges has also learned to adjust the doses of his medication — including dopamine inhalers, receptor agonist patches and extended-release pills — in a way that supports his concert roster. This often requires great sacrifice: He actually schedules the worst of his symptoms.
In February, Hodges performed Rebecca Saunders’ “to an utterance” for piano and orchestra, a work composed for her, at the Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg. Final rehearsals on the afternoon of the performance meant he had to take dopamine once at 4pm, and again at 8pm
“There may have been moments where I felt a little tired,” Hodges said earlier in the day, “but in a game situation, that’s better than getting too little.”
In an email, Saunders said Hodges is still playing with intensity. “His recent performance of the piano concerto ‘to an utterance’ was brilliant, and I found it deeply expressive,” he wrote. He plans to write her an ambitious new piece that he describes as “a big, long solo based on the concerto.”
Seven other composers are currently working on new piano concertos for Hodges. This spring, he recorded the complete solo piano works of Betsy Jolas and premiered a new piece by Christian Wolff, “Scraping Up Sand in the Bottom of the Sea.” Hodges also plans to record an album with works by Debussy and contemporary composers, similar to his double portrait of Beethoven and Birtwistle.
On rare occasions, Hodges felt he was treated differently because of his illness. A composer recently “looked straight at my hands as if they were crooked or bleeding,” he said. But many of his colleagues were supportive, helping him adapt without hesitation or pity.
Hodges said his goal, now, is to adjust his career “to make sure I have the best chance to slow the progression of the disease and thus continue to play with whatever qualities I may have had before Parkinson’s more or less whole.”
He knew that wouldn’t last long. “If I have to stop playing, then I hope my friends tell me I should stop playing,” Hodges said. “But, so far, it’s working.”