Jonathan Powell (1969-2025) – a person, then a great musician

I, like many others, am still reeling from the tragic news made public yesterday (7 January) of the death of pianist Jonathan Powell, on 27 December 2025, at the age of 56. I had known Jonathan for around 30 years, and whilst we had been closer during some periods than others, I considered him now a good friend, and someone I cared about and admired.

Doubtless many others will also draw attention to Jonathan’s extraordinary achievements: as a pianist able to absorb a vast repertoire often with seeming ease, including many of the most challenging pieces (he was especially renowned for his performances and recordings of the transcendentally difficult music of Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji, including his eight-and-a-half-hour Sequentia Cyclica (1948-49)). He was also a brilliant intellect, a dedicated Slavist who spoke Russian well as well as Polish, and had championed a huge range of lesser-known Russian (the music of Aleksander Skryabin was a particular passion), Ukrainian, Polish, Romanian and many other Eastern European composers, alongside much other repertoire from Britain, France, Spain, Italy, the US and elsewhere. He was also a composer, though this activity ebbed and flowed at different points in his life; some of his music could best be described as a type of ornate post-tonal idiom which overlapped somewhat with figures associated with the ‘new complexity’, but never really embraced modernist fragmentation and angularity. After the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022, he did turn very hostile towards Russian culture and society and even stopped playing a good deal of Russian repertoire, and he and his wife, then living in Poland, let a Ukrainian refugee stay at their home. As a player, he would have located the style to which he gravitated in the tradition of Aleksander Goldenweiser and others, and this seems fair. Whilst relatively unusual for a British player, it would be wrong to characterise him as a stylistic radical as a player – his playing was continuously characterised by a very strong sense of line and underlying harmonic flow. When playing modernist music of Berio, Xenakis, Ferneyhough and others these qualities tended to remain and it would be rare to encounter playing from him which might be characterised as more dry (with little or no pedal), pointillistic, ‘spikey’, or aloof. The modernist work he valued most constituted a continuation and expansion of a late romantic tradition, and even the music of Prokofiev and Stravinsky (after the early great ballets) was not the closest to his heart. A major international profile proved somewhat elusive for a while for Jonathan, until the last 10-15 years of his life when he finally achieved the recognition he deserved.

But that is not really what I want to talk about here, however estimable his abilities and achievements undoubtedly were. The cause and nature of his death are not yet known, and I will not speculate on these. I should also make clear that I did not know his wife, nor talked to him or others about her, so nothing in what follows should be read as any comment on her. What is no secret to the many who knew him is that he had his own many demons and other issues. He seemed more settled and happy in the last 15 years, and had been married for over a decade, following a string of short-term relationships. He and his wife lived together in Poland with their two sons. Sadly, he posted on social media in early autumn 2025 about the fact that his marriage was coming to an end, and was now estranged from his wife. This clearly hurt him greatly (and I want to state emphatically that in absolutely no sense whatsoever would I want to imply any criticism of his wife for wanting to move away, and would strongly resent anyone who tries to do so). Pictures from the last months do not show him in a healthy or happy way, having lost weight and become paler, though to those who knew him, health problems had seemed evident before then, indeed from before he was married. I tried to speak to him on the phone just a week before he died, just as a friend when I knew things were rough for him – after two plans to do so which were aborted at his end, I decided that if he wanted to speak, he would follow up, so didn’t push more. He was talking and posting about getting a new piano and furniture for the place he had moved into in Brighton, so it seemed like he was thinking more positively. I’m now regretting not pushing more

Jonathan was someone who needed help and support. He did get some of this from various people in his life, but I believe professional help became more difficult following his move to Poland. But there were also issues about how he was perceived and constructed by many, not least some of his acolytes and other musicians with whom he attended Cambridge University in the mid-1980s.

Jonathan did attend Eton College, but as a scholarship student; he was from a relatively ordinary middle-class family, certainly not what one might consider the ‘establishment’, though some treated him as such (and I made this mistake for a while). But this fact also contributed to a perception of him as one of a ‘breed apart’. He was thought of as mysterious, brooding, somewhere between a Dostoyevskyian antihero and a Rasputin-like figure, a type of ‘mad genius’, or even someone transplanted to the modern world from an earlier era.

Jonathan always spoke just a bit slower and a bit louder than might be thought normal, for reasons which are unclear, but which I do not believe were any type of affectation. But this was part of what I believed generated a type of mystique – rather as Paganini’s pale complexion, borne of illness, was read by many of the more lurid nineteenth-century critics as signifying his coming from ‘another world’. One musician even regularly called Jonathan ‘Satan’s ambassador’, for reasons likely connected to this. Also, as he was clearly a man who was far from happy some of the time and given to prolonged downs, this also fed into clichéd ideas of the ‘artistic personality’.

But I don’t buy any of this – much of which has already started doing the rounds again in obituaries – and never have, viewing it as little other than the most banal stereotypes of romantic mythology. Attempts to portray the mental illness of Robert Schumann or Friedrich Hölderlin as some type of window onto a fantastical netherworld are worthy only of abject contempt, as are Michel Foucault’s presentation of the distinction between ‘madness’ and ‘civilisation’ as essentially just a social construction in order to render some people marginalised and socially unacceptable. Undoubtedly forms of social pathologisation have occurred across history (and more recently in some communist societies for political dissidents) but that does not mean mental illness is not a real thing, or that those suffering from it (speaking here as someone who has gone through some bouts of mild depression and other things) do not want and need help to manage and often minimise this.

In Jonathan’s case, his amazing achievements were despite his various issues, not because of them. He was an extraordinary individual who, when living in Britain, was in a society which either distrusts such people, or turns them into myths. Jonathan encountered both of these; I don’t think he ever liked being placed on a pedestal the way he sometimes was, and wanted to interact with others in a more regular fashion. The social expectations upon men of his type of generation are exacting – overt revelation of vulnerability is very dangerous, especially in a musical world in which some of the lowest of low (including some now lionising him) will fish for malicious gossip to spread around as often as they can, to compensate for their own chronic insecurities and sense of inadequacy.

There is also lots of nonsense spoken about how if men interacted and supported each other in the same way as women, everything would be a lot better. First of all, one should not over-sanitise women’s support networks and the ways those can be exploited by some for social position and favour. Secondly, the socialised expectations on men (including expectations from some women, various of whom – not all – will run a mile from men who seem upset or unsettled) are more than a few can change quickly, and they still have to live and function in such a society. To expect men to support other men simply by adopting a ‘feminised’ discourse is patronising rot, mostly spread by those seeking easy gender capital, no less reprehensible than macho figures who love to do down others as part of a competitive toxic masculinity. Many men in middle-age facing common problems – marital or relationship break-down, loss of work, or terrorisation at work – simply need company in which they feel safe, appreciated, cared about and not judged, and where they are not always expected to be dominant, the life and soul, or whatever. That is the very least they deserve. Asking them to let it all out, wear their hearts on their sleeves, is not always fruitful or productive. 

How much of this applies to Jonathan I cannot be sure at this stage. But I do know he was first and foremost a person who was going through difficult times, and reacted to these as many others would under the circumstances. How much this relates to his death I do not yet know, but I and others are desperately wondering what else we might have done to help. Some will say this momentarily, and go on treating others of his ilk in a similar fashion, and preying on their misfortunes. This should instead be a time to learn, not least that artists are people too,, and have to deal with the same struggles of life as everyone else – whilst at the same time sometimes finding their personal lives are treated as public property. 

So I don’t want to remember or hear about Jonathan as a ‘tortured genius’ or other sort of mythical figure. I am mourning the loss of a person, one I cared about very much. If he had been someone of more average capacities, the tragedy would be no less.

Addendum 17 January 2026: I feel the need to add something which is difficult but necessary. In the immediate aftermath of Jonathan’s death, I read tributes that were clearly written from a perspective of love, admiration, shock and grief. Yet I found myself feeling physically sick when reading them. This was not because these accounts were inaccurate, but because they reproduced a familiar way of seeing that I believe is deeply dangerous – and to which the above was, in part, a response.

In artistic cultures, there is a long tradition of rendering severe distress as a form of ‘wildness’, self-destruction into ‘anarchic’ or eccentric behaviour, and collapse people into mystification and legend. The effect is not merely to turn a human being into an aesthetic object. It makes it easier to marvel, to tell stories and anecdotes for entertainment, to feel close to the drama — and harder to recognise when someone is in genuine danger.

I do not believe this tendency kills people in any simple or direct way. But I do believe it contributes to environments in which serious warning signs are repeatedly misread, minimised, or even admired. In that sense, the spinning of such narratives is not an innocent act. They shape what a community notices, what it tolerates, and what it fails to intervene in – and will continue to do so in the future. Sadly in Jonathan’s case the warning signs were sadly all too clear to see.

My insistence on Jonathan as a person first is grounded in this conviction. However brilliant, charismatic, or overwhelming he could be, none of that should ever have obscured the seriousness of what he was living with — or the responsibility of those around him not to turn suffering into spectacle.