In a Buenos Aires kindergarten in the mid-1940s, a five-year-old boy told a three-year-old girl she could not play the piano. She walked to the classroom instrument and played a piece flawlessly by ear. This episode follows that girl, Martha Argerich, born in 1941, from a legendary career launched by a playground dare through the pressure cooker of prodigy training under Vincenzo Scaramuzza, who taught her to treat the piano as a human voice using the full weight of the arm.

At 16 she won both the Geneva and Busoni competitions, then spent 18 months with a renowned maestro who gave her only four lessons and claimed to have taught her the gift of silence. She walked away from the piano for three years, considering work as a doctor or secretary, before a friend coaxed her back to win the 1965 Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Hating the lonelines ...