Maria João Pires Stopped Performing Last November and Has Opened a Piano Academy: 500 Euros an Online Lesson, 800 a Day at Belgais

Maria João Pires stopped giving concerts last November, at 81, after a period of ill health. On Sunday her team announced what she is doing instead: teaching, from the house in the Beira Baixa she has been trying to make work as an arts centre since 1999, and over Zoom to anyone anywhere with a fast enough connection.

The project is called the MJP Piano Academy, and the announcement was carried across the Portuguese press as a cultural item. The part that went unreported is that it already has a booking page with prices on it, and the prices are the most concrete statement anyone has made about what the last three decades of Portuguese pianism are worth by the hour.

The price list

Bookings run through a scheduling system linked from the academy's page. Three services are currently open:

• Belgais Residency, 800 euros. One private lesson with Pires per day, about eighty minutes, at the Belgais Centre in Escalos de Baixo, in the municipality of Castelo Branco. The price includes lodging for the night before the lesson, a private studio with a piano for practice, access to a private kitchen, and breakfast provisions. Meals are not provided, though groceries for the rest of the day can be added at booking. Students are told to arrive from 5pm the day before and leave by 4pm the day after arrival.
• Online lesson, adult, 500 euros. Eighty minutes over Zoom, for students aged 14 and over.
• Online lesson, child, 250 euros. Forty-five minutes, for students aged 6 to 14. Under-14s book the shorter format by default, though from the age of twelve, depending on level and preference, they can book the eighty-minute lesson instead.

Residency students must also be at least six years old, and minors at Belgais have to be accompanied by a parent or guardian, who may stay in the student's studio for the duration. Lessons are offered in English, French, German and Portuguese, with basic Spanish possible. Students may work on a maximum of two pieces per lesson, and are asked to identify each one precisely, down to catalogue reference, opus number and key.

The cancellation terms differ by service and are stricter at Belgais than online: more than 72 hours' notice for a residency and more than 24 hours for an online lesson are refundable, less a 4 percent payment-processing fee, and anything later is not refundable at all. A lesson cancelled by Pires is fully refunded or rescheduled.

The equipment requirement is not a formality

The online offer comes with a hardware specification that will exclude a good number of the students who would most like to take it. A laptop or desktop computer is mandatory, because the required Zoom settings are not compatible with tablets or smartphones. An external microphone must be connected to the computer and to the Zoom application. Speakers or headphones are required, with the audio input set to the external microphone. And the connection must run at more than 100 Mbps download and more than 30 Mbps upload, with the page linking to a speed test so applicants can check before booking.

The site publishes separate Zoom configuration guides for Mac and Windows. The specification is doing something audible: default videoconferencing audio processing is built to suppress everything that is not speech, which is precisely what destroys a piano tone, and the settings guides exist to switch that processing off.

In a country where fibre reaches most urban addresses but where upload speeds in the interior are frequently the binding constraint, the 30 Mbps upload floor is worth noting. The academy's own residency programme is in Castelo Branco district; a student living nearby may find it easier to drive to Belgais than to meet the specification at home.

What is coming, and what it says about Belgais

Two further formats are announced as being in preparation, with waiting lists open.

Belgais Workshops are described as a week of intensive work supervised by Pires, assistant teachers and, where appropriate, other speakers, and the description lists lecturers, academics, therapists and a yoga teacher among them. The framing is explicitly set against the conventional format: the workshops are said to encourage interaction between participants, collective work sessions and exchanges over shared meals, "trying to offer an alternative to traditional masterclasses".

Online Workshops are the more novel item commercially. These are weekly group sessions for three to four students who apply to a monthly programme, and they will also be sold on a subscription basis to viewers and listeners, allowing other students, teachers or simply enthusiasts to watch the monthly events and take part in a monthly question-and-answer session with Pires. That is a recurring-revenue model attached to a teaching studio, and it is unusual at this level of the classical world.

Behind both sits a larger ambition. The announcement says the team is working on a plan to reopen the Belgais Centre for Arts as a broader programme of in-person events and experiences, this time sharing its activities through a dedicated Belgais online platform for an international audience, and that the MJP Piano Academy will most likely merge into that platform once it launches. More information, the announcement says, in the coming months.

Why the word "reopen" is doing a lot of work

Pires created the Centro Belgais para o Estudo das Artes (Belgais Centre for the Study of the Arts) in 1999 on an estate at Escalos de Baixo, a village in the Castelo Branco countryside, as a pedagogical and cultural project. It closed in 2009 in difficult financial circumstances, with the association carrying substantial debts. The estate and its concert hall came back into use in a renewed form from 2018, hosting retreats, workshops and recordings.

Set against that history, an online booking system with fixed prices, published cancellation terms and card payment is not a small change of presentation. It is the first version of Belgais that does not depend on grants, sponsorship or ticketed attendance in a rural concert hall, and it is the version most likely to survive its founder's decision to stop travelling.

It also lands in a district that has spent 2026 arguing about access. The Beira Baixa railway line, which serves Castelo Branco, has been out of action since a storm took away an embankment in February and is due back on 20 September. A residency programme that expects students to arrive the day before their lesson is, among other things, a transport proposition, and the interior's difficulty in holding onto people and services is a running theme of the year, from rail closures to the state paying to get newspapers there at all.

The performer who stopped

Pires was born in Lisbon on 23 July 1944 and gave her first public performance at the age of four. She studied with Campos Coelho and Francine Benoît, then in Germany with Rosl Schmid and Karl Engel, and won first prize in the 1970 Beethoven competition. She recorded for Erato for fifteen years and for Deutsche Grammophon for twenty, a discography that made her the most widely heard Portuguese classical musician of her generation.

Since the 1970s her stated preoccupation has been the relationship between art, community and education rather than the concert circuit. In 2012, in Belgium, she started the Partitura projects: choirs for children from disadvantaged backgrounds, and workshops built on the idea of an altruistic dynamic between artists of different generations, offered as an alternative to a musical culture organised around competition. She has said of the new academy that teaching is "much more" than the common meaning of the word, describing it as a dialogue through music, a giving and receiving, a shared apprenticeship in the art of listening.

She announced her retirement from performing in November 2025 following health problems, and in July 2026 received an honorary doctorate from the University of Évora, where she said she remained interested in recording in the studio.

What this means if you are in Portugal

• The residency is open to amateurs. There is no audition, no conservatory requirement and no upper age limit in the published conditions. The only stated eligibility rules are age six and above, and the two-piece repertoire cap. That is unusual: access to a musician of this standing normally runs through institutions.
• Budget for more than the lesson. The 800 euro residency covers the room and the piano, but not lunch or dinner unless you add the groceries option, and not the journey to a village more than 200 kilometres from Lisbon.
• Check your upload speed before you book online. The 30 Mbps upload requirement is the specification most likely to fail, and the cancellation policy does not treat a technical problem at your end as the academy's problem.
• The subscription tier is the one to watch if you are not a pianist. The announced viewing plan for the Online Workshops, with a monthly question-and-answer session, is aimed at teachers and listeners rather than performers, and it is the only part of the offer that will not cost hundreds of euros a session.
• It is a Castelo Branco story as much as a music story. A functioning international arts centre in the interior is exactly the kind of thing regional development programmes spend years trying to manufacture. This one already exists, has a building, and is now being rebuilt around a booking page.

Portugal's classical infrastructure is concentrated in Lisbon and Porto, where the country's largest private cultural institution reopened its museum in July after eighteen months of works, and its musical identity abroad is still mostly carried by fado. What Pires has put online this weekend is a different proposition: not a festival, not a season, not a competition, but a rural house with a piano in it and a calendar anyone can book. Whether it scales is a question for the subscription tier. Whether it works at all is, for the moment, a question of who fills the first residencies.