Alfred Brendel obituary
In the postscript to his 1998 book of poetry One Finger Too Many, the pianist Alfred Brendel cites among his muses an elderly woman who stopped in front of the bench on which he was sitting at New York's Museum of Modern Art, pointed at him and asked: 'Are you Woody Allen?'
The fact that he could be confused with the American actor and director is not in itself surprising: with his puckish face, quizzically raised eyebrows and thick-rimmed Eric Morecambe glasses, Brendel, who has died aged 94, did have the air of a comedian. It was an aura he relished and cultivated in his quirky poetry and it goes to the heart of his personality.
For Brendel's art was characterised by a paradox. On the one hand lay an intellectual discipline, academic rigour and search for perfection; on the other a delight in the absurd. He once listed 'laughing' as his favourite occupation and was fond of observing that 'humour is the sublime in reverse'.
In a performing career that spanned six decades Brendel commanded a respect that came, especially in the later years, to border on reverence. His authoritative interpretations of the classical repertoire – primarily Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert – were second to none, though in his earlier years he was also a fine Lisztian and helped to establish Schoenberg's Piano Concerto in the concert repertoire.
But for a sense that he would not be able to do it justice and that it would draw him away from his beloved classical repertoire, he might have been an active advocate for contemporary music, for it interested him keenly and he was a familiar sight at avant-garde events.
In 2007 Brendel announced his intention to retire following a year-long series of concerts and recitals. The final London recital, at the Royal Festival Hall in June 2008, was representative of his last years in that, while lacking something of the flair and muscularity that had so impressed in his prime, his playing of Mozart and Beethoven had all the nuanced subtlety and consummate artistry we had come to expect. Schubert's valedictory Sonata in B flat, D960, was delivered with inspirational insight, while encores by Bach and Liszt paid tribute to masters recently neglected by him.
The last appearance of all came in December 2008 in Vienna, where Brendel chose to bow out with Mozart's youthful Piano Concerto No 9 in E flat, K271, the 'Jeunehomme'.
Born in Wiesenberg, Moravia (now the Czech Republic), Alfred was the son of Ida (nee Wieltschnig) and Albert Brendel. He had a somewhat itinerant childhood on account of his father's diverse occupations (architectural engineer, businessman and manager of resort hotels).
It was when his father became a cinema director in Zagreb, Croatia, that he had his first piano lessons, at the age of six, from Sofia Dezelic, followed after the second world war by study with Ludovika von Kaan at the conservatoire in Graz, Austria, and private composition lessons with Artur Michl, a local organist and composer. His relative lack of formal training in music was, Brendel later considered, a blessing, for it encouraged him to be self-critical: 'A teacher can be too influential,' he once said.
It was entirely characteristic that his first public recital, in Graz at the age of 17, should have consisted of works by Bach, Brahms, Liszt and himself, but only works that included fugues. Even the four encores contained fugues.
It was an early manifestation of the intellectual streak that was to define him; also evident was his interest in literature and the visual arts – he held a one-man exhibition of paintings in a Graz gallery in conjunction with his recital. After taking fourth prize at the prestigious Busoni competition in Bolzano, northern Italy, in 1949 he began to tour Europe, taking part in masterclasses by Paul Baumgartner, Eduard Steuermann (a pupil of Busoni and Schoenberg) and, crucially, Edwin Fischer, to whom (along with Alfred Cortot and Wilhelm Kempff) he believed he owed the most.
He made his first recordings in the 1950s, and became the first pianist to record the entire piano works of Beethoven, a memorable and highly praised issue on the Vox–Turnabout label (1958-64).
His Queen Elizabeth Hall debut in London led to offers from three record companies, and having been signed by Philips as an exclusive artist, he recorded a Beethoven sonata cycle in the 70s. His complete Philips recordings (114 CDs) were reissued by Decca in 2016.
Beethoven was always to loom large on his musical horizon: in the 1982–83 season, for example, he gave the complete cycle of 32 sonatas in 77 recitals in 11 cities across Europe and America, and further similar tours were made in the 90s, with a third recorded cycle completed in 1996. Inevitably, perhaps, some of the fire and spontaneity present in the first of those recorded cycles was no longer evident in the third, but in its place was a spiritual profundity, the product of a lifetime's experience.
Alongside Beethoven, it was Mozart and Schubert who had pride of place. Clues to Brendel's approach to Mozart can be gleaned from a revealing essay entitled A Mozart Player Gives Himself Advice, in which he proclaims that: 'Mozart is made neither of porcelain, nor of marble, nor of sugar.'
The 'touch-me-not' Mozart and the 'sentimentally bloated' Mozart were to be avoided at all costs. Neither was Mozart a 'flower child' with weak or vague rhythms and dreamy tone, Brendel asserted. Rather it was the duty of the interpreter to find the ideal balance between freshness and urbanity, unaffectedness and irony, aloofness and intimacy.
Playing Schubert, on the other hand, was, according to Brendel, akin to 'walking on the edge of a precipice'. In this music, happiness was always on the verge of tragedy and Schubert's brooding moods were projected as harbingers of the phantasmagorical visions of Schumann. It was also the case that Brendel revelled in the romantic, Sturm und Drang – storm and stress – aspects of Haydn and Mozart, which similarly looked forward, in his hands, to the emotionalism of Beethoven.
With regard to Liszt's music, Brendel drew attention to its fragmentary nature, and amply fulfilled what he saw as the interpreter's responsibility to 'show us how a general pause may connect rather than separate two paragraphs, how a transition may mysteriously transform the musical argument'.
He claimed it was 'a magical art' and therefore, one might assume, a particular challenge for a man so ruled by his intellect. But in his performances of such works as Vallée d'Obermann and Sposalizio it was precisely the otherworldly, transcendental quality of the music he captured so well, not least by his perfect calibration of their silences.
The aim was to integrate passion and introspection, and while it goes almost without saying that the cult of the self-advertising virtuoso held little appeal for him, he was also, in his prime, able to surmount the fearsome technical demands of such a work as the Rákóczy March, deploying a rock-steady rhythmic control to generate its expressive force. A similar intensity characterised his rendering of Busoni's formidable Toccata, while his knowledge of the spooky world of German romanticism informed his response to the enigmatic aspects of Schumann's fantasy pieces.
In the last decade or so of his career, physical problems with his back and his arm prevented Brendel from essaying the big virtuoso works, though it has to be said that this was all of a piece with his concentration in these years on the inner essence of things: a striving after truth.
In some of these late recitals, the repertoire for which focused increasingly on the classical period, Brendel's playing often lacked the inspirational quality of his earlier years, but there was more than adequate compensation in the authoritative, penetrating readings he delivered. Such an evolution in his style may well have been related to a psychological development: inner emotional conflicts were perhaps reflected in the more volatile interpretations of his earlier period, while the sublime revelations of his late maturity were the product of a more reconciled, integrated personality.
Beyond the solo piano repertoire his recordings likewise reflected his predilections: major releases included four complete sets of the Beethoven concertos (most memorably with Simon Rattle), complete Mozart concertos with Neville Marriner (together with a further eight in conjunction with Charles Mackerras), the two Brahms Piano Concertos with Claudio Abbado and the Schumann with Kurt Sanderling. He collaborated also with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on a Winterreise and with Matthias Goerne on lieder by Schubert and Beethoven. Chamber recordings included the complete works of Beethoven for cello and piano with his son, Adrian.
His literary abilities and incisive mind resulted in two collections of immensely rewarding essays on music: Musical Thoughts & Afterthoughts and Music Sounded Out (both 1990). A third collection, Alfred Brendel on Music (2001), gathered together both published and previously unpublished essays. A further collection of essays and lectures – Music, Sense and Nonsense – distilling his thoughts on music over the decades, appeared in 2015.
If those collections amply demonstrated his erudition on musicological matters, his two volumes of poetry, One Finger Too Many and Cursing Bagels (2004), attested to a dadaist sense of humour and a florid imagination. In one poem an extra index finger was developed by a pianist 'to expose an obstinate cougher in the hall' or to indicate the theme in retrospect in a complicated fugue. Other poems mused on Brahms, beards and the Buddha.
After his retirement from the concert platform, Brendel continued to give lectures, in which he often attempted to distance himself from what he regarded as the self-indulgent excesses of the historically informed movement. Seeking his own authenticity in a balance between fidelity and interpretation, he evinced little patience with exaggerated phrasing and accentuation, and even less with over-brisk tempi: 'There is a reductionist theory that all music is dance,' he wearily intoned, 'and what a treat to hear an Agnus Dei or Miserere skipping along.'
All forms of the absurd fascinated Brendel: kitsch and masks (of each of which he had amassed collections), nonsense verse and cartoons. But his extra-musical enthusiasms embraced also Romanesque churches, baroque architecture, literature, film and much more. The sum total was an artist who relished eccentricity yet focused on the inner essence, who countered a cerebral image with a delight in the whimsical, and above all who never ceased in his search for musical truth.
In 1960 he married Iris Heymann-Gonzala, and they had a daughter, Doris. They divorced in 1972, and three years later he married Irene Semler. They lived in Hampstead, north London, and had three children: two daughters, Katharina and Sophie, in addition to Adrian. They divorced in 2012, and he is survived by his partner, Maria Majno, his four children and four grandchildren.
Alfred Brendel, pianist, born 5 January 1931; died 17 June 2025
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