With a 60-year career and self-taught background, Austria’s Alfred Brendel became a global icon of clblockical performance on his own terms.
Self-taught pianist Alfred Brendel, who was widely regarded as one of the greatest musicians of the 20th century, has died at the age of 94 in London, where he had lived for more than five decades.
Brendel retired from the concert stage in 2008 after a career spanning 60 years, but remained a towering figure in clblockical music. Known for his modesty and meticulous artistry, he once admitted in a do***entary: “I’m completely at a loss to explain why I made it.”
A quiet performer, a demanding listener
On stage, Brendel was intensely self-effacing, offering only quick bows before sitting at the piano. But while not one for “fireworks and histrionics”, as The Guardian once put it, he was famously intolerant of audience disturbances, even walking off stage mid-performance if coughing or noise became too disruptive.
“If I belong to a tradition, it is a tradition that makes the masterpiece tell the performer what he should do and not the performer telling the piece what it should be like,” he once said.
READ ALSO: Austria celebrates 200 years of ‘waltz king’ Johann Strauss II
A musical path without formal rules
Brendel began playing piano at age six and had little formal instruction after turning 16. Born in 1931 in Wiesenberg, Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), he spent his early years between Yugoslavia and Austria. After World War II, the family moved to Graz, where Brendel briefly studied at the city’s conservatory.
Beyond that, he was largely self-taught — something he came to see as an advantage.
“A teacher can be too influential. Being self-taught, I learned to distrust anything I hadn’t figured out myself,” he said. He preferred to tape-record himself learning new pieces, listening critically to his own playing.
Advertisement
The pianist’s pianist
Best known for his interpretations of the central European repertoire — including Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Liszt — Brendel became a touchstone for generations of pianists. Though he did not formally teach, he mentored artists like Till Fellner, Imogen Cooper, Paul Lewis and Kit Armstrong.
READ ALSO: 7 of the most famous Austrians in History
Regarded by many as an intellectual in the music world, Brendel resisted that label: “I have never been somebody who ***yses a piece and then plays it. I want to know the piece well and for it to tell me what it is about.”
A joyful farewell
When Brendel gave his final recital in Vienna in December 2008, he said he would miss the “adrenalin” and the public — “in spite of all those obnoxious coughers and the mobile telephones and hearing aids going off”.
After retirement, he continued to write and speak about music, publishing books and humorous verse, and giving lectures around the world.
Advertisement
He was the recipient of numerous honours, including the Hans von Bülow Medal from the Berlin Philharmonic and the Herbert von Karajan Music Prize, as well as honorary doctorates from prestigious universities.
“I’ve found it possible to talk about music without talking nonsense… and I want to say this about music in general — I’ve also had a lot of fun. I was never a tortured person,” he said.
READ ALSO: Ode to joy: How Austria shaped Beethoven’s Ninth
Source link
https://findsuperdeals.shop/
