Alfred Brendel, one of the greatest pianists in history, dies.
A prolific and revered performer, the 94-year-old musician also excelled as a writer.
BarcelonaThe Austrian pianist Alfred Brendel, a musical giant who also devoted himself to writing, died this Tuesday at the age of 94 at his London home, according to his family. Brendel as "a musician, pianist, essayist of sharp wit, humanist, and a unique reference point for 20th- and 21st-century music." He had retired from the stage since 2008, when he closed out a sixty-year career with a final concert in Vienna Sonning, the Furtwängler Prize for Musical Performance, London's South Bank, the Robert Schumann Prize, and the Ernst von Siemens Prize. He was not known for not addressing him as a maestro or teacher. He had a fine sense of humor in Barcelona in 2013 during the presentation of one of his books, the essay From A to Z of a Pianist. A book for piano lovers., which was published here, along with other works, by the Acantilado publishing house.
The musician will go down in history as one of the leading interpreters of the masters of Viennese classicism. His goals include being the first to record Beethoven's complete piano works ("I started with the smallest, with early works that are very different from his later, titanic personality," explained to ARA in 2016), and also recorded all of Mozart's piano concertos.
Throughout his career, Brendel performed with the leading orchestras and conductors of his time, and in many of the largest concert halls. But he did not want to perpetuate his career and retired at the age of 77, when he could still "bring out of the piano" what he liked, he explained in Barcelona in 2013. Also in Barcelona, in 2018, recognized in a conversation with Richard Sennett that music was still in his head: "For me, the piano was a voice, an entire orchestra. The works I've done in my life I still work on in my mind."
Brendel was born in 1931 in Vizmberk, and his childhood was marked by his family's moves to Zagreb and Graz and by the Second World War, which he experienced while living in Graz. He was not a child prodigy, nor did he have a particularly musical family environment, but he fell in love with music and studied piano, composition, and conducting at the Graz Conservatory until the age of sixteen, when he began recording his performances on a tape recorder to listen to himself later and correct his mistakes. He also attended master classes with famous pianists such as Edwin Fischer. In 1948, at the age of 17, he gave his first recital and the following year he won the Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition, which opened the door to his career as a concert pianist.
Versatile by nature, Brendel also stood out as a painter, poet and, above all, essayist. About music (2008, Acantilado) collected essays and lectures in which the pianist reflected on music with rigor and a touch of irony. "The great danger when writing about music is arrogance," he asserted in one of the texts in that book. Brendel appreciated humor in music, and also practiced it in his opinions on the musical world. "I would like to feel Lang Lang twenty years from now. We have to be patient with pianists. A violinist can master the instrument at sixteen or eighteen, but a pianist needs more time," he exclaimed in 2013. Poetry, he explained, was a late-life passion that arrived in the early nineties. "It was dark and everyone was asleep when I came up with a poem about a pianist who had an extra finger."
