The question that could not be asked of Alfred Brendel

BarcelonaA Catalan music lover once had dinner with Alfred Brendel, transferred to London last Wednesday, and asked him if he believed that playing the piano was only a question of technique, or if it was essential to also have an idea, or an intellectual conception, of what was being played, whether it was Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert.

Brendel almost got angry. "How can you expect someone not to have an idea"—and he emphasized this word—"of what is being played, if the composer himself had a concept of each of his works and a diverse intentionality?" This contradicted another opinion, echoed by the music lover himself, who, once at the Higher School of Music of Catalonia as an advisor or consultant, asked a notable professor from the Juilliard School in New York, who was also there, the same question. In this case, the American replied that in a music school the only thing one should learn is the technique of an instrument. The Catalan music lover replied that a Baroque piece could not be played with romantic emotion, and that a Schubert sonata could not be interpreted as one plays the Goldberg Variations, Bach's. The Catalan advisor was fired.

Brendel stood out above all as a pianist, but he never stopped studying and reading: he conceived music as an intellectual product – although it was at the same time the highest expression of human spirituality – and he expressed this in his books; From A to Z of a Pianist. A book for piano lovers. and in About Music. Complete Essays and Lectures, both published in Barcelona (Acantilado, 2013 and 2016). He was one of the most prolific pianists of the 20th century and part of the 21st. He retired when he considered himself old and having lost his good ear.

When once asked what he thought of the Chinese pianist Lang Lang, Brendel replied that it would take fifteen or twenty years for him to make an informed judgment: for now, he said, he played all the notes, but that still didn't seem to him the same as making music or bringing a score to life. Brendel won't be in time to comment.

Perhaps the secret of his interpretations, especially those of Beethoven and Schubert, lies in his refusal to receive extensive indoctrination or instruction from his teachers. He concentrated and thoroughly studied the scores and aesthetic laws of each historical moment, and then, with a perfect, though variable, conjunction of idea and technique, he offered the world a distilled and elevated music: notes and spirit in harmony.