Exception: final chord of a classic world star: Alfred Brendel is dead

Alfred Brendel was one of the most important musicians in the 20th and 21st centuries and as a genius on the buttons. Where the pianist appeared, he delighted his audience. Experts agree: Hardly anyone interpreted Beethoven’s works as masterfully as Brendel. The Austrian had already said goodbye to the concert podium years ago. On June 17, Alfred Brendel died in London at the age of 94.

“How very, very sad,” wrote the German pianist Igor Levit on the death of Brendels on X. “A unique musician and artist, a giant went.”

Brendel was unable to identify a single highlight in his long career. “I am grateful for the fact that I was able to develop without over the age of 60,” said the gifted pianist in an interview on his 90th birthday of the German Press Agency.

Singing operas on the record player

Alfred Brendel was born on January 5, 1931 in Wiesenberg, which is now part of the Czech Republic. “My parents were not musical,” he recalled, “but there was a wing at home, and I got piano hours as it should be for a bourgeois family.”

The operetta aria “Whether blond, whether brown” and the Berlin Chanson “I tear out a eyelash/and sting you dead”, sung by his own mother, were the first musical impressions of the young Alfred. As a child, he tried to sing about opera music on record.

During the war, the family lived in Yugoslavia at times, and after returning to Austria he studied at the Conservatory in Graz. Brendel’s career picked up speed as a teenager. “At 16, my teacher said that I could now move alone, should give a first piano evening and play the great pianist Edwin Fischer,” said Brendel. “From my seventeenth to the seven and seventh year I gave concerts.”

World fame in the 1950s

In the 1950s, he also became known internationally as a concert pianist. During this time he took his first recordings, which have followed countless recordings over the decades.

He played numerous cycles from Beethoven’s sonatas and concerts and was the first to record the full piano work. Brendel is attributed to a significant proportion to emphasize Haydn’s meaning as a composer. He established the music of many composers in the concert repertoire and made her work more popular.

Brendel’s interpretations of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven or Schubert became world famous. For him, Schubert’s music is “the most direct touching,” he said, the whole of his songs was “one of the peaks of music”.

His celebrated concert tours led the multi -award -winning musician around the globe for six decades. It was best he liked it “where the halls sound the most beautiful” and “where old and new music is performed,” said Brendel, adding: “And where the audience coughs the least.” The exceptional pianist was known to interrupt a concert if the cough bothered him too much.

Brendel, whom the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” once referred to the work and the intention of his composer, was the highest concern. He helped him to learn composing. “The experience of leading a piece of music to the last tone and writing down will help the interpreter to better understand foreign texts.”

In his book “After the final chord”, he apologized – with a wink – with the composers “for everything I did to you”. He also wrote: “It is difficult enough to do justice to the work, succeed rarely enough and, I think, is exciting enough.”

Second career as an author

In addition to playing and composing, writing was a “second purpose of life” for Brendel. He wrote numerous books and essays about music, plus bizarre poems, such as “a bacon pig, a real bacon pig” that calls him every day. “Grunting it tells me his life, chosen metaphorically speaking in his own mud.” Laughing was also a passion for Brendels.

The father of four has lived in London since the 1970s. “Vienna was provincial at the time. I longed for a big living city,” he said shortly before the Brexit, about whom the sophisticated pianist was disappointed. “But there were also personal reasons.”

Alfred Brendel almost modestly commented on his life’s work. “I was neither a child prodigy, nor did I have an early sensational career to end,” he said, expressing hope. “It would be nice if one or the other of my own recordings would continue to find their listeners in the future.”