Alfred Brendel (5 January 1931 – 17 June 2025) was a Czech-born Austrian classical pianist, poet, author, composer and lecturer, based in London. He is noted for his performances of music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, and Franz Liszt. He made three recordings of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas and was the first pianist to record Beethoven's complete works for solo piano.

Life and career

Brendel was born in Vizmberk, Czechoslovakia (now Loučná nad Desnou, Czech Republic) on 5 January 1931 to a non-musical family. They moved to Zagreb, Yugoslavia (now Croatia) when he was three years old and he began piano lessons there, with Sofija Deželić, at age six. The family later moved to Graz, Austria, following the father who worked as an architectural engineer, businessman, resort hotel manager and cinema director. Towards the end of World War II, the 14-year-old Brendel was sent back to Yugoslavia to dig trenches.

After the war, Brendel composed music as well as continuing to play the piano, to write and to paint; he never had more formal piano lessons and was largely self-taught after age 16.

Aged 17, Brendel first performed publicly in Graz. featuring a double fugue. He went on to make other strings of recordings, including three complete sets of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas (one on Vox Records and two on Philips Records). He was the first performer to record Beethoven's complete solo piano works. He recorded Mozart's piano concertos which is included in the 180-CD complete Mozart Edition. He also recorded numerous works by Liszt, Brahms, Robert Schumann, and particularly Franz Schubert.

Brendel completed many tours in Europe, the United States, South America, Japan and Australia. He had a particularly close association with both the Vienna Philharmonic and the Berlin Philharmonic; he is only the third pianist (after Emil von Sauer and Wilhelm Backhaus) to have been awarded honorary membership of the Vienna Philharmonic, and he was awarded the Hans von Bülow Medal by the Berlin Philharmonic.

Brendel worked with younger pianists such as Paul Lewis, Amandine Savary, Till Fellner and Kit Armstrong. He also performed in concert and recorded with his son, the cellist and appeared in many Lieder recitals with singers including Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Matthias Goerne.

In 2007 Brendel announced that he would retire from the concert platform after his concert of 18 December 2008 in Vienna, His final concert in New York was at Carnegie Hall on 20 February 2008, with works by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. Since his debut at Carnegie Hall on 21 January 1973, he performed there 81 times, including complete cycles of Beethoven's piano sonatas in 1983.

In April 2007, Brendel was one of the initial signatories of the "Appeal for the Establishment of a Parliamentary Assembly at the United Nations".

In 2009 Brendel was featured in the German-Austrian documentary Pianomania, about a Steinway & Sons piano tuner, directed by Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis. The film premiered theatrically in North America, where it was met with positive reviews by The New York Times.<!--as well as in Asia and Europe, and is a part of the Goethe-Institut catalogue.-->

Personal life

Brendel was married from 1960 to 1972 to Iris Heymann-Gonzala; they had a daughter, Doris, who became a progressive rock and pop rock musician. In 1975, Brendel married Irene Semler; they had three children, a son, Adrian, who became a cellist, and two daughters, Katharina and Sophie. They lived in Hampstead, London.

Work

Brendel performed series of the music of Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, Mozart and Liszt. He was particularly close to the works of Schubert, described by Gerald Felber from the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung as of "luminous warmth, vulnerable and sad, painfully transience-conscious and at the same time dreamlike" and "obsessed with beauty". Brendel played relatively few 20th-century works but did perform Schoenberg's Piano Concerto.

<!--Brendel was lauded by music critic Michael Steinberg as "the new Schnabel," whereas-->Harold C. Schonberg from the New York Times noted that some critics accused the pianist of "pedanticism". Brendel's playing was sometimes described as "cerebral," and he said that he believed that the primary job of the pianist is to respect the composer's wishes without showing off himself, or adding his own spin on the music: "I am responsible to the composer, and particularly to the piece".

Recordings

  • Alfred Brendel – Unpublished Live and Radio Performances 1968–2001
  • Great Pianists of the 20th Century – Alfred Brendel III

Publications

Brendel was a prolific author. His writings have appeared in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, and other languages. For several years, he was a contributor to The New York Review of Books. His own books include:

  • 1976: Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts, essays, Robson Books
  • 1990: Music Sounded Out, essays including "Must Classical Music be Entirely Serious?", Farrar Straus Giroux
  • 1998: One Finger Too Many, poetry, Random House
  • 2001: Alfred Brendel on Music, collected essays, A Cappella
  • 2003: Me, of All People: Alfred Brendel in Conversation with Martin Meyer (UK edition: The Veil of Order), Cornell University Press
  • 2004, Cursing Bagels, poetry, Faber & Faber
  • 2010: Playing the Human Game, collected poems, Phaidon Press
  • 2013:

Awards and accolades

  • Honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE; 1989)
  • Pour le Mérite for Sciences and Arts (1991)
  • Hans von Bülow Medal of the Berlin Philharmonic (1992)
  • Beethoven-Ring of the Vienna Music University (2001)
  • Léonie Sonning Music Prize (2002; Denmark)
  • Ernst von Siemens Music Prize (2004)
  • Prix Venenia: Premio Artur Rubinstein (2007)
  • Herbert von Karajan Music Prize (2008)
  • Juilliard Medal (2011)
  • Voted into the Gramophone Hall of Fame (2012)
  • Golden Mozart Medal of the Salzburg Mozarteum (2014)
  • Echo Klassik Lifetime Achievement Award (2016)

Brendel was awarded honorary doctorates from universities including London (1978), Oxford (1983), Yale (1992), University College Dublin (2007), McGill Montreal (2011), Cambridge (2012) and York (2018) and held other honorary degrees from the Royal College of Music in London (1999), New England Conservatory (2009), University of Music Franz Liszt Weimar (2009) and the Juilliard School (2011). He was an honorary Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford, Wolfson College, Oxford, and Peterhouse, Cambridge. He received Lifetime Achievement Awards by Edison, International Classical Music Awards, and Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, among others. He was included in Peter Donohoe's "Fifty Great Pianists" series for BBC Radio 3, which aired in 2012.

Notes

References

Further reading

  • The Festschrift for Brendel contains contributions by, i.a., Imogen Cooper, Andreas Dorschel, Till Fellner, Peter Gülke, Florence Noiville and Sir Simon Rattle.
  • Alfred Brendel interview, 20 April 1991
  • Alfred Brendel on Desert Island Discs. (BBC Radio 4, 2013)