Alfred Brendel, a classical pianist who followed his own lights on a long path from obscurity to international stardom, gaining a devoted following in spite of influential critics who faulted his interpretations of the masters, died on Tuesday at his home in London. He was 94.
His death was announced by his family in a news release.
Mr. Brendel was unusual among modern concert artists. He had not been a child prodigy, he lacked the phenomenal memory needed to maintain a large repertoire with ease, and he had relatively little formal training. But he was a hard and cheerfully patient worker. For the most part he taught himself, listening to recordings and proceeding at a deliberate pace as he concentrated on a handful of composers, including Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Liszt and Schoenberg.
“I never had a regular piano teacher after the age of 16,” he told the critic Bernard Holland of The New York Times for a profile in 1981, although he did attend master classes in his native Austria with the Swiss pianist and conductor Edwin Fischer and the Austrian-born American pianist Eduard Steurmann. “Self-discovery is a slower process but a more natural one.”
Over the years, Mr. Brendel developed and continually revised his own ideas on using the modern piano to make well-worn music sound fresh without violating the composers’ intentions. How well he succeeded was very much a matter of taste. His analytical approach appealed especially to intellectuals and writers, and it didn’t hurt, either, that he was himself an erudite writer on music history, theory and practice.
His fans filled the house to overflowing for recitals in New York, London and other major cities — including for his memorable cycle of the complete Beethoven sonatas at Carnegie Hall in 1983. Among his champions was Susan Sontag, who contributed a blurb to one of his several books of collected essays, “Alfred Brendel on Music” (2000), saying he had “changed the way we want to hear the major works of the piano repertory.”
A bit to his dismay, he thus found himself cast as a hero of the “formalists,” who championed structure, proportion and the primacy of the score in their hundred-years’ war with the “affectists,” as The Times’s chief music critic Harold C. Schonberg characterized a more extroverted crew who were concerned with emotional impact, color and line. Mr. Brendel was an heir to the tradition of Fischer and Artur Schnabel, as opposed to Vladimir Horowitz.
“I have never belonged to any club,” he protested. “I do not believe in schools of piano playing, and I have no technical regimen. Only the particular piece you happen to be playing can tell you about its technical problems.”
Still, his approached turned off more than a few critics — and especially those in New York, it seemed — even as they acknowledged his technical achievements. In a Times article from 1983, Mr. Holland contrasted him with the young Murray Perahia, whose apparent ease and naturalness made one feel “that there are things passing from his ear and mind to his arms and fingertips that neither he nor us really understand.”
“Mr. Brendel, on the other hand,” Mr. Holland wrote, “seems to understand everything, and that is both his fortune and his misfortune. While others seem to receive their music whole, Mr. Brendel has to reinvent his for himself — piece by piece. It is a laborious effort, and though Mr. Brendel’s playing does not always please us — it can lapse into brutality and ugly angularity — we are nevertheless drawn to it.”
In the same vein, Donal Henahan, another Times chief music critic, reviewing a segment of the Beethoven cycle earlier in 1983, called Mr. Brendel “a formidable precisionist who can play at breathtaking tempos without ever seeming to be taking a chance.” But he also found that Mr. Brendel’s playing could be “brittle” and “clinical.”
“It was as if Mr. Brendel were projecting an X-ray picture of each sonata onto a screen for our admiration,” Mr. Henahan wrote, “rather than luring us into the heart and soul of the composer.”
Mr. Brendel was treated more kindly abroad. Receiving the London Critics’ Circle Award in 2003, he gave a funny speech expressing gratitude to the reviewers in Graz, Austria, who predicted a brilliant future after his long-ago debut recital at age 17. “But,” he said, “I should also be grateful in hindsight to The New York Times, which for a number of years had put me down, for showing me that it is possible to gain a following and establish one’s reputation in spite of it.”
In fact, he said elsewhere, his sense of having made it on the strength of his appeal to audiences had given him more freedom than most artists to choose which music to perform and record.
Onstage, he was a tall and somewhat gawky figure with a way of seating himself at the piano that reminded one writer of a big bird coming in for an awkward landing. His thick eyeglasses and patchy head of hair, his contorted facial expressions, the bandages he wore on his fingertips to protect the nails, all contributed to the impression of a scholarly player not much concerned with making an impression.
He did do something about his distracting tics, though.
“When I saw myself on television for the first time,” he once said in an interview with the music writer and broadcaster Jeremy Siepmann, “I became aware that I’d developed all kinds of gestures and grimaces that contradicted what I did and what, musically, I wanted to do. I then had a mirror made, a big standing mirror, which I put beside the piano,” he continued. “It helped me to coordinate what I wanted to suggest with my movements with what really came out.”
Alfred Brendel was born on Jan. 5, 1931, in Wiesenberg in Moravia, now a region in the Czech Republic, to Albert and Ida (Wieltschnig) Brendel. His father was an architectural engineer who worked in various East European cities.
As a child, Alfred began studying piano in Zagreb, Yugoslavia. He later attended the Graz Conservatory and then the Vienna Academy, where his graduation in 1947 with a state diploma in piano marked the end of his academic training.
Mr. Brendel had always had other interests, including painting, architecture and literature. But he committed himself to a career in music after competing in Italy’s Busoni competition in 1949. By his account, he went on a lark, paying his own expenses in traveling to Bolzano, the northern city where the event continues to be held. He placed third (fourth, technically, but no first prize was awarded that year), and it was enough to encourage him to move to Vienna, where for the next 20 years he pursued a concert career in the shadow of players like Paul Badura-Skoda and Friedrich Gulda, both his generational peers. He picked up some recording contracts, though, first with the budget label SPA and then Vox and Vanguard.
The turning point came with a concert in Queen Elizabeth Hall in London in the late 1960s. “For some reason people became very excited about my playing,” Mr. Brendel told Mr. Holland in the 1981 Times profile. “The next day record companies began calling up my agent. The market at the time was full of my older, low-priced issues, and no one knew how to compete with them without first raising my image. After that particular concert, this was no longer a problem.”
Mr. Brendel’s marriage in 1960 to Iris Heymann-Gonzala ended in divorce in 1972. That year, he moved to London, where he would live with his second wife, Irene (Semler) Brendel. That marriage also ended in divorce.
He is survived by his partner, Maria Majno; a daughter, Doris Brendel, from his first marriage; three children from his second marriage, Adrian, Sophie and Katharina Brendel; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Brendel recorded all of the Beethoven sonatas three times. He also did much to further interest in Schubert’s piano music and, perhaps to a greater degree, that of Liszt — “a noble spirit,” in his estimation, whose reputation as a serious composer was unfairly damaged by lesser talents jealous of his virtuosity and magnetism.
Mr. Brendel gave his last concert, in Vienna, on Dec. 18, 2008. Two years later, in a chat with a writer for The Telegraph in London, he described a schedule that left no time for missing the concert hall. “Well, it seemed the right time,” he said. “Ideally, I would like to have just quietly stopped without telling anyone, so I could avoid all those farewell parties, with the tears I did not shed!”
He added: “I mapped out exactly what I would do when I retired. For a long time I had a literary life — not a hobby, a second life — and it was nice to pursue lecturing and writing in a more focused way.” He also gave readings of his works and piano master classes.
One project was the publication of “Playing the Human Game” (2011, Phaidon Press), his collected poems in German and English. The poems show a subversive, mischievous side of his personality. One, “The Coughers of Cologne,” stands as payback for years of enduring every soloist’s curse: audiences that make inappropriate noises at the most crucial times. It begins:
The Coughers of Cologne
have joined forces with the Cologne Clappers
and established the Cough and Clap Society,
a nonprofit-making organization
whose aim it is to guarantee each concertgoer’s right
to cough and applaud.
Attempts by unfeeling artists or impresarios to question such privileges
have led to a Coughers and Clappers initiative.
Members are required to applaud
immediately after sublime codas
and cough distinctly
during expressive silences.
Ash Wu contributed reporting.
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