The celebrated pianist Alfred Brendel died on 17 June 2025 at the age of 94...
Remembering the great pianist, Alfred Brendel...
In what was billed as an ‘illustrated lecture’, the pianist engaged, enlightened and entertained, moving between lectern and keyboard to share his indomitable wit and wisdom about Liszt. Alfred Brendel’s lauded appearance at Aldeburgh Festival in 2012 was among the last of his public performances. He had retired from the concert platform some three years prior, yet his piano playing – unofficial, unprogrammed – as part of the event showed that the music had coloured beautifully in the autumn of the then 81-year-old’s life.
Brendel’s pianism, artistic analysis and musical thinking was dispensed, as it always was, with a brisk efficiency, as though 90 minutes could not contain all the treasures he had to share. Indeed, there would never be long enough for this creative colossus, who, in addition to his accomplishments at the piano, was a notable writer and painter. Brendel, who has died aged 94, combined rigorous intellectualism with an eccentric sense of humour and an appreciation for the kitsch.
Alfred Brendel... a serious artist with a sense of humour
This was often considered a curious paradox: how could the pianist who presented such coolly articulate Beethoven also take a baby tortoise on a lead into Austria’s Musikverein, as Brendel once did in the late 1950s? ‘I like funny things,’ Brendel shrugged to a bemused Tom Service on BBC Radio 3 in 2015, ‘It was walking slowly, looking at a bust of Mozart … it is so very baffling to do such a thing?’ The surrealist taste did not extend to Brendel’s repertoire, which largely focused on the first Viennese School, although he dabbled in the second, through close association with Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto.
Alfred Brendel... early studies, towering Beethoven and numerous writings
Brendel was born in 1931 in Wiesenberg in northern Moravia (now the Czech Republic) and spent a nomadic childhood against the backdrop of the Second World war, eventually settling in London in 1971. He had some lessons at the conservatoire in Graz, Austria, but was broadly self trained. After taking fourth prize at the Busoni piano competition in Bolzano, Italy (1949), he began to tour Europe, taking part in masterclasses with Eduard Steuermann (a pupil of Busoni and Schoenberg) and Edwin Fischer. Brendel, in turn, taught Paul Lewis and Imogen Cooper, among others.
He will be remembered for his Beethoven sonata cycles (Turnabout, Vox and Vanguard, 1958-64; then latterly Decca, 1992-96), concertos (with Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, Philips, 1997-98) and his numerous writings – from Music Sense & Nonsense (2015) to the adorable A Pianist’s A–Z (2013) – stretching, as he did, across the scholarly and the silly.