Brendel, Alfred 1931-

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BRENDEL, Alfred 1931-

PERSONAL:

Born January 5, 1931, in Wiesenberg, Moravia (now part of the Czech Republic); son of Albert (an architect, businessman, and theater manager), and Ida (Wieltschnig) Brendel; married Iris Heymann-Gonzala, 1960 (divorced, 1972); married Irene Semler, 1975; children: (first marriage) Doris; (second marriage) one son, one daughter. Education: Graz Academy of Music, diploma, 1947; studied under Sofija Dezelic, Ludovika V. Kaan, Edwin Fischer, Paul Baumgartner, and Eduard Steuermann.

ADDRESSES:

Agent—Colbert Artists Management, Inc., 111 West 57th St., New York, NY 10019-2211.

CAREER:

Concert pianist. Debut recital, Graz, Austria, 1948; U.S. debut, 1963.

MEMBER:

American Academy of Arts and Sciences (honorary), Royal Academy of Music (honorary).

AWARDS, HONORS:

Premio Citta de Bolzano Concorso Busoni, 1949; Grand Prix du Disque, 1965, 1984; Edison Prize, 1973, 1981, 1984, 1987; British Music Trade Association award, 1973, 1978, 1981; Grand Prix des Disquaires de France, 1975; Deutscher Schallplattenpreis, 1976-77, 1981-82, 1984; Wiender Flotenuhr, 1976-77, 1979, 1982, 1984, 1987; Japanese Grand Prix award, 1977-78, 1980, 1982, 1984, 1987; Gramophone Award, 1978, 1980, 1982, 1984; Franz Liszt Prize, 1979-80, 1982-83, 1987; Frankfurt Music award, 1984; named honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic, 1998; Busoni Foundation award, 1990; Orden pour le Merite fur Wissenschaften und Kunste, 1991; Diapason D'Or award, Preis der deutschen Schallplatten-Kritik, and Hans von Bülow Medal, Berlin Philharmonic, all 1992; Royal Philharmonic Society prize, for Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts; Cannes Award, Edison Award, Netherlands, and Beethoven Ring award, University of the Performing Arts, Vienna, all 2001; recipient of the Leonie Sonning Prize, the Furtwaengler Prize for musical interpretation, the South Bank Award, and Robert Schumann Prize. Honorary doctorates from the University of London, 1978, Sussex University, 1981, Oxford University, 1983, Warwick University, 1991, and Yale University, 1992. Appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II, 1989, for outstanding services to music in Britain.

WRITINGS:

Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts, Robson Books (London, England), 1976, Princeton University Press (Princeton, NJ), 1977.

Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts, Robson Books (London, England), 1990, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 1991.

Störendes lachen während des Jaworts: neue texte (title means "Annoying Laughter while Saying 'I Do'"), Carl Hanser (Munich, Germany), 1997.

One Finger Too Many (poems), translated by Brendel and Richard Stokes, Random House (New York, NY), 1998.

Kleine teufel: neue gedichte (poems; title means "Little Devils"), C. Hanser (Munich, Germany), 1999.

On Music, translated by Brendel and others, Robson Books (London, England), 2001, published as Alfred Brendel on Music: Collected Essays, Chicago Review Press (Chicago, IL), 2002.

Ausgerechnet ich (interview), Carl Hanser (Munich Germany), 2001, translated by Richard Stokes as Me of All People: Alfred Brendel in Conversation with Martin Meyer, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 2002, published in England as The Veil of Order: Conversations with Martin Meyer, Faber (London, England), 2002.

Also author of Fingerzeig (title means "Finger Pointing"). Contributor to periodicals, including New York Review of Books. Credited with numerous classical recordings. The Art of Alfred Brendel, a five-box set, was released in honor of his sixty-fifth birthday in 1996, and includes twenty-five CDs featuring the works of Haydn and Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and Brahms and Schumann; work represented in Philips's "Great Pianists of the Twentieth Century" series.

SIDELIGHTS:

Pianist Alfred Brendel has been called "the world's greatest classical player" by the New Yorker, and few would dispute this fact. He has played with the finest orchestras and musicians of his time in countries around the world. Brendel was the first pianist to have recorded all of Beethoven's piano compositions and one of the few to have recorded all of Mozart's piano concertos.

The author of a biography of Brendel that appears on the Pittsburgh Symphony Web site noted "Alfred Brendel, praised as a supreme master of his art who is always searching for new perspectives, is recognized by audiences the world over for his legendary ability to convey the emotional and intellectual development of the music he performs. His accomplishments as an interpreter of the great composers have earned him a place among the most revered musicians of our time."

Brendel was born in Moravia to a family of German, Austrian, Slavic, and Italian heritage. Because his father changed jobs frequently, the young Brendel traveled continuously, and he spent his early childhood in Croatia, on the Adriatic island of Krk, where his parents ran a hotel. Brendel took his first lessons at the age of six and studied formally only until the age of sixteen. The family moved from Zagreb, Yugoslavia to Graz, Austria in 1943. Brendel dug ditches for the war effort but was returned to his family after suffering frostbite. He earned a diploma from a state school, and like young musicians of his time, he also studied composition and conducting, and he was soon composing his own music. At the time of his debut at the age of seventeen, a one-man exhibition of his watercolors was being held in a Graz gallery.

Brendel is largely self-taught. He attended concerts in Vienna and learned from the masters. He began his international career after winning a prize in the 1949 Concorso Busoni competition and alternated between touring and taking classes with the preeminent musicians of the day, including Paul Baumgartner, Eduard Steuermann, and Edwin Fischer. He later said Fischer had the greatest impact on his style, and Brendel traveled to Lucerne, Switzerland to study with Fischer from 1949 to 1951.

Success did not come immediately to Brendel. His was not a flamboyant style, but rather a restrained concentration on interpreting the music as he felt the composers intended. In addition to playing, he also held master classes in Vienna from 1960 until the early 1970s, when he moved to London. With success came a schedule that was brutal. During the 1982-83 season, for example, he played seventy-seven recitals in eleven cities in France, Great Britain, the United States, Austria, Germany, Switzerland, and the Netherlands, all to sold-out audiences.

Brendel is also a student of architecture, literature, language, and film. He is an author and poet, and at times he has combined his poetry with his music, as he did in 1999 at Carnegie Hall and in many other performances. In that year, when Brendel was sixty-eight, Time contributor Helen Gibson wrote of his love of Beethoven, and remarked that "Brendel's playing is distinguished by its heightened intellectual and emotional intensity, by his ability to energize details while sustaining taut lines, by his infallible grasp of musical architecture and by his extraordinary empathy with composers. His performances often achieve a sense of inevitability. Surely, a listener feels, this is what the composer intended."

Brendel followed his twenty-five-CD album, The Art of Alfred Brendel, released on the occasion of his sixty-fifth birthday, with a number of other CDs featuring Beethoven's bagatelles, the fantasy and the piano concerto by Schumann (with Kurt Sanderling and the Philharmonia Orchestra), the Beethoven concertos (with Simon Rattle and the Vienna Philharmonic), Mozart concertos and sonatas, and a special live recording of Schubert sonatas released on the occasion of Brendel's seventieth birthday. The pianist also celebrated by performing in London, Paris, Vienna, Tokyo, Cologne, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Frankfurt. The following year found him in the United States and Japan, as well as at the Lucerne Festival in Switzerland.

Brendel compiled sixteen essays for Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts, in which he discusses the compositions of Beethoven, Schubert, and particularly Liszt, for whom Brendel is a champion. In reviewing the book in the Times Literary Supplement, Samuel Lipman wrote that "it is plain that the significance of Mr. Brendel's literary efforts is the same as his reason for writing at all: to justify and perhaps even expand the individual role permitted to an interpreter by our present guardians of musical virtue. He makes clear, for instance, the insurmountable difficulties which lie in the way of the perfect recapture of original performance styles." Lipman continued, saying that "it is precisely because Mr. Brendel, in addition to his high pianistic skills and his dedication to the music he plays, is so conscious of himself and of his own role in his work that he may be counted as a fruitful force in bringing new life to music which may have begun to seem to many both overplayed and overfamiliar."

In Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts, Brendel expresses his ideas about music, the state of musical performance, and the musicians he admires, including Beethoven, Liszt, Busoni, Mozart, Schumann, Bach, Schubert, and others. In writing about Schubert, Brendel demonstrates that the composer's sonatas are not failed attempts at mimicking Beethoven's, but rather original works that have suffered in comparison to the powerful Beethoven.

Calum MacDonald wrote in the Times Literary Supplement that "Brendel's thought proceeds from his repertoire, but is hardly limited by it. Few musicians are both articulate and literate; far fewer can boast such a high level of culture in the arts and literatures of several languages."

An Economist reviewer called Brendel "the antithesis of the smooth, jetsetting personality. To see him at the piano is to witness a man in the throes of recreation, trying to convey every nuance and implication of the work at hand as he pursues its central mystery. Indeed, he once compared a Beethoven sonata to a detective story, and his performances always convey the sense of a dramatic quest. These splendid essays have something of that same quality."

Many of the essays contained in the first two collections were reprinted, along with seven previously uncollected pieces, as Alfred Brendel On Music: Collected Essays. American Record Guide's David Mulbury noted that "this is not a book for light reading. Rather it is an approach to music on an advanced, sophisticated level. The reader needs to peruse carefully, taking the time to digest the concepts Brendel introduces." Philip Hensher commented in the London Observer that "performing musicians needn't be intelligent, but it's nice when they are."

Brendel writes in both German and English, and his German-language book of poems titled Kleine teufel: neue gedichte was reviewed in World Literature Today by Richard Exner, who called it "delightful, witty, and sophisticated." Exner observed that Brendel "presents poems among whose godfathers we might wish to count Lewis Carroll and Christian Morgenstern."

With translator Richard Stokes, Brendel published One Finger Too Many, a collection of poems in which music is the central theme. In one, Brendel is mistaken for Woody Allen. In others, composers are called up and transformed into sometimes unsavory characters. The title poem is about a pianist with an extra index finger. A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote, "A moralist and fabulist, Brendel displays his good taste and breeding everywhere in these sometimes absurdist little narratives" and described the volume as "celebrity verse for high-brow concertgoers, who will be properly amused."

The London Observer's John Kinsella wrote that "viewed as a whole, the collection is a hybrid—both in the movement between literary and musical cultures, and in its being a work of apparent clarity while also innovative in its focus, voice, and, to a certain extent, structure."

Me of All People: Alfred Brendel in Conversation with Martin Meyer, published in England as The Veil of Order: Conversations with Martin Meyer, is a book-length interview in which Brendel talks about his life and career, the composers he reveres and those he does not. He says that he never plays the Russian composers Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff and that he prefers the English language over German.

Richard Coles commented in the Times Literary Supplement that Brendel "is not perhaps a man to whom comedy comes naturally (or intentionally)—indeed, I can't think of a more serious musician—but, as old age approaches, Brendel has become more and more fascinated by the comic." Coles noted that Brendel had once read everything by Agatha Christie and that "in Zagreb, Brendel acquired the Dada Almanach with a moustachioed Beethoven, like Duchamp's 'Mona Lisa,' bristling on the cover. And what of it? 'If I had to choose between sense and nonsense, I personally would prefer nonsense,' he says. 'Not in piano playing, where one hopes for performances that do not maltreat masterpieces, but elsewhere.'" Brendel is also fond of the work of Gary Larson ("The Far Side").

Donald R. Vroon reviewed the volume in American Record Guide, saying that "a touch of irony and some wit are present in most of what Alfred Brendel has to say, and that makes this entertaining and thought-provoking."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Brendel, Alfred, Ausgerechnet ich Carl Hanser (Munich Germany), 2001, translation by Richard Stokes published as Me of All People: Alfred Brendel in Conversation with Martin Meyer, Cornell University Press (Ithaca, NY), 2002.

Contemporary Musicians, Volume 23, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999, pp. 50-53.

PERIODICALS

American Music Teacher, December, 2003, Richard Bobo, review of Me of All People, p. 62.

American Record Guide, March, 2002, David Mulbury, review of Alfred Brendel on Music: Collected Essays, p. 253; January-February, 2003, Donald R. Vroon, review of Me of All People, p. 252.

American Spectator, August, 1991, R. J. Stove, reviews of Music Sounded Out: Essays, Lectures, Interviews, Afterthoughts and Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts, p. 40.

Booklist, December 1, 2002, Ray Olson, review of Me of All People, p. 640.

Economist, December 22, 1990, review of Music Sounded Out, p. 119.

Guardian (London, England), January 5, 1996, Andrew Clements, "Music: The perfect player—Alfred Brendel," p. 10.

Kirkus Reviews, May 1, 1999, review of One Finger Too Many, p. 668.

Los Angeles Times, March 31, 2002, Chris Pasles, "Performing Arts: The Touch of the Poet" (interview), p. F-10.

Observer (London, England), October 4, 1998, John Kinsella, review of One Finger Too Many and interview, p. 15, February 4, 2001, Philip Hensher, review of On Music, p. 15.

Sewanee Review, spring, 1994, Robert Miles, reviews of Music Sounded Out and Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts, pp. R51-R53.

Time, May 24, 1999, Helen Gibson, "Back with Beethoven: No one loves the composer's piano concertos more—or plays them better—than Alfred Brendel," p. 83.

Times Literary Supplement, June 24, 1977, Samuel Lipman, review of Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts, pp. 777-778; January 25, 1991, Calum MacDonald, review of Music Sounded Out, p. 18; October 23, 1998, David Wheatley, review of One Finger Too Many, p. 26; November 15, 2002, Richard Coles, review of The Veil of Order: Conversations with Martin Meyer, pp. 8-9.

World Literature Today, summer, 2000, Richard Exner, review of Kleine teufel: neue gedichte, p. 643.