I last saw Alfred Brendel just over a year ago, at the home of his former pupil Imogen Cooper. Physical frailties had caught up with him at the age of 92—pain in walking and some trouble hearing—but, in all other respects, he was his irrepressible self.
He was still writing, mentoring, lecturing and teaching. But his enthusiasm that night was for two composers he had just discovered. He beamed in anticipation before revealing who they were: Handel and Haydn.
Of course, he had played some Haydn during his seven-decade career as a concert pianist. But there was so much of it he’d never heard, especially the string quartets. As for Handel! The operas! How could he have lived so long without fully appreciating what astonishing music they contained? People said he wasn’t a patch on Bach. Alfred was not so sure.
He asked me what I was playing. “Grieg,” I answered. He wrinkled his nose. “Not keen on Grieg?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Gateway to Rachmaninov.”
If that makes it sound as if Alfred regarded the Russian composer as akin to a dangerous Class A drug, then it would not fall far short of the truth. “A fine pianist but an overrated composer,” he told me on another occasion. “Piano literature is very big and one shouldn’t waste one’s time with things like the Rachmaninov concerto.”
He didn’t think much of Tchaikovsky’s much-played concerto, either. “Splurgy,” he muttered.
Brendel, who died last week at the age of 94, famously ended up concentrating on the works of a small group of composers, Schubert and Beethoven especially—but, even then, he was capable of discoveries. I remember a moment, more than 20 years before, when he excitedly told me that—at the age of 69—he had discovered Mozart.
Not the concertos, obviously, but the sonatas, which, he said, did not have a good reputation. “People think that, besides the piano concertos and Beethoven’s sonatas, they are no great shakes, and I must confess that I myself did underestimate some of them before. Well, I take everything back.”
During several conversations over the years, Brendel gave glimpses of what it meant to be a pianist operating at the very highest level. It involved, as he explained it to me, doing contradictory things “like controlling and losing myself”.
When he was on the platform, he was “anticipating what I should do next and at the same time taking in what I have played and reacting to it. Overlooking the whole piece in the way you overlook a landscape and at the same time unfolding it, giving birth to it, starting from the first note like a new experience.
“Then there is the contradiction of pleasing yourself as much as possible, but also thinking of the person in the 30th row and a way of transmitting something into the distance.”
The state he described—at the intersection of control and abandon, freedom and accuracy—encourages speculation about the performer’s relation to his own conscious and unconscious. Brendel said he has never been tempted to delve too deeply into his own unconscious, but he nevertheless didn’t share the modern enthusiasm for debunking Freud.
“There are three Freudian notions without which I cannot be. One is the unconscious; the second is neurosis; and the third is—what is the English word?—depression. They seem so natural and so important to explain certain things. I also admire Freud as a stylist, but in German. He is one of the finest writers of aesthetic prose, if not scientific prose.”
He played his last concert in Vienna in 2008 and then, for someone who had taught a very small number of pupils over his career, launched into a life of mentoring and coaching—especially of string quartets. Another discovery.
With only one exception I know of, he didn’t teach children (“I remember Schnabel saying you do not employ a mountain guide when you teach a child how to walk”). One of his older students, Paul Lewis, once described to me the intensity of learning with Brendel.
“Sometimes the lessons would go on for five hours,” he remembered. “The effect of the early lessons was as if he had just dropped a bomb on my whole way of thinking about a piece. And, when I came away from some lessons, I remember getting home and not being able to play the piece at all. I couldn’t even play the notes. There was so much information that was new to me, I needed months away from the piece to really sort it out.
“There are certain notorious openings for pieces, like the opening of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No.4. Everybody knows that it’s a nightmare, the first line, it’s so exposed, it has to be so perfect in its balance and sound.
“I played Alfred the first line, and he just turned round and said, ‘Yes, we can spend some hours on this.’ Another time we tried the notorious opening of the Piano Sonata No.28. I think we spent the best part of an afternoon on the first page of that.”
Brendel himself had no academic teacher after the age of 16, though he attended three master classes by (the pianist born in Switzerland in 1886) Edwin Fischer. He avoided being pigeonholed into any tradition of playing. “I had the impression that one could find out oneself what is necessary—that it may take a little longer, but it is a different kind of process.
“I was in central Europe. I was 14 when the war ended and, at that time, I had the chance to hear certain musicians and not others. People who were in America or in Moscow would hear mostly different musicians.
“I believe more in individualities. Cortot was actually very untypical for the so-called French school. I mean, of the pianists I have heard in the concert hall, Kempf, Cortot and Fischer made a lasting impression, and there are still some of their recordings from which I can learn or which give me a measure of what one can achieve on the instrument.”
“Of course, I decided early on where I should go in terms of whether I would be a player of a large set of European repertory or whether I would be a Chopin specialist, because that was still a possibility when I was young. The Chopin specialists are extinct now. In my next life, maybe I will play Chopin—in this life, my vertebrae will no longer allow it.”
Some of these conversations took place in Brendel’s imposing home in Hampstead, a minute away from the heath where he would walk to collect his thoughts. His irrepressible sense of the absurd broke through often as he spoke—and was evident in his collection of kitsch objects as well as his poetry.
He took a keen interest in contemporary music, encouraging one young student, Kit Armstrong, to bring him Ligeti’s Études. When the Guardian was in need of a chief music critic to replace Edward Greenfield in the early 1990s, he emphatically advocated for someone who would champion new music.
He was equally happy talking about books or films, and was delighted, at the age of 80, to be asked to curate a season of films (“between horror and laughter”) in Vienna (which included two British films—Karel Reisz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment [1966] and Lindsay Anderson’s If…. [1968]).
After retiring from the concert platform, he played only to prepare illustrations for his lectures, but—well into his eighties—he still felt that he was growing as a musician.
“And when I now think of the clarity of the imagination that I now have of certain pieces, then something is still going on, although I do not have the physical power now to have another go at the [Schubert] Wanderer Fantasy.”
When I heard of his death, I immediately recalled the 92-year-old Alfred talking with a beaming, almost childlike, wonder about his discovery of Handel. There is hope for us all.
