“The better we know a work,” Alfred Brendel said, “the more it surprises us.” That may explain why one of the best-loved postwar pianists kept returning to pieces, such as making three recordings of Beethoven’s 32 sonatas. He thought afresh about every dot and slur, hoping to be delighted by a new understanding.
It was a diligence Brendel developed having been largely self-taught from the age of 16. He was no child prodigy, filled with divine inspiration, but enjoyed exploring how to play a piece using a Revox tape recorder he got as a teenager. Record, rewind, review, react. He felt it was his duty to work out what the score was telling the pianist to do, not for him to tell the piece how it should have been written.
“A teacher can be too influential,” Brendel said. “I learned to distrust anything I hadn’t figured out myself.” His preparation extended to placing a mirror beside his home piano so he could see when his movements were not in concord with the music, and he often wore plasters on his fingers to protect his nails, a habit he began aged 15.
Brendel’s students knew his thoroughness. At Imogen Cooper’s first lesson, he made her play the opening chord of a Schubert sonata for 20 minutes, over and over, with comments about the balance being wrong or the bass too heavy. Finally a curt “thank you” indicated that she had got it. Then she realised that she had to play the next chord. “He was inspirational and uncompromising with a formidable knowledge,” Cooper said. “His playing was intense and visionary, his teaching no less so – but dry humour was never far.”
Paul Lewis often visited Brendel at home after impressing him during a masterclass at the Guildhall school of music in the 1990s. The lessons could go on for five hours as he analysed every bar so that by the end Lewis could not play another note. “Every time was the most intense experience,” he said. “He opened so many doors to thinking about what the piano could do. He was the greatest teacher, a colossal intellect.”
Alfred Brendel was born in the then Czechoslovakia in 1931 but often moved as his father sought work. At six he had his first piano lesson in Zagreb; on the Adriatic island of Krk, he discovered opera by playing records for hotel guests. In 1943, the family went to Graz, Austria, where Brendel studied at the conservatoire. Then he was sent back to Yugoslavia to dig trenches, where he was badly frostbitten.
Brendel had many talents. He claimed to have written 124 sonnets as a teenager and was a fine painter. His first public piano recital, in Graz aged 17, coincided with an exhibition of his watercolours. The piano finally won. He attended masterclasses with Edwin Fischer and made his first recording, of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 5, in 1951.
