Alfred Brendel, who has died aged 94, ranked among the greatest pianists of the postwar era; he was the first to record the complete works for solo piano of Beethoven and, as a fan of absurdism, was probably the first person to take a baby tortoise on a lead into the Musikverein in Vienna.
During a performing career that spanned six decades Brendel was a supreme interpreter of the Austro-German classics, ranging from Bach, Haydn and Mozart to Beethoven and Schubert. He was highly particular in his repertoire, rarely playing Chopin and almost never Debussy or Rachmaninov, arguing that they belonged to a tradition better suited to other pianists. Yet he did feel the urge to learn Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto and was a champion of contemporary music, hailing Harrison Birtwistle as one of the great composers of our time.
He was also surprisingly enthusiastic about the music of Liszt, insisting that even the composer’s showiest works contain hidden depths. “I treat Liszt as a complement to Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert,” he said, while the American critic Harold Schoenberg wrote that the composer’s rehabilitation had much to do with him.
Brendel’s personal style however, could not have been further removed from the tradition of the pianist-showman begun by Liszt. Tall and stooped, his high forehead accentuated by a central raft of wayward swept-back hair, he usually wore a donnish tweed jacket and horn-rimmed glasses with intimidatingly thick lenses. He fitted perfectly into the bookish milieu of Hampstead village, where he had made his home since 1971.
Although he disapproved of self-indulgent Lisztian expansiveness, Brendel’s own playing was highly distinctive, both to watch and to hear. He often leaned away from the keyboard, screwing up his features into a grimace as if smelling something bad. Such was the intensity of his practice regime that his fingers were frequently wrapped in sticking plasters.
As an intellectual’s pianist, Brendel was concerned to expose the philosophical underpinning that lay beneath music’s surface, an approach which appealed greatly to the cultivated circles in which he moved. Sir Isaiah Berlin was a particular fan.
Some felt that such high-mindedness spilled over unnecessarily when works called for a lighter, more capricious touch. One critic even wrote that attending a Brendel concert was like being at some “secret rite”, with the pianist as high priest. This was a minority view, and his pianism was often touched with the dry wit that flavoured his conversation, while his technique was sufficiently secure, even in virtuoso passages, for him to obey Artur Schnabel’s injunction of “safety last!”
His interpretations of Schubert’s later piano sonatas, which characteristically he refused to prettify, undoubtedly added to their growing recognition as masterpieces of western music. It was a subject on which Brendel wrote passionately, attacking the “ignorance, doubt and contempt” of an older generation of musicians who regarded these Schubert works as unpianistic.
Yet it was the 32 Beethoven sonatas that lay at the heart of Brendel’s artistic achievements. “It may be that no musician in history has given more concentrated and sustained thought to these works,” wrote the broadcaster Jeremy Siepmann. In particular, his three recorded cycles of the Beethoven sonatas produced insights that could only be compared to those of Schnabel.
The first, for Vox in the early 1960s, helped to make his name as a recording artist. Although recognisably the work of a young man in its fiery athleticism, it was also clearly the product of deep study. The cycle, which was extended to become the first complete recording of all Beethoven’s piano music, won the Grand Prix du Disque in 1965.
In contrast, his second cycle, for Phillips in the 1970s, was more restrained, even pedestrian, and the authors of the influential Penguin Guide commented that only rarely did it match the authority of the pianist in the concert hall.
He seems to have taken this to heart, and a third cycle, issued in the 1990s, included several live performances including a thrillingly taut and almost note-perfect account of the Hammerklavier, Beethoven’s longest and most taxing sonata. It was an astonishing achievement for a man who was by then in his sixties. This, he later declared, would be his last word about the titanic work. Unlike many older pianists, Brendel was ruthless in dropping pieces from his repertoire to which he felt he could no longer do justice.
As for the third cycle as a whole, the critics were nearly unanimous in describing it as his finest. As Richard Osborne wrote in Gramophone: “What does one do about a performance so satisfying that, after it, even a well-honed sentence seems an irrelevance. Retire, perhaps, and devote oneself to a more useful and benign trade, such as growing vegetables.”
Alfred Brendel was born on January 5 1931 in Wiesenberg, northern Moravia (now in the Czech Republic), of Austrian, German, Italian and Czech descent. He was the son of Albert Brendel, who at various times was an architectural engineer, businessman and hotel manager, and his wife Ida, née Wieltschnig.
It was an unpromising and untypical start for a future pianist. Although he had a fine singing voice there was little musical stimulation at home, nor did his parents take him to concerts. It was Brendel’s own idea aged six to learn the piano, though he was never considered a child prodigy; nor would he ever be a good sight reader or blessed with a phenomenal memory.
By then his parents were running a cinema in Zagreb, Yugoslavia, but in 1943 the family moved to Graz, in Austria, where his father worked in a department store. The young Alfred studied composition with Artur Michl and piano with Ludovika von Kaan, who had been a student with Bernhard Stavenhagen, one of Liszt’s more illustrious pupils. Later he attended masterclasses with Edwin Fischer, whose “avoidance of false sentiment” he particularly admired.
He claimed that after the age of 16 he never again had a regular teacher, arguing that “self-discovery is a slower process but a more natural one” and that “technique is only a tool”. More valuable, he said, was listening to other pianists as well as observing conductors and singers.
To that end he acquired a Revox reel-to-reel tape recorder and spent much time recording and listening back to his own playing. “I was never over-ambitious,” he told Ivan Hewett in The Daily Telegraph in 2010. “I had an idea when I was 20 that I wanted to reach a certain standard by the time I was 50. The pianists I really admired like [Wilhelm] Kempff and Fischer were mostly in their fifties and sixties.”
The teenage Brendel was also attending art classes and was such a talented painter that he considered making that his career. At the time of his first public recital in Graz, boldly entitled “The Fugue in Piano Literature” and encompassing works by Bach, Brahms and Liszt, a one-man exhibition of his watercolours was being shown in a local gallery. He was still only 17.
Any doubts about pursuing music were laid to rest in 1949 when he was placed a respectable fourth at the first Busoni Competition held in Bolzano, Italy. It was the last competition he would enter, and thereafter he gradually embarked on a life of concerts, slowly and unspectacularly building a career that included Beethoven cycles in cities around the world. The Times once devoted an entire leading article to a Brendel cycle, suggesting that for a short time it had encompassed the whole intellectual musical life of the capital.
In the recording studio he came to attention with a 1951 account of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No 5 with the Vienna State Opera Orchestra. Later he picked up Gramophone awards for his recordings of Mozart (1977), Liszt (1978, 1981 and 1982) and Haydn (1987), and in 2010 received a lifetime achievement award.
It was through records that Brendel made his name in the US, and by the time of his first tour there, in 1963, he was a known quantity. Yet not all the American critics warmed to his austere performances and as recently as 1983 the New York Times described a Brendel concert as “rather brittle”.
In Britain he made his Proms debut in 1968 playing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 2 with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Charles Groves; he appeared there on 33 occasions in all, his final Prom featuring Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with the Philharmonia under Christoph von Dohnanyi. It sat alongside the world premiere of Harrison Birtwistle’s Three Settings of Alfred Brendel, a work for baritone and orchestra based on the pianist’s own poetry.
Despite making his home in Britain for half a century, he insisted that he would not go native. “I’m happy to speak and count and think in English, but I’m not someone who needs or wants to be rooted,” he told the Telegraph. “I want to be as cosmopolitan as possible. I had the good fortune not to grow up in one place. I prefer to be a paying guest. It’s a lesson I learnt in the war, to be suspicious of nationalism.”
Throughout his career Brendel strove to integrate his playing with the rest of his intellectual life. He once wrote that every pianist should be trained as a composer, and he found that writing about music was an essential part of his art, allowing him to articulate verbally the ideas that he was working out through his playing. His books of essays, including Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts (1976) and Music Sense and Nonsense (2015), express complex ideas in highly polished English. The former includes an essay on the art of tuning a piano, something else he thought all pianists should be able to do.
His extra-musical interests manifest another side to this single-minded purveyor of the central European piano repertoire, ranging from Romanesque churches and Baroque architecture to Dada and Edward Gorey, and from Shakespeare to nonsense verse and the cartoons of Charles Addams or Gary Larson.
He was fascinated with the grotesque and the fantastic, collecting kitsch, primitive masks and newspaper bloopers. Perched in mock triumph on piles of learned books on his mantelpiece were little grotesque figures, including a grinning alligator in a dress and bonnet. “Yes, that came from New Orleans,” he told Hewett.
Brendel’s other enthusiasms included “unintentional humour”, in which category he included his collection of discarded passport photographs recovered from photo-booths. He wrote and published his own poetry and listed “laughing” as his favourite occupation, a subject he dealt with in his 1984 Darwin Lecture at Cambridge University entitled “Does classical music have to be entirely serious?”
He was a lifelong theatregoer and said that the experience of seeing productions by Peter Brook and Giorgio Strehler had taught him the vital lesson that a work of art could develop in performance from the inside. “There are some moments of happiness when I feel that things are speaking through me, even if this is an illusion,” he said in a 65th-birthday interview.
Brendel officially retired from the concert platform in December 2008. “I wanted to stop when I am maybe still in pretty good shape – the difference with my colleagues being that I’m not addicted to giving concerts,” he said in a farewell interview with Gramophone. “I did it out of free choice – at least that’s what I told myself.”
Yet he remained a fixture in the musical world, giving lectures that involved demonstrating at the keyboard. He was also a great supporter of other musicians, especially younger pianists such as Till Fellner and Paul Lewis, buying tickets to their concerts and offering words of encouragement after their performances.
Alfred Brendel, whose many awards and honours included an honorary KBE in 1989, married Iris Heymann-Gonzala in 1960, and they had a daughter. The marriage was dissolved in 1972, and three years later he married Irene Semler, with whom he had a son, the cellist Adrian Brendel, and two daughters, Katharina and Sophie. That marriage was dissolved in 2012, and he is survived by his partner Maria Majano.
In the 1990s the family bought Plush Manor estate in Dorset, including a 160-seat 19th-century church that they renovated. At first it was used as a space to relax and try out new repertoire among select friends; gradually it evolved into a thriving venue, with concerts produced by the Brendel family.
Alfred Brendel, born January 5 1931, died June 17 2025