“One Finger Too Many”, has seen him depart from his usual role as a music essayist in a volume of absurd poetry. He then toured throughout Europe and Latin America, slowly, unspectacularly building his career, and participating in a few masterclasses of Paul Baumgartner, Eduard Steuermann (a pupil of Busoni and Schoenberg, and who gave many first performances of the latter's work) and, most importantly, the great Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer. Although he was known primarily for his interpretations of Ludwig van Beethoven’s works, his repertoire also featured such composers as Franz Schubert, Franz Liszt, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The film premiered theatrically in North America, where it was met with positive reviews by The New York Times,[15] as well as in Asia and throughout Europe, and is a part of the Goethe-Institut catalogue. ... Now his three children, with his second wife Irene, have grown up and left home, they have sealed off … More valuable than teachers was listening to other pianists, conductors and singers - and himself. During the 1982-83 season he presented cycles of all 32 Sonatas in the course of 77 recitals in 11 cities throughout Europe and America. His books include: Brendel has been awarded honorary doctorates from universities including London (1978), Oxford (1983), Yale (1992), University College Dublin (2007),[29] McGill Montreal (2011), Cambridge (2012) and York (2018) and holds other honorary degrees from the Royal College of Music, London (1999), Boston New England Conservatory (2009), Hochschule Franz Liszt Weimar (2009) and The Juilliard School (2011). Alfred Brendel is the recipient of honorary doctorates from Oxford, London, Sussex and Yale universities. He thinks that, as it were, certain kinds of jokes, certain kinds of paradox are actually the deepest way of representing important things. It seemed really rather grotesque, like a slow, hardly noticeable rise on a thermometer or a kettle warming water suddenly beginning to boil and to bubble and the steam comes out."*. "It consisted," he recalls, "only of piano works with fugues and of four encores which also contained fugues. Here Alfred Brendel was given his first piano lessons at the age of six from Sofia Dezelic (he also appeared at a children's theatre in Zagreb) and had a succession of early teachers as the family moved on, returning after the War to a place near Graz where Brendel pere worked in a department store. 5 had been made a couple of years earlier. His breakthrough came after a recital of Beethoven at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, the day after which three major record labels called his agent. Still at home with Brendel and wife Irene are cellist Adrian, who is 17, 15-year-old Sophie, and 12-year-old Katharina, who plays violin. I think he lives with his very strong sense of the time he still has to achieve what he wants to achieve and he is very economical with his forces and his energies. [16] Brendel's playing is sometimes described as being "cerebral",[17] and he has said that he believes the primary job of the pianist is to respect the composer's wishes without showing off himself, or adding his own spin on the music: "I am responsible to the composer, and particularly to the piece". Brendel's discography is now among the most extensive of any pianist, reflecting a repertoire of solo and orchestral works that ranges from Bach and Haydn to Weber to Schumann, Liszt, Brahms, Mussorgsky and Schoenberg. [31] A 2016 survey of the UK's Classic FM presenters included Brendel in its 25 greatest pianists of all time. As well as playing a prominent role in championing Schubert's Piano Sonatas, he has recorded two complete cycles of his mature piano works, 1822-28, as well as establishing Schoenberg's Piano Concerto in the concert repertoire. In 1999, Carnegie Hall invited him to be musician in residence with an unprecedented series of seven events in a variety of roles - solo recitalist, Lieder collaborator, chamber musician, orchestral soloist and performer of his own poems. A 2012 survey of pianists by the magazine Limelight ranked Brendel as the 8th greatest pianist of all time. Francis Merson, "Alfred Brendel: Notes on a Musical Life". In 1975, Brendel married Irene Semler, and the couple have three children; a son, Adrian, who is a cellist, and two daughters, Katharina and Sophie.[10]. For several years, he has been a contributor to The New York Review of Books. Since his debut at Carnegie Hall on 21 January 1973 he had appeared there 81 times, and in 1983 he became only the second pianist to perform the complete cycle of Beethoven's piano sonatas at the Hall, a feat he repeated in 1993 (Artur Schnabel was the first in 1936; after Brendel, Maurizio Pollini performed the cycle in 1995/1996, and Daniel Barenboim did so in 2003). "A teacher can be too influential," he feels. A second poetry selection in English is called “Cursing Bagels”. "*, Brendel gave his first public recital in Graz age 17, boldly entitled 'The Fugue in Piano Literature' with works by Bach, Brahms and Liszt. [2], Brendel gave his first public recital in Graz at the age of 17. He considers Chopin's Preludes "the most glorious achievement in piano music after Beethoven and Schubert". On 26 April 1998, Alfred Brendel celebrated 50 years of public performances. But in 1949 he won fourth prize in the prestigious Busoni Competition in Bolzano, Italy. Born in East Germany, Alfred Brendel was a painter and composer before becoming a musician. One of these pieces was a sonata of my own with a double fugue, of course. But then, one day I was performing a Beethoven programme in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. Alfred Brendel is the preeminent thinking pianist, a loner to whom fame came through the power of imaginative integrity, an artist who has achieved -- at his best -- a divinatory rapport with piano literature from Bach to Schoenberg.Yet by his account, "I did not come from a musical or intellectual family....I have not been a child prodigy. Mozart is one of the most sensuous composers ever. Later, one of his Lied partners was Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. As he approached this next significant milestone in his eventful life, what of the future? He received Lifetime Achievement Awards by Edison, Midem Classical Awards, Deutscher Schallplattenpreis and The Gramophone. Reply. Jeremy Nicholas Sir Simon Rattle recalls that "I was right at the beginning of my twenties when I first worked with him and he's since become a very good friend. 9 in E-flat; the orchestra (the Vienna Philharmonic) was conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras. "I now lead a kind of double life. He was lauded by music critic Michael Steinberg as "the new Schnabel", whereas NY Times critic Harold C. Schonberg noted that some critics and specialists accused the pianist of "pedanticism". Alfred Brendel's place among the greatest musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries is assured. At various times his father worked as an architectural engineer, businessman and resort hotel manager on the Adriatic island of Krk. I think he has integrated the person he wanted to be. Now I find that he is more and more reconciled. Unusually tall for a pianist (he has suffered from back problems in the past), with his trademark heavy spectacles and high forehead accentuated by a central raft of wayward swept back hair, Brendel's is one of the most instantly recognisable faces of any musician. However, Brendel maintains that he has profited most from listening to singers and conductors. Towards the end of World War II, the 14-year-old Brendel was sent back to Yugoslavia to dig trenches. "I am not exclusively a musician, as the past few years have clearly shown," says Brendel. His writings have appeared in English, German, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, and other languages. Recently, all his essays have been gathered in “Alfred Brendel on Music” (new edition, JR Books 2007). With his famous facial grimaces in performance and frequently bandaged fingers, Brendel's art is a byword for perfection, profundity, self-effacement and textual illumination. During the 1950s he made his first recordings. Brendel has been recipient of many major music prizes, including the Leonie Sonning Prize 2002, Ernst von Siemens-Musikpreis 2004, Prix Venezia: Premio Artur Rubinstein 2007, Praemium Imperiale Tokyo 2008 and Herbert von Karajan Prize 2008. To celebrate his 65th birthday in 1996, Philips released a 25-disc boxed set entitled The Art of Alfred Brendel. [citation needed], Brendel has been married twice. "Being self-taught, I learned to distrust anything I hadn't figured out myself." Recently, in a double CD series, he has selected some of this own favourites on record including a number of live performances from the BBC; this series is called ‘Artist’s Choice’. He is fascinated with the grotesque and the fantastic, and collects kitsch, primitive masks and newspaper bloopers. Alfred Brendel resides with his wife, Irene, in London, where they have been based since 1971. Next to music, literature is Brendel's second life and occupation. He is one of the few pianists to have recorded all of the Mozart piano concertos (with Sir Neville Marriner and the Academy of St Martin-in-the-Fields).