Alfred Brendel: The man who tried to seem normal
Why BeethovenFrom my appreciation of the great pianist in the new issue of The Critic:
He worked so hard to appear normal. A tall man, Alfred Brendel cultivated a stoop to meet people at their level. His suits never sat easily on his frame. His tie was dark, no pattern.
His one notable accessory was a pair of black-rimmed glasses of the kind worn by Michael Caine in The Ipcress File. No comparison intended. Where Caine was slick, sexy and laconic, Brendel shambled into a room and spoke in discursive phrases.
The publisher George Weidenfeld urged him to write an autobiography. Brendel declined. “I don’t find myself interesting,” he said. That, for psychoanalysts who lived either side of his Hampstead street, made him more than just interesting. He must be in denial, they said….
Continues here.
The photograph cannot be from 2015, as stated: Brendel stopped playing in public in 2008, as also stated. And he did not retire “in his sixties,” but rather at 77.
The article says Brendel “closed the piano lid for the last time in public a week before Christmas 2008,” but the caption of the photo accompanying the article says it depicts “Alfred Brendel at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles, 2015.”
He may have been giving one of his public readings, not a full piano recital.
A giant among giants, and what’s more generally recognised as a really nice person!
Lovely article, Mr. Lebrecht. Philips was astute to support Brendel and Arrau as their two pianistic giants, both of them very serious artists (though Arrau lacked Brendel’s leavening sense of humor), and both devoted to Liszt (with enriching differences in interpretive approach) in the face of widespread dismissive attitudes.
Mendelssohn was a shady producer? Well, you guys on your side of the pond had Barrington-Coupe, so I don’t think you can put Mendelssohn anywhere near that level of chicanery. At least he put the right name of the artist on the album, cover. Brendel recorded for Vox many many years before the Turnabout name have any association with them… That was in the mid 60s. The “scratchy” Vox pressings, though, were really from a bit later also. Oh well, they said that same thing about Schnabel educating rather than entertaining, but I was always entertained by Brendel, and I’ve also been completely bored by supposed entertainers at the piano, so I don’t find much use in those kind of characterizations… To each his own.
Lovely man, fine pianist.
“Robert Schumann walked perilously close to the edge that Alfred Brendel so cautiously avoided.” Schumann fell over the edge. I have never seen any evidence that Brendel was close to the frontier between sanity and madness.
“You put me down as an egghead,” fumed Alfred.” The word actually used was “cerebral”. I doubt if Brendel “fumed”!
Norman, methinks your arithmetic is a bit off. He actually was closer to 80 (almost 78) when he stopped playing in public.
Brendel adored Furtwängler more than any other interpreter. It is confounding, then, that he was such a literal and unimaginative interpreter himself. He reminds me of Abbado in that sense, who likewise idolized Furtwängler. Perhaps they both figured they couldn’t possibly pull off WF’s re-creative genius and thus didn’t even try. I enjoyed Brendel’s writing on music far more than his records. Doubtlessly supremely intelligent, perhaps he was too much of an analytical intellectual to possess the kind of intuitive genius that sets apart the greatest interpreters like Cortot, Schnabel, Arrau. He will nonetheless be missed.
There are many ways to play music; it is a mistake to believe that our preferences are the only valid ones.
Excellent article. For the record, Brendel was not “in his sixties” when he retired. He was 77.
If he retired in 2008, why is the photo dated 2015? Also, his Vox/Turnabout LP of the Diabelli Variations (TV 34139S) is
fabulous.
Brendel used to stay with my great-uncle in Paris, in a large apartment built around a long corridor. These were memorable visits, not only as there were two grand pianos for him to choose between. Brendel would routinely set up a target at one end of the corridor, go to the other end with a pistol, and practice hitting the bullseye.
Was he preparing to deal with a critic?