Alfred Brendel and other great pianists I have met (and what they taught me)

Times

6 hours ago

I suspect I'm not the only classical music fanatic to measure my life not by decades but by revered performers who are now no longer with us. In my case the list is mournfully long, and another name was added this week: the pianist Alfred Brendel, who died at 94, though he stopped playing in public 16 years ago.
One of the best perks of my job is that I don't just get to hear legendary pianists, I meet them too. I have to say, quite a few were eccentric, bordering on bonkers. Vladimir Horowitz always had mental health issues, but when I met him in 1986, during his 'comeback' tour at the age of 83, he seemed completely gaga. His wife (Wanda Toscanini, terrifying daughter of terrifying conductor) constantly butted in to answer my questions. I thought: 'How on earth is this tragically senile old fellow going to play a recital in the Royal Festival Hall?' Two days later I had my answer. Horowitz's famous 'flat fingers' — the antithesis of what every piano tutor teaches — skimmed the ivories at such mercurial speed that 3,000 people were on their feet cheering every piece. Music is indeed the last thing to go when the mind disintegrates.
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He wasn't the only pianist to produce jaw-dropping performances while struggling mentally. John Ogdon, the most phenomenally virtuosic British pianist of the 1960s, developed such acute bipolar disorder that he was eventually confined to a psychiatric hospital. Maurizio Pollini had a nervous breakdown in early adulthood, when (like many prodigies) he was pushed too fast into a relentless whirl of concerts. Then he wrapped himself in a protective cloud of such impenetrable reticence that interviewing him was like trying to tickle a hedgehog.
The great Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter went through a phase when he would perform only if his 'friend' — a pink plastic lobster — was waiting in the wings. And the magnificent Chilean pianist Claudio Arrau (whom I met in his Long Island home, which was crammed with African, Etruscan and pre-Columbian artefacts) sought out psychiatric help throughout his life, but particularly after a humiliating episode in 1950s Australia, when he was plastered all over the newspapers for picking up a man for sex, only to find that the guy was a police officer whose job was to trap homosexuals. That Arrau had the resilience to resurrect his pianistic career after that speaks volumes about his character.
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I run through this catalogue of complex geniuses to put Brendel in context. Of all the great 20th-century pianists I met, he seemed the most grounded and sane. Perhaps that was because he never went through that pressurised child prodigy upbringing. The son of an itinerant Austrian hotel manager, he hardly heard — let alone performed — music during his wartime childhood. Indeed, he was conscripted to dig trenches. That early experience, I believe, imbued him with two lifelong beliefs. One, he told me, was that 'the world is grotesque and absurd'. The other was that, 'in an absurd world, manners require one to be graceful'.
Those beliefs, I think, accounted for how he interpreted such composers as Liszt, Beethoven and Brahms. He could grapple with the 'grotesque' in their music — the psychic storms when the pianist seems to be locked in battle with some beast inside the Steinway. But he was also alive to moments of absurdist humour. 'If you can't make an audience laugh at the end of Beethoven's Piano Sonata Op 31 No 1,' he told me, 'you should be an organist.' (I don't think he knew I play the organ.)
And everything Brendel did, in music and life, was governed by that second belief: that 'manners require one to be graceful'. I think by graceful he meant civilised — always being curious intellectually and expressing yourself (whether in music or words) coherently and courteously. Just as he regarded a 'steady temperament' as the key to a long performing career ('Being a depressive doesn't really help,' he said, when we were discussing a pianist mentioned above), so he preferred to think his way to the core of a piece of music rather than skating across it with razzle and dazzle. Indeed, he deeply distrusted music that too easily tugged at the heartstrings. Rachmaninov, he declared, was 'music for teenagers'.
Above all Brendel was an intellectual, as curious about literature, the visual arts and philosophy as about music. I cannot imagine him living anywhere except where he did: in one of those quiet Hampstead lanes, meandering from the bookshops to the heath, that have been the haunt of literati since the days of Keats. Indeed, Brendel published several collections of his own poetry. Thinking he had taken up writing late in his life, I asked him when he had written his first poem. 'When I was a teenager I wrote 124 sonnets,' he replied, in a tone that said 'doesn't everyone?'
No one is irreplaceable, even great musicians. Brendel, Pollini, Richter and Horowitz have gone but fascinating pianists are still around. My four favourites right now are Vikingur Olafsson, Yuja Wang, Emanuel Ax and Stephen Hough — but ask me tomorrow and I will probably come up with different names.
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Nevertheless, when great performers die, something unique dies with them. I wonder if Brendel realised that. I once asked him whether he saw any meaning in life. (Never accuse a Times journalist of asking trivial questions.) 'No,' Brendel replied. 'There is none. One should fill one's existence with things of interest. But why one lives is a question that is unanswerable.'
I disagree. As with all musicians of integrity, his performances brought a great deal of meaning to life. My life, anyway. Although I love his story of driving late at night, infuriated by something playing on Radio 3. 'What idiot would mess up Beethoven like that?' he fumed to himself. 'That was Alfred Brendel,' the announcer said.