Three Great Pianists Part III - Alfred Brendel
artikel
• David Hackett
Alfred Brendel has always claimed he had just two piano teachers in his childhood, neither of them remarkable. “The first invested a lot of energy in strengthening my little fingers,” he recalls, “for which I am grateful. The other one told me that I was tense and needed to relax. She didn’t tell me how, but it was interesting to find out by myself!”
Finding things out for himself would become a recurring theme of Brendel’s early career. In retrospect he was grateful he had not been a child prodigy “from a musical family, an artistic family or an intellectual family.” From his teenage years he was granted a certain leeway to educate himself at his own speed and in his own way.
The end result has been one of the most idiosyncratic and deep-thinking pianists of the past sixty years. There are no frills or empty virtuosity to Brendel’s playing. Rather his interpretations have been characterised by complete lucidity, keen insight and a profound emotional depth. He is the ultimate “substance over style” artist.
Doing things his own way has been one of his hallmarks. “I like my independence very much”, he once said. “I am not a member of a club or of a party or a creed [and] I have no nationalist feelings of any kind." It was an outlook partly shaped by a childhood divided between Czechoslovakia (where he was born in 1931), Croatia and Austria, at a time when all three were overshadowed by extremist right wing politics.
Brendel never forget the experience of living in countries governed either by the Ustaše (a Crotian fascist movement) or by Nazi Germany. As he puts it, “the experience of war, bombs, people proud to be political ‘believers’, the preposterous voices of Hitler and Goebbels on the radio, the sight of Jews wearing yellow stars and the experience of a war closing in on where I stayed with my mother left a store of information in my memory, information that told me in hindsight what the world should avoid being. It… inoculated me against all brands of fanaticism and nationalism.”
Despite going without access to a piano for some of the war, Brendel had nonetheless make sufficient progress on the instrument to be able to give a debut solo recital in Graz, aged 17 - a “strange and very complicated programme” as he remembers it. Entitled “The Fugue in Piano Literature”, he played music by Bach, Brahms and Liszt as well as a double-fugue composed by himself. Brendel would always regard composition as an integral part to understanding how music worked. “I urge every young pianist to take composition lessons and try composition”, he once said. “To learn how a piece hangs together gives you a different perspective."
He was by now formulating a more general approach towards becoming a concert performer. Although technical skill was of course an integral part of that, Brendel believed that it could only fully develop alongside a close understanding of the score. “I'm not talking about dry analysis”, Brendel explains, “which is relatively easy if you know how. I do the opposite. I familiarise myself with a piece and wait for it to tell me what it's about, and what makes it a masterpiece.”
Subjecting himself to long hours of practice, Brendel would carefully shape his performance, not only through meticulous score-reading, but by endlessly taping his practice sessions. He would play back each recording and listen out for anything that didn’t sound quite right. “What did I do?” he would ask himself whenever he heard something suspicious. “Did I overemphasize something? Did I underemphasize? Did I do the right thing, but not in the right measure?... There are many possibilities. There are sometimes minute corrections that make an enormous difference.”
Despite winning third place at the inaugural Ferruccio Busoni competition at Bolzano in 1949 (Brendel’s only notable competitive success in his entire career), he was never tempted to chase fame for its own sake. “Impatience was not one of my vices,” he says. “I did not feel the need to reach the top within a few years.” His talent was rather “a long-range proposition. When I was 20 I wanted to achieve certain things by the time I was 50, not by 25. I was not without ambition, but it was not a burning, self-destructive ambition. I thought about the works to which one should do justice."
The whole process would be gradual, its upward steps almost indiscernible. “Perhaps no other pianist of our time has so wilfully avoided the ordinary channels to success and formulas for stardom and still arrived at the top of his profession,” wrote the New York Times some years later.
With the Busoni prize safely in his pocket, Brendel set himself up in Vienna for the next two decades. Aside from giving concerts, he also benefitted from a flurry of small to mid-sized American record companies descending on the city. “There were fine halls to record in”, Brendel recalled, “and young talent queueing up. During these postwar years, facilities in a city divided into British, American, French and Russian zones were relatively cheap and the wording of contracts suitably vague. The LP had just reached the market, and big chunks of music had never been recorded before.” Brendel was happy to cash in on this, duly signing for Vox Records (“a very strange company, but they did give me the chance to record virtually the whole of Beethoven's piano works”). Although many of his early recordings were produced and sold cheaply, “we were just grateful for the chance to be heard by the outside world [so] didn't ask too much about fees and contracts.”
No matter how carefully thought-out, Brendel’s thirty-year plan could still sometimes hit the buffers, and he admitted to periods of “stagnation” in Vienna. A lifelong aversion towards publicity did little to help him, nor his own introverted manner on the concert stage. As he put it, “certainly I had no early success to speak of. I was not the type physically to appeal to a wide public when I was twenty-five. I did not appeal to mothers, and I pulled a lot of grimaces. I was really a kind of outsider, and I wanted to be an outsider. I looked at the public with a kind of irony or disdain as a necessary evil; I never knew in those early years how to project what I did.”
Despite all of this, Brendel’s playing eventually came to the attention of a wider audience in 1969, after he had given what he thought an unremarkable Beethoven recital in London. Several influential figures at the concert thought otherwise and the next day, Brendel’s agent was flooded with career-changing offers from several British record labels: for Brendel, it was like a slowly warming kettle finally coming to the boil. Soon after he moved to London, where he has lived ever since.
It may be that Alfred Brendel and his adopted city were made for each other. British music lovers immediately warmed to the pianist’s modest, stoical manner, his bookishness and his quirky sense of humour. Above all, they liked his unflashy way of performing. The feelings were soon mutual. “Perhaps one of the reasons I like London,” Brendel said, “is that the English have very little talent for fanaticism."
With his first marriage back in Vienna having broken down, it was also in London that Brendel found love again, with a German television producer named Irene Semler. The couple would go on to have three children together, including their ‘cellist son Adrian, who has since gone on to forge a successful professional career of his own ("I admire him enormously,” his proud father says of him).
Brendel’s own playing, with its long, slow evolution, was now reaching its peak. Despite performing a wide range of music in his youth, in his maturity he would build his repertoire around the four Austro-German titans of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert: romantic sensibilities within classical structures always seemed to suit him best.
According to one observer, he was "capable of winning through to that 'second simplicity' where the listener has the sensation of music not being played, but happening by itself.” Brendel himself felt he had got better at communicating with audiences: “my grimaces have calmed down,” he said in 1981. “And now that I play in larger halls, I'm far enough away that people notice them less! Generally, the public has become used to my peculiarities.”
By this point, he had come to regard performing as a form of acting, with each piece of music akin to a character role: “I have always felt actors to be an inspiration," he explains. "On stage, they have to turn into a character, to impersonate many different characters: I feel they are my colleagues… Great acting in the theatre as well as on the screen has continued to inspire my urge to play roles as a musical performer, and to treat musical pieces as characters.”
Another important component to Brendel’s playing was his ability to see the transformative potential of the piano: “great piano works have been receptacles of many musical ideas – orchestral, vocal, instrumental in various timbres – and not primarily products tailor-made for a certain vintage of a certain keyboard maker. The greatest piano composers, with the notable exception of Chopin, were all composers of ensemble music, sometimes predominantly so. There are plenty of ideas derived from other musical media latent in the score; the pianist should make them as manifest as possible.”
Despite his intense approach to his craft, Brendel was never a man to get stuck in his music all day long (“I could not bear the thought that music gulps me up completely”). From a young age, he has demonstrated a wide engagement with other artforms, such as literature, art, architecture and philosophy. Having once been a good enough painter to have had some of his work exhibited in Graz, he became an accomplished writer in later life, producing “some of the best writing on music there has ever been,” according to fellow pianist and protégé Till Fellner.
And for all his analytical, scholastic bearing, Brendel has never threatened to be an intellectual pedant. An outlandish sense of humour has always lurked just beneath his apparently serious exterior – perhaps another coping mechanism from his early years in Nazi-occupied Europe. “Next to the wonderful sense of order I derived from music, I learned to value nonsense”, he once said, and “not just the poetic territory discovered by Edward Lear but the nonsensical part of reality.”
In later life, Brendel was able to channel some of that "nonsense" into writing his own absurdist poetry. The latter was like finding “something in my mind volunteering to cheer me up.” He has since published several volumes of poems, with one of his most famous efforts describing a pianist growing an extra index finger during a performance, which he then uses to "expose an obstinate cougher in the hall" as well as seductively "beckon to a lady in the third row.”
By now an international star, Brendel’s career continued to blaze brightly into the new century. Although a stiff back eventually forced him to curtail some of his more challenging repertoire, he was still playing as well as ever when he finally decided to retire from concert-giving in 2008, aged 77. Thankfully it was not a total retreat from public life. He has since remained busy, keeping up a hectic schedule with masterclasses, lectures, poetry-readings and further writing (“I've found it possible to talk about music without talking nonsense, and I think you should always be a little witty”).
In summing up his career, Brendel recently said that “I have some trouble understanding when I could have done it all: playing, writing, looking, living, loving. While I never managed to be bored or idle, I always got enough sleep. Although I loved playing, I was never driven, and went on stage of my own free will. At the conclusion of my concert career I didn’t shed a tear. How does it all add up? Life, on the whole, has remained rather mysterious.”
And as for his legacy? Having once been told his retirement had left “a big hole in the lives of so many people,” the twinkly-eyed Brendel responded: “I felt just glad that I could leave something behind – even if it is a hole!”