High Fidelity (May 1988)

To judge by appearances, Alfred Brendel is a pretty unlikely hero. Hair perpetually disheveled, forehead furrowed like a Thomas Hart Benton landscape, teeth a little too prominent, he shambles onstage like an absent-minded professor, looking rather bookish in his thick-rimmed glasses. People sometimes remark that he could pass for a tall version of Woody Allen.

But heroes are often unlikely. And once Brendel's clear-toned, finely nuanced Haydn, Beethoven, or Liszt issues from the piano, his fans are transported. No glamour boy, not even a flashy interpreter, he is one of today's most listened-to and most talked-about keyboard artists. In an age supposedly devoted to the mediagenic, Brendel has broken all the rules.

It hasn't always been so. Two decades ago, Colbert Artists, his American managers, were begging presenters to sign him up. His name rang a bell only with those who'd seen his Vox recordings of the complete Beethoven sonatas sitting in dusty bargain bins. But one thing led to another, and Brendel went on to prove that careers can be made without the trappings of high-visibility media hype. He simply went on doing what he believed in, and bigger and bigger audiences came around to believing, too.

We meet in connection with one of his virtually annual engagements with the Boston Symphony at Tanglewood. Our conversation begins in a handsomely appointed sitting room at Blantyre, one of those grand Berkshire estates reincarnated as a fancy guest house. It's a gorgeous July afternoon, and soon we're outside.

Brendel takes a few minutes to warm up. His first few answers are carefully considered and brief. But the smiles start to come more often -- and then the big, utterly contagious grin. His English is easy and idiomatic, delivered in a quiet, almost conspiratorial baritone.

One of those grins forms when I say it's ironic that he continues to be labeled an "intellectual" or an "objective" player -- not the sort you'd expect to inspire so wide and devoted a following -- and that he rarely ventures outside a century's worth of Austro-German repertory. "It's interesting," he replies, "that these are questions raised only in America. I think they tell you more about the American view of music than about me, in a way."

The grin disappears as Brendel addresses the "objective" label. "I don't think this is quite true," he argues. "If you would follow along on one of my tours, you would see that my performances turn out to be quite different. I don't like so-called 'objective' playing, which tries to exclude a personality in order to get the spirit of the composer down from heaven. It doesn't work. But I also do not like performers who are out to surprise the listener by doing everything differently from what anybody would ever expect. I think that is an immoral stand: These people should have tried to become composers and proved themselves as composers."

He goes on to talk about musicians he has admired, and they're anything but the objective types. He mentions Furtwängler, Bruno Walter, Calas, and Cortot. "They were individualists, but they were not the kind of flamboyant musician who thinks he is god and the composer is his servant."

We move to the subject of his repertory, which scarcely extends beyond the Austro-Germanic mainstream of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann, with Liszt thrown in as an odd relative. The irony is that Brendel's own listening ranges so widely.

"For me, the central European repertory is, by and large, the great repertory," Brendel opines. "I have no nationalist feelings -- I've lived in London for 17 years -- but the great majority of the great composers have come from this area. I don't know why, but it is a fact."

Would he ever consider turning to, say, Debussy? "No. I think this repertory is large enough, larger than a human being can do justice to in a lifetime. For me, it isn't a matter of just learning a piece, recording it, and discarding it; it's a matter of living with pieces. I try to choose pieces which would stay interesting."

To anyone who knows Brendel's playing, such a statement should come as no surprise. If there's a single distinctive feature in the Brendel "style", it's the delicate detail work. It's the product of long and careful deliberation, of toying with the tiniest nuances of attack and color. No wonder Brendel huddles close to the keys, as if in intimate two-way communication with them. But there's a strong sense of structure, the legacy of early lessons in composition.

Brendel settled on his own musical career only as he began his third decade. Born on January 5, 1931, in the Czechoslovakian town of Wiesenberg, he spent ten years in Yugoslavia, then seven in Graz, Austria. For the next 20 years, home was Vienna. His wasn't a musical family, but young Alfred's musical aptitude didn't go unnoticed.

"But I wasn't a child prodigy," Brendel has written, "and there seemed to be some other options. My second love was, and is, literature -- some writing, a large amount of reading. In Zagreb [Yugoslavia], my father was for a time director of a cinema, and I went to see films every weekend. In my teens in Graz, I attended art school and painted and drew a lot: portraits, imaginary cityscapes, a series of fantastical pictures called 'masks'."

The piano lessons begun at age six were given up at sixteen. The only real contact Brendel had with teachers thereafter was in "a few" masterclasses with Edwin Fischer and Edward Steuermann. But Brendel listened to the pianists then heard in Vienna -- Cortot and Kempff, especially -- and to recordings of Schnabel.

"I learned from all of them," he says, "but I did not try to imitate them. I also didn't try to play completely differently from anybody else. I did find out much for myself. It was a longer process, but in the end it was my own."

Not surprisingly, given his background, Brendel himself has no interest in playing guru. He used to give short masterclasses, but they quietly fell by the wayside as his schedule filled out. He'd really rather write about music. His book Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts has been a steady seller since it was published by Princeton University Press in 1976. For The New York Review of Books he has written articles on playing Mozart and listening to Liszt, and he has contributed some of the liner notes for his own records.

"I do it on the side all the time, as much as time permits," he explains. "I've just started to work on a second book of essays, but it is time-consuming, even if the material is there. And I have to do it in two languages -- German and English. It works better. I would like to have a solid six months just to sit down and write."

The private Brendel is quite a different creature form the nervous onstage professor. He moves with surprising grace, and his manner is a mix of Old World courtliness and subtle avuncular mischief. Probably few in his admiring audiences realize the breadth of his interests, a legacy of those childhood enthusiasms. He's a compulsive reader -- from novels to literary criticism and books on philosophy and psychology. With another of his big grins, he admits to collecting inadvertent humor in print -- such as an ad for a beauty preparation with reversed "before" and "after" pictures -- and to collecting postcards from the First World War. "The notion, the meaning, of kitsch has interested me for a very long time," he admits. "It helps us to realize what art is."

With this, there's a hearty laugh. Brendel goes on to confess a fondness for cartoons. "I think cartoonists are among the important figures of the century -- as creators, in a sense, of the world in which we live. And this seems to me almost a predominantly American specialty." Favorites include Charles Addams, Edward Gorey, and -- get this -- Gary Larson of The Far Side fame.

In London, Brendel often goes to the opera and to new music concerts. "I listen to new music as much as I can. Before I left London this time, Elliot Carter was there, and his Third and Fourth Quartets were performed. And Ligeti's piano music was performed in its entirety in one evening. His etudes are very fine and very difficult pieces. He's going to write more of them."

Would they ever appear on a Brendel recital or recording? "No," he replies, "but I'm most interested to see what my younger colleagues will do with them."

The one piece of "modern" music with which Brendel has been associated is the Schoenberg Concerto. Back in the early 1950s, he was one of the first pianists to take up its cause -- it was composed in 1942 -- and he suspects that he may have played it more than anyone else. It's still in his repertory, and he says he'd like to record it again.

Perhaps it's life imitating art -- concerts modeled on recordings -- that accounts for Brendel's penchant for recitals entirely devoted to single composers. Back in the early 1960s, he made a big splash in London with a recital cycle of all the Beethoven sonatas, a feat he's since repeated a number of times. This spring, he goes on tour with four all-Schubert programs. He took them to the Soviet Union in March, and he'll be playing them this April and May in New York, Washington, DC, Chicago, Madison, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. ...Shortly thereafter, much of this repertory should be appearing on record.

Sometime in the future, Brendel would like to tour with two all-Haydn programs. "This has not been done before, and, curiously, this composer has been neglected almost completely by the great older pianists. I find it important -- also as a viewer of art -- to see how the production of an artist looks in a large exhibition, four or five big rooms. What does it do for you? Does it hold its own or does it get tiresome? For me, there are certain composers in piano literature who can stand the test, and I think Haydn is one of them." Eventually, Brendel would like to widen his still-circumscribed Mozart and Schumann playlists and to explore "amusing corners" like Rossini and Smetana.

While he champions composers such as Mozart and Haydn and has made a careful study of 18th-century performance practice, Brendel can't summon much enthusiasm for the present-day revival of older instruments. He prefers Scarlatti, some 18th-century French music, and "very little" of Bach on the harpsichord. Otherwise, he remains committed to the notion that historic music has latent expressive possibilities that can best be brought to life on the modern Steinway. "I think most piano music written by great composers is not tailored for a certain instrument of a certain vintage. It is a receptacle of everything music can express -- orchestral, vocal, or anything else a composer could do."

To Brendel, there's less to be learned from the instruments known to composers than from the context of their music in other genres. That much is clear from the way he has been preparing for his upcoming all-Schubert programs. "What did Schubert do in his chamber music and orchestral works? How did his lieder fit the voice? How did he treat his texts? What do his harmonies tell me in connection with certain texts? What do major and minor mean to him? How did he apply them?

"The question of old instruments is particularly virulent in the case of Schubert, I think. So many of his later sonatas are as orchestral in their imagination and in their range of dynamics and color as any music I could name. They actually cannot come to life on a period instrument. And the instruments of Beethoven's time were in a state of flux. Some of them were produced when he was already quite deaf."

Brendel admits that it's partly a question of environment -- the differences between the performing spaces of the 18th and early-19th centuries and those of our own. "How much dynamics are needed to bring a piece alive in a hall that seats 3,000 -- or a Tanglewood Shed that seats 6,000? How does one suggest the music without distorting it?

"With old instruments, you need completely different rooms. If you put a harpsichord or gambas in the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna, they sound lovely; if you put a piano there, it sounds impossible. This specialization in older instruments brings big gains in certain orchestral and choral music, but not, at least as far as I am concerned, with the fortepiano. There are qualities that come out better, but I think the modern piano has more to offer altogether."

Brendel has an abiding love for chamber music, and his collaboration with members of the Cleveland Quartet a few years back made for one of the most satisfying Trout Quintets on record. Recently, he got together with Heinz Holliger, Hermann Baumann, and friends to make a new recording of the Mozart and Beethoven quintets for piano and winds. Brendel has warm feelings, too, for Schubert lieder. He made his American debut in 1964, at New York's Hunter College, accompanying Hermann Prey in Die schöne Müllerin, and nearly 20 years later recorded Winterreise and Schwanengesang with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Philips, Brendel's exclusive label for nearly 20 years, recently released his new recording of Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition ("I played it in my earliest years quite a bit, and it was on one of my earliest recordings for Vox") and a new Brahms D minor Concerto with Claudio Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic. The latest installments in his ongoing Liszt discography are two volumes of the Années de Pèlerinage (there are also some Liszt works filling out the Mussorgsky release).

Brendel is quick to acknowledge how recordings have changed our way of hearing music. For one thing, there's the present-day fetish for note-perfect performances. "I am not a perfectionist myself," he says. "Of course, I try not to be sloppy. In the service of a composer, to be meticulous is a good thing. But I do not overestimate the kind of spotless surface that these days, with the help of the record, is so often achieved, and which some listeners seem to look for -- and some critics. There is that comment of Steuermann about the 'barbarism of perfection', of which I sometimes have to think."

Then, too, there's the immense variation in recording techniques and playback equipment. "There are all kinds of things in the machinery -- often denied -- than can slightly change the balance of your playing, or slightly distort the dynamics over a certain level, and it suddenly doesn't make sense. There are also certain circumstances, particularly in modern recordings, when the right speakers in the right room with the right amplifier are absolutely essential. That worries me a little.

"The dependence on refined machinery is too large, from the CD player to the fantasy of SDI. If you've been at Heathrow Airport when suddenly a computer breaks down, you won't forget it. Somebody who has a CD player at home may not notice whether he hears the right thing or whether the damned thing has gone awry. It's like kaffeesatzlesen, telling the future from the remains of the coffee in the coffeepot."