The Alte Oper mourns the death of Alfred Brendel

Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Haydn – this was Alfred Brendel's last concert programme at the Alte Oper when he bid farewell to his Frankfurt audience as a guest of the Frankfurt Bach Concerts in 2008. A typical, profound Brendel programme. He was called back to the podium ten times during the final applause, three encores (Beethoven, Liszt and Busoni's Bach), standing ovations. Three weeks later came the final concert of this pianist of the century, in Vienna in December 2008. 
Alfred Brendel has now died at the age of 94, a musician who wrote the history of interpretation. He epitomised the knowledgeable pianist like no other; his absolute and objective playing made Brendel, who was born in Moravia in 1931, the epitome of the witty musician. And an advocate for the work, behind whom the interpreter sometimes takes a back seat. ‘Intoxication alone does not create a work of art, only control and reflection make it so’ – this was one of Brendel's fundamental convictions.
We can count ourselves lucky that Alfred Brendel has been a permanent fixture on our season programme from the very beginning. Since 1981, he has sat at the piano in the Alte Oper no fewer than 40 times – ‘the accomplished Brendel audience of the Bachkonzerte association’, as the Frankfurter Rundschau review of his last concert here put it, ‘usually got something out of this world’. His great Schubert cycle in 1987 is unforgettable; Brendel was recognised as the most important Schubert interpreter of his time. In September 2001, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, he came to us for four evenings as part of an ‘interpreter portrait’, and in the 2003/04 season he played the Beethoven sonatas for cello and piano together with his son Adrian Brendel. Alfred Brendel, for his part, appreciated the Alte Oper and its acoustics, otherwise he would not have released a live recording of Franz Schubert's Piano Sonata in G major D 894 for release on CD in 1998.
Even after his official retirement as a concert pianist, the versatile artist honoured us one more time: in 2011, Alfred Brendel invited us to a ‘School of Listening’ and gave a lecture with musical examples from Beethoven's piano sonatas on the subject of ‘Character in Music’. In musical interpretation, Brendel demanded that as much attention be paid to the character, atmosphere and emotions of a piece as to the knowledge of structures and forms. ‘The assumption that the structure of a work automatically reveals its character is a mistake,’ says the pianist. ‘The pianist's task is thus close to that of an actor’, whereby he himself must then be described as the ultimate character actor at the piano. The Alte Oper Frankfurt takes a bow to this probably greatest character actor on the keys.