Happy Birthday, Alfred Brendel!
- Blue Pumpkin
- Jan 5
- 2 min read
Updated: Mar 16
I'm not just a fan of Jorge Bolet. Another great interest is Alfred Brendel, who today on 5 January 2025 is celebrating his 94th birthday. He is my benchmark for Beethoven and Schubert. I've just come across this anecdote:
"In the early 1960s, Brendel was on a recital tour of South America when Pope John XXIII died. In Buenos Aires, Brendel was politely asked if he could change his programme to rid it of the Schubert Sonata in A major D959. The reason: ‘It could arouse frivolous associations because of Lilac Time.’ Brendel explained that the sonata was ‘a profoundly tragic piece’, and played it as planned."
Australian Book Review, 7 February 2024
Pope John XXIII died on 3 June, 1963. I think the reference is to Das Dreimäderlhaus ('House of the Three Girls'), adapted into English-language versions as Blossom Time and Lilac Time, is a Viennese pastiche operetta with music by Franz Schubert, rearranged by Heinrich Berté (1857–1924), and a libretto by Alfred Maria Willner and Heinz Reichert. The work gives a fictionalised account of Schubert's romantic life, and the story was adapted from the 1912 novel Schwammerl by Rudolf Hans Bartsch (1873–1952). Originally the score was mostly Berté, with just one piece of Schubert's ("Ungeduld" from Die schöne Müllerin), but the producers required Berté to discard his score and create a pasticcio of Schubert music.
This video (in German) is from an interview in 1965 at the time of his Vox/Turnabout recordings. His big break came in the early 1970s. "When I was young my overall career wasn't sensational at all, it rather progressed step by step. But then, one day I was performing a Beethoven programme in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London. It was quite an unpopular programme, I didn't even like it much myself and the next day I got three offers from big record companies. It seemed really rather grotesque, like a slow, hardly noticeable rise on a thermometer or a kettle warming water suddenly beginning to boil and to bubble and the steam comes out."