The Touch of the Poet

Pianist Alfred Brendel has been called “the world’s greatest classical player” by the New Yorker magazine for his more than 50 years of performing and his rich legacy of recordings. He is also a superb writer about music, with four books of essays to his name, and recently he has published poetry as well.

His musicianship and literary skill will both be on display next weekend at recitals Friday and Sunday in Los Angeles and Irvine, and at a reading Saturday at an L.A. art gallery showing work inspired by his latest collection of poetry.

Often identified as a Viennese pianist, Brendel was actually born in Weisenberg, Moravia, in 1931 to a family of German, Austrian, Italian and Slavic background. He spent his early life in Croatia, on the Adriatic island of Krk, where his parents ran a hotel. There, operating a record player for the guests, he learned to love pop music and sing along to operetta arias. Later, when the family moved to Zagreb, where his father managed a cinema, Brendel made a stage appearance in a children’s play and began his piano studies. He was 6.

Brendel’s career evolved slowly but steadily. He came in fourth in the Busoni Competition in 1949, a year in which no first prize was awarded. His popularity was enhanced by a series of low-cost, post-World War II recordings he made for Vox (recordings he now disavows because of his youth and the fact that he earns no royalties from their recent reissue).

Musically, Brendel has spent his life mining the works of the central European masters, returning again and again to Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms and Liszt. Since 1948, for instance, he has recorded the complete Beethoven cycle of 32 sonatas three times and the five Beethoven concertos four times, each with different results.

Brendel spoke by phone from his home in London about his music-making and his poetry, which Stuart Isacoff of Piano Today described as “amusing, often trenchant, witty, startling and occasionally wicked.”

Question: How and when did you begin writing poems?

Answer: It came about eight years ago completely by surprise. I had not planned to write poetry at all. I would not have believed it if somebody would have told me there would be three volumes of poetry coming out within the next six years. It simply happened.

It maybe requires a hypnagogic state, between sleeping and waking, to trigger something off. It started in a plane to Japan, when after a couple of hours I couldn’t possibly sleep, and [the title poem of his first book] “One finger too many” imposed itself on me. I wrote it down in the dark plane. After I looked at it, I thought it was quite funny. One could say my poetry is absurd because that seems to be my view of the world.

Q: In what language did that poem come to you?

A: It came to me in German. While I write my essays in either German or English, I write poetry in German first. But often I have done an English version right next to the German. When I was a “young” poet, eight years ago, it usually came much faster. These days, I sometimes take quite a lot of time. There can be 12 or 13 versions or even 15 versions.

Q: Do you think in terms of rhyme and meter?

A: They are all free. That seems to be a prerequisite of my writing poetry. But it is not random. They constantly vary in rhythm. It’s very important that a poem surprises me. Each one does. It has to.

Q: How many have you written?

A: About 200.

Q: How seriously do you take your poems?

A: About as seriously as I take myself. But I do take them seriously, even the fun ones. There are more serious ones in the last year or two. But I don’t want to overestimate them. I was surprised and delighted that they sort of live their own life. The three German volumes were translated into French, two of them into Dutch. There will be an Italian selection in the autumn. It really does go on.

Q: How do you regard your reading of poems?

A: It’s certainly a performance, and it has given me much pleasure in the last six or seven years. I’ve given readings both in English and in German, some of them with the participation of Pierre-Laurent Aimard, who is a pianist I admire and also a person with quite a sense of humor. What we are doing is a kind of happening, not just a boring juxtaposition of text and sound. But in Los Angeles, I am by myself.

Q: Your writing has always been well-received.

A: I have always lived with literature. I have always read a great deal, not so much about music, real literature. It was the music that informed me about music much more than any writing about music. I tried to write about what I found in the music, in the works, and give some real information, which was challenging. It was dealing with language and trying to be concise, trying to be elegant, and trying to avoid nonsense. Maybe what an American would call “bull.”

Q: You have the reputation for being an intellectual, not the kind of guy who uses a word like “bull.”

A: That was partly prejudice. When you look at me, I have glasses, I sit in a certain way, I do not appear to be flamboyant. It’s a particularly American view. That is my impression. Also, in America, Classicism is by at least some critics equated with intellectualism, and Romanticism with emotionalism, which is something that I could never understand.

Q: Did you grow up in an intellectual or a musical household?

A: I have the good fortune--I would call it the good fortune--that my parents were not musical, not particularly interested in music, not particularly interested in the arts. I had to find things out for myself.

They were helpful to a degree. They didn’t prevent me from doing things. They were overly bewildered and not at all at ease about the prospects of me becoming a musician. They were quite right. You never know how well it will go. My mother was taken aback because I did not go through the university and get a degree. She only forgave me when I got an honorary degree years later.

Q: Competitions did not seem to play a critical role in your career. Los Angeles is currently involved in a Rachmaninoff International Piano Competition and Festival. What do you think of competitions?

A: Well, what should I say? To a degree they’re a necessary evil. They sometimes can be the trigger for a career. But if you look at the prizewinners, the majority of them, didn’t make [careers]. I did get one of the prizes when I was 18, which helped me to get some concerts in Austria where I lived.

Q: In your local recitals, you will be playing Beethoven’s “Variations on a Theme by Diabelli,” which you have called the greatest piano work in the literature.

A: This is my personal choice. I try to explain [in his essay on the work] that for me it’s the paragon of a humorous composition, taking its cue from the Diabelli theme, which is already a funny theme. But don’t underestimate the theme. Beethoven would not have written the work if he found it totally uninteresting. He shows what one can do with such a theme in being aware of every component of the theme and making use of this component, sometimes individually, sometimes dominating a whole variation and also taking the advantage in making fun of the theme.

Q: How did you make your choices for the rest of the program?

A: The “Diabelli” Variations are 55 minutes long, nearly entirely in major keys, almost entirely in C major. This needed a kind of balance in minor keys. So we have three minor-key works in the first half [Haydn’s Sonata in G Minor, Mozart’s D-Minor Fantasy and Sonata in A Minor]. I love both composers. It’s very touching that they got along so well, that Haydn was able to admire Mozart so much. Mozart also got a lot out of Haydn’s music. They are different by temperament. In one of my earliest essays, I have a list of comparisons between Haydn and Mozart.

Q: Are you looking forward to your return to Southern California?

A: There is one reason why I am very apprehensive to get to Los Angeles and that is because of the coughing. I think generally in California people cough and sneeze more than anywhere else. I haven’t heard them laugh. I wouldn’t mind a laugh here and there in the “Diabelli” Variations, however.

Q: Maybe you can enlist them in your humorous poem about “The Coughers of Cologne” society.

A: When that poem was published in Cologne, in the concert hall itself, it did help. One of the reasons for the extreme coughing in California is the air-conditioning systems. I was sitting once in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, in the balcony, and I was freezing. It was like being outdoors on a winter day. I cannot imagine it’s such pleasure to be frozen indoors.

Q: Do you think it’s easier or harder for a young pianist to make a career these days?

A: It hasn’t ever been easy to make a career. Maybe the chances were a bit better when I was young, immediately after the war, living in Vienna, and there were lots of recording firms coming there because it was a very cheap place to record and young people generally got a little bit of money to play. I did get to record quite a lot in my 20s. I wouldn’t recommend it as a pattern for everybody. I learned a lot by doing these recordings. But I’m glad I could go on recording and recording.

Q: You’ve been an advocate of recording live performances. Why?

A: I’m not against studio recordings. Both have their merits. But if a live recording is a good one and one got through it with flying colors, it is a particular feeling of something almost heroic.

I’m always casting my eye on [live] radio recordings to see if there is something that can be used later--if I recognize my sound, if the room is good enough and if the public doesn’t cough the piece to bits. There are few things which I hope will be issued later. I have earmarked the Brahms D-Minor Concerto for later use.

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Alfred Brendel, Friday, 8 p.m., Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, $14-$51, (323) 850-2000; next Sunday, 7 p.m., Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine, $49-$69, (949) 854-4646. Brendel’s poetry reading, 7 p.m., Saturday, Jack Rutberg Fine Arts gallery, 357 N. La Brea Ave., L.A. Free. (323) 938-5222.

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Chris Pasles is a Times staff writer.