Alfred Brendel the Dadaist

How many people are celebrating the fact that, last week, one of Europe’s most inspired writers about music, modern art and aesthetics celebrated his 90th birthday? The answer is relatively few, which might seem surprising. He is a world-renowned authority on the grotesque and the absurd — territory through which he darts mischievously in his poems, originally composed in his native German. But you have to turn to his essays written in English to experience his refined sarcasm, which is either delicious or mortifying, depending on whether you feel incriminated by his strictures against intellectual laziness. He is quirky and rigorous — a combination associated with his beloved Dada, a movement I’d written off as an embarrassment until I read his dazzling essay on the subject in the New York Review of Books.

And yet, as I say, his writings aren’t attracting the attention they deserve as he turns 90. That’s because he is Alfred Brendel, the revered Austrian interpreter of the piano music of the Viennese masters. The media will inevitably focus on his recorded legacy. The tributes won’t be as easy to write as, say, birthday salutes to Rubinstein or Horowitz. That’s because Brendel, who retired from playing more than a decade ago, was always determined not to project his own personality from the keyboard.

Ironically, his fidelity to the composer’s markings led some critics to claim that his trademark was a certain didactic fussiness. You can work out where they got this idea, if you search hard enough among the 114-CD set of Brendel’s Philips recordings. But I despair of anyone who thinks he’s defined by the occasional whiff of overthinking. I’ve met a few Brendel-haters in my time; they tend to be either tiresome evangelists of ‘period practice’ or old queens whose idea of perfect pianism is Horowitz in Liberace mode.