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Alfred Brendel’s last night

— Photos: N. Ram

Passing the baton: Alfred Brendel takes his last bow at Vienna’s Musikverein on Thursday night.

At 8.13 p.m. on Thursday night, one of the greatest pianists of his, or any, age sat down to play in public for the last time. For the last time Alfred Brendel spread his tails behind him, adjusted the height of the stool, and beamed his readiness to the conductor.

Two weeks before his 78th birthday, he was ready to bring the final curtain down on his career while still at something like the peak of his powers. To choose such a moment of finality is, for a pianist, a comparatively rare thing. Arthritis gets some in the end; others die in harness; for some the phone gradually stops ringing.

Brendel decided he would rather be in control of the moment. His chosen exit was quite characteristic. Not for him a last Prospero-style pronouncement through the great works he has, as much as anyone, has interpreted — not an opus 111 or a D960. Instead he chose a youthful Mozart piano concerto.

And he chose Musikverein in Vienna, that be-gilded, white-tied, and chandeliered temple to high culture. Brendel may love living in London, may love almost everything about the British. But it was to Vienna that he returned at the end — to mark the journey that had begun 60 years previously, 90 miles away in Graz. He has played in this hall over 120 times during those years: it was here that it had to end.

On Thursday evening, he was playing the first concerto to have marked Mozart out as someone prepared to take revolutionary risks with a form that had already grown its own conventions — K. 271 in E flat. Brendel has described the piece as “a wonder of the world,” quoting Busoni as saying that it is both “as young as a youth” and “as wise as an old man.” He added, for good measure in 1985: “And from this point on the Mozart player must shoulder a burden of perfection that goes beyond his powers.”

Alfred Brendel with his four pupils (from left to right) Paul Lewis, Kit Armstrong, Imogen Cooper and Till Fellner.

The first of the piece’s startling breaks with tradition is that the piano enters in the second bar, before the orchestra has had a chance to describe the landscape. Typically, Brendel kept his hands on his lap for the first bar and a half, as if trying to trick even this most knowing of audiences. It was a moment of pure theatre.

The performance was everything you have come to expect of Brendel — technically assured and un-showy; surprising in both small and large ways; sensitive and intensely thoughtful. If the occasion got to him at all, it showed only in the quiet passages when he vocally willed himself to capture the pathos, the flashes of humour, and the serene beauty of the melodies. The “never surpassed” slow movement was an extended dialogue with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of his 83-year old friend, Sir Charles Mackerras — the piano sometimes passive, sometime urgently assertive, sometimes imploring and plaintive.

We expected a playful finale, but we did not get it. There was a tone of gentle elegiac acceptance — though a hint, too, of not wanting the music to end quite yet.

Nor did it. The hall rose as one to thunder out such Viennese respect that Brendel returned to play the haunting arrangement by Busoni of Bach’s chorale Nun komm der Heiden Heiland. The orchestra and audience listened in total silence and then demanded more. He shrugged. He waved a coquettish goodbye. He crossed his arms over his heart and bowed. After half a dozen returns he shrugged acceptance and played for one last time — Liszt’s Au Lac de Wallenstadt. In an irony that would not have escaped him (he has written a poem on the matter), he played to the accompaniment of a ghostly mobile phone ring tone for a few bars.

He had first played Liszt in this hall 51 years ago. These last minutes marked not only the end of his career, but the severing of the final link between his generation and that of previous masters — a closing of a chapter of piano history starting for Brendel with the master classes of Edwin Fischer and Paul Baumgartner, and which encompassed Schnabel, Backhaus, Kempff, Serkin.

The older Viennese in the audience would have had the pianistic family tree in their minds and could trace the genealogy back through Rudolph Ganz or Theodor Leschetizky to Czerny and Beethoven himself.

Recently, Brendel was struck by a cartoon in which a serene, smiling man was surrounded by an audience in grief. At the end, he smiled with what looked like a surge of relief and gestured down into the audience, which included all four of his significant pupils — the child prodigy Kit Armstrong, Imogen Cooper, Paul Lewis, and Till Fellner. He seemed to be saying, “That’s me. Now, over to you.” And so the baton was passed to the next generation. For Brendel the rest is — in public, at least — silence.

(Alan Rusbridger is Editor-in-Chief of The Guardian.)

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