
The great pianist Alfred Brendel died peacefully this morning at his London home.
He was 94.
Brendel was born in a Czech town, raised in Zagreb, educated in Graz and sidelined in Vienna.
A rush of Mozart and Beethoven recordings that he made in the late 1950s for the cheapo label Vox caught the attention of bigger fish and he moved to London to cover the entire classical repertoire for Philips. Possibly his greatest achievement was to retrieve the entire piano output, long neglected, of Franz Schubert.