For Alfred Brendel, now 94, climbing up to the top floor of his Hampstead house has become increasingly challenging. Whenever he’s in London, he’ll make that ascent with great determination, slowly making his way up the narrow, winding stairs, past several floors of book-lined rooms, leading to a space in which he’s rigged up a large TV screen and a comfortable armchair. He subscribes to the streaming service Mubi, the treasure trove of new and old arthouse cinema, buys or borrows DVDs and is as alert as anyone—apart perhaps from critics and academics—to the latest film releases, the more leftfield the better. From time to time, I’ve joined him and have always been surprised at his selections. He’ll invariably mention, with infectious enthusiasm, a film I’ve never heard of—and which I “absolutely must see”.
Although he is mostly recognised as a pianist, one the greatest interpreters of Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert and Liszt of our time, Brendel also collects art, has published several volumes of poetry and has written with finesse about Surrealism and Dada and the use of humour in classical music. Then there’s his cinephilia—more sophisticated than being a mere film buff—which has led him to curate seasons for major festivals in Berlin, Vienna and Prague, always on the theme of “Laughter and Dread”. This reflects a taste for the macabre and absurd that’s reflected in the surprising and sometimes bizarre objects around his house: from a stuffed baby crocodile in a crinoline to a spooky devil face from the Tyrol; from the death mask of Franz Liszt to some curiously dysmorphic paintings by the contemporary German artist Max Neumann. When I made a documentary film about him 1999, one of the opening sequences plays with the idea of his home being the perfect set for a scary movie.
Brendel has sometimes been criticised for being an overly cerebral musician. But his intellectual rigour is balanced by a more fanciful sensibility. He is fascinated by the far reaches of the human imagination, not least when they pose a challenge to the realm of received ideas. There is something appealingly crazy about him.
His love of cinema—the darker and funnier the better—may seem unrelated to his career as a serious musician, but there is a link. Although he detests the crassness of “programme music”, with its literal and illustrative evocations of nature and human emotions, he does recognise the importance of character in music—one of his best examples being the succession of highly individual pieces in Chopin’s celebrated 24 Preludes. Cinema explores similar territory. There are themes, motifs, the play of light and dark, the subtleties of flashback and repetition. Film and music language—in the hands of an artist—share an essentially poetic quality in which story is an essential element. They take us on journeys of discovery.
In fact, Brendel reveals that he once told his protégé and student Kit Armstrong, an immensely gifted young prodigy, that he would only start maturing as an artist “once he’d become familiar with the great books and the great plays”. And probably some great films as well. For Brendel, the best cinema ranks as high as literature, painting and sculpture, all of them essential to Bildung, the particularly Austro-German conception of culture and education as a necessary part of being a civilised human.
Brendel grew up with the cinema. As a child, he lived in Zagreb, where his father ran the Capitol, the second largest movie house of the Croatian capital. While he’s always made a point of describing his parents as “not at all intellectual—they were not artistic or aesthetic in any way”, he’s grateful that his father brought an 8mm projector home and showed him classic films by Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd. “Those films,” he insists, “were very important to me in the long run.” The “Rosebud” clue perhaps to the pianist’s eccentricity and sense of humour?
The family would visit the Capitol cinema every weekend, where they saw productions from the UFA and Tobis studios, Nazi propaganda fare such as Jew Süß (1940)—the film that Heinrich Himmler insisted all SS concentration camp guards be shown before they took up their duties. The film starred Werner Krauss, “one of the greatest German actors,” Brendel says, “who after the war appeared in the theatre.” “The star actors in German films of the period,” he continues, “Hans Moser, Heinz Rühmann and Paul Kemp had all started out in Expressionist theatre.” The last of these played—along with Lotte Lenya—in GW Pabst’s The Threepenny Opera (1932), based on the Brecht-Weill opera, a film which Brendel rates as highly as any in pre-war German cinema.
There was a lot of what Brendel calls Seelenkitsch (“soul kitsch”) in the films he remembers seeing as a child, often biopics of great artists such as Rembrandt, Brahms and Schumann. “I can remember a film about Mozart [When the Gods Love (1942)]. The composer was on his deathbed—the actor was Hans Holt—and they played part of the Requiem as background. He was sort of conducting it and then exclaimed, ‘The trombones! Where are the trombones?’” As Brendel evokes the screen Mozart’s dying call, he chuckles in an enchantingly childlike manner: for him, this is a perfect example of the cloying sentimentality that characterised so many of these Nazi-period films. He regards them today as objects of ridicule as much as of horror.
Colour, which appeared in the German cinema of the late 1930s, inspired a sense of wonder in the adolescent Brendel: “I remember a film about Munchausen, who flew through the air. And director Veit Harlan’s Die Goldene Stadt (1942)—the golden city being Prague. It was quite daring, as it conveyed a copulation! Remarkable in the prudish Nazi atmosphere!” These often syrupy films were sponsored and approved by propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, who loved hanging out with film people, not least the leading ladies. They evoked a world of romance to distract a warring nation under totalitarian rule, but they also clearly awed the future pianist. They were, at this point of his life, his only experience of culture, apart from the silent comedies.
After the war, Brendel discovered a different cinema, as well as other art forms that had been banned by Goebbels’s propaganda machine. Like many others who had come of age during the Second World War and witnessed the horrors that were revealed as it ended, he no longer felt comfortable with the sentimentality that had masked the terror and violence of Nazism. In this light, it’s no surprise that he’s curated film seasons around Laughter and Dread—an expression of both a deep-seated sense of the absurd and an unshakable atheism common to so many of Brendel’s generation, convinced, as they are, of the bankruptcy of ideologies and other faiths.
I put this to him: why laughter and dread? “Because they combine,” he replies, “to evoke most accurately the neuroses of our time.” This combination is reflected in some of Brendel’s other enthusiasms: the anarchic theatre of Alfred Jarry, with the comical figure of Ubu Roi; the absurdist theatre of Eugène Ionesco and Samuel Beckett; the crazy visions of Franz Kafka; and the subversive work of Bulgakov and Daniil Kharms as brought to life by Complicité’s stage productions, of which he is a devoted fan.
“I’m not a religious person,” he adds, “and if it’s presented on a big platter, as in the cinema of Andrei Tarkovsky, I cannot really appreciate it.” He is a fan, however, of recent Russian cinema: the now-exiled Circassian director Kantemir Balagov, best known for Beanpole (2019) a heart-rending film set in the siege of Leningrad, for example. He also loves the young director’s first feature, Closeness (2017), a film I wouldn’t have discovered without the pianist’s enthusiastic recommendation.
The attached lists (see below) demonstrate Brendel’s passion for the chaos and fun of Dada as well as a suspicion of authority. He cannot hide his enthusiasm for Karel Reisz’s Morgan: A Suitable Case for Treatment (1962) and Lindsay Anderson’s If… (1968), nor for Woody Allen, of course, and the great American silent movie comics. He comes back again and again in our conversation to a Keaton film that was new to me: Seven Chances (1925), in which the hero’s combination of resourcefulness and persistence seem to awake in Brendel a sense of wonder. Could Keaton’s character offer the pianist something of an alter ego? A naive, vulnerable and essentially tragic figure who survives thanks to gifts for self-renewal and playful opportunism?
If laughter and dread and the combination of the two—as in two favourites, Tod Browning’s Freaks (1932) and Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (1962 )—excite Brendel, he’s also moved by stories rich in humanity, such as the Austrian film Breathing (2011) by Jessica Hausner, the story a young man desperately trying to forge a life beyond prison, or Miranda July’s touching comedy Me and You and Everyone You Know (2005).
When I ask him about film music, Brendel has strong views. He’s not a fan of the great Austro-German-influenced soundtrack composers, nor of Bernard Herrmann’s bombast. He regards Erich Wolfgang Korngold—so influential when he arrived in Hollywood as a refugee from Nazi Vienna—as someone who gave in to kitsch and “never fulfilled his promise as a follower of Mahler and Zemlinsky”. He is particularly scathing when it comes to Michael Nyman and his famous score for Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993). “I think,” he says, carefully choosing his words and with a mischievous glint in his eyes, “that his music is of such skilful emptiness!” Nor does he like Zbigniew Preisner’s score for Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colours Blue (1993): “I detested it. Overblown and banal.”
His favourite film music is, without doubt. the soundtrack to Chaplin’s City Lights (1931). “I don’t know how much Charlie Chaplin did himself. He probably improvised on the piano and someone else composed, but it’s tailor-made for the film!”
It’s now some weeks since Brendel made those observations to me, and I’m back at his house. We’re about to watch Edward Berger’s recent Robert Harris adaptation, Conclave. There’s one major change since I last visited: a chair lift so he can reach the top-floor cinema room more easily. His partner Maria jokes that it’s the first vehicle he’s driven himself. Watching him slowly ascend, gliding past his painting collection, I cannot help but imagine a camera leaving the ground for a crane shot, revealing a more panoramic perspective of the everyday world. He’s on his way to the wonderland of movies, as excited, I imagine, as he would have been as a child in Croatia.
“Have you watched The Bibi Tapes?” he asks me suddenly. I tell him that I haven’t yet. “You must!” he says, breathlessly. “It’s an amazing film. That man Netanyahu is so incredibly corrupt, it’s unbelievable!” For a man who’s lived through so much, and might easily retreat into world-weary cynicism, Alfred Brendel, in his nineties, still has a contagious capacity for awe. He is clearly horrified by the perennial fallibility of humankind, yet embraces cinema’s redeeming capacity to open our eyes and move us, time and time again.
