Paul Badura-Skoda

Editions, essays and recordings came from a single pair of hands in Paul Badura-Skoda's work, and that is the unusual thing about him. Born in Vienna in 1927, he studied at the city's conservatory and then with Edwin Fischer, and by the early 1950s was touring internationally in the Viennese classics that stayed his centre of gravity. He recorded Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on the modern piano and again on period fortepianos, becoming one of the players through whom historically informed keyboard performance reached a general audience, and he wrote about the music he played — on Bach interpretation, on Mozart, on the Beethoven sonatas — with the authority of someone who tested every argument at the instrument. He was still playing concertos in public past his ninetieth birthday. He died in 2019, in the city where he was born. He studied conducting as well, taking his diploma at the Konservatorium der Stadt Wien in 1948, and was engaged the following year as a soloist by Furtwängler and Karajan; in 1950 he stepped in for the ailing Edwin Fischer at the Salzburg Festival and was known internationally from then on. Frank Martin wrote a Second Piano Concerto and a fantasy on flamenco rhythms for him, in 1969 and 1973. He marked the Beethoven bicentenary of 1970 with the thirty-two sonatas in Paris, Mexico City, Chicago and elsewhere, and played some hundred and forty concerts during the Mozart year of 1991.