Biography (read more)
Paul Badura-Skoda was born in Vienna on 6 October 1927 and died there on 25 September 2019. A student of Edwin Fischer, he took first prize in the Austrian Music Competition in 1947, and by 1949 was playing under Furtwängler and Karajan; with Friedrich Gulda and Jörg Demus he formed the so-called Viennese Troika of post-war pianists.
Badura-Skoda’s Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert carried the Viennese tradition into the age of historical performance: he owned a collection of period instruments and recorded Schubert’s complete sonatas across five of them, decades before that practice became common. A prolific recording artist and scholar — his editions and books on Mozart and Bach interpretation are standard — he appears in this catalogue in both guises, on modern and historical pianos, which makes his readings natural fixed points for comparison.
Sources: