Biography (read more)
Dinu Lipatti was born Constantin Lipatti on 1 April 1917 in Bucharest. George Enescu was his godfather, and he is said to have played a Mozart minuet at his own baptism. He studied piano and composition with Mihail Jora for three years, attended the Gheorghe Lazăr high school and entered the Bucharest Conservatoire under Florica Musicescu. From 1933 he studied in Paris with Alfred Cortot and Nadia Boulanger, with Paul Dukas for composition and Charles Munch for conducting, and made his professional debut at the École Normale in Paris in 1935, aged eighteen.
At the Vienna competition of 1933 he was placed second, behind the Polish pianist Bolesław Kon; Cortot resigned from the jury in protest, believing the first prize should have been Lipatti’s. He fled Romania in September 1943 with the pianist Madeleine Cantacuzene and, with Edwin Fischer’s help, reached Geneva, where he took a professorship at the conservatoire. He was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in 1947, and experimental cortisone injections brought temporary improvement. He gave his last recital at the Besançon festival on 16 September 1950, playing Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Chopin while gravely ill, and died in Geneva on 2 December 1950, aged 33, of a burst abscess on his one lung.
Almost everything by which Lipatti is known was recorded in four years. Working with the producer Walter Legge for Columbia Graphophone and EMI between 1947 and 1950, he set down a small body of work that has stayed in circulation ever since, and the Besançon recital of September 1950 survives as a document of his final public appearance.
His reputation is a function of concentration rather than volume. A career ended at thirty-three left no late period, no broadening of repertoire and no revision of earlier views, so the recordings are heard as finished statements rather than as stages in a development. He was also a composer, trained by Dukas and Boulanger, and a conducting pupil of Charles Munch, and he taught at the Geneva Conservatoire during his last years, so his influence ran through teaching as well as through the discs.
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