Biography (read more)
Thierry de Brunhoff was born on 9 November 1934, the son of Jean and Cécile de Brunhoff, the creators of Babar the elephant; his brothers are Laurent and Mathieu. He began piano lessons at eleven with Alfred Cortot, of whom he said afterwards that he owed him everything, everything he could timidly be. He then studied with Edwin Fischer. He went on to teach at the École normale de musique de Paris for more than a decade, where his pupils included Hüseyin Sermet.
His performing career was comparatively short. In 1974 he left the platform altogether and entered the abbey of En-Calcat, in the Tarn, as Brother Thierry Jean, explaining the decision as a matter of placing devotion to God above everything else, music included. His playing had been largely forgotten by the time EMI Classics issued a double album in its Les Rarissimes series in 2004, with performances of Chopin, Weber and Schumann, which brought renewed attention to what he had recorded.
De Brunhoff is remembered chiefly as an interpreter of Chopin and Schumann, within a repertoire that ran from Beethoven through to Debussy and Ravel. He held Chopin in particular regard, and spoke of the piano itself as inseparable from what Chopin had done with it.
The shape of his influence is unusual. Because he withdrew from performing in 1974, at an age when most pianists are entering their most productive years, his reputation depends on a small body of recordings and on his years of teaching at the École normale de musique de Paris, where Hüseyin Sermet passed through his class. The Les Rarissimes reissue of 2004 is what restored the recordings to circulation, and it is the basis on which his playing is now generally assessed.
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