Biography (read more)
Walter Gieseking was born in Lyon in 1895 to German parents; his father was a doctor and a lepidopterist. He began playing at four with no formal instruction, and from 1911 to 1916 studied at the Hanover Conservatory under Karl Leimer, with whom he later co-wrote a series of piano method books. He made his concert debut in 1915.
He built an international career between the wars and premiered Hans Pfitzner’s Piano Concerto in 1923. He was known for a remarkable memory, learning works away from the keyboard, famously while travelling by train. He remained in Germany through the Second World War and performed for Nazi cultural organisations; he was blacklisted afterwards, and cleared in January 1947, but his scheduled American tour of 1949 was cancelled in the face of protests. He returned to the United States successfully in 1953. In December 1955 a bus accident near Stuttgart injured him and killed his wife. He died in October 1956 of complications of pancreatitis, in London, in the middle of recording Beethoven’s Pastoral Sonata; the final movement was left unmade.
Gieseking’s name is inseparable from French piano music. He was admired for subtlety of touch, of pedalling and of dynamic control, and it was in Debussy and Ravel that these qualities were held to tell most clearly. He recorded the complete piano works of both composers, and also recorded Mozart’s complete solo piano music and the Beethoven sonatas, so that his catalogue takes in three of the largest surveys a pianist can undertake.
His work with Karl Leimer went beyond his own lessons. The method books the two published together set out an approach founded on mental preparation and on listening rather than on mechanical drill, and Gieseking’s own capacity to learn a score away from the instrument was its most conspicuous demonstration. His postwar reception was complicated by his conduct under the Nazi regime, which cost him the 1949 American tour and shaped how his career was discussed for the rest of his life.
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