Biography (read more)
Wilhelm Backhaus was born in Leipzig on 26 March 1884, the son of an architect, and had his first lessons from his mother at the age of four. Arthur Nikisch noticed his talent and recommended him to the Leipzig Conservatory, where he studied with Alois Reckendorf from 1891 to 1899, followed by private lessons in Frankfurt with Eugen d’Albert. As a child he heard the Brahms piano concertos conducted by Brahms himself.
He made his concert debut at sixteen and toured internationally for the rest of his life. In 1905 he won the Anton Rubinstein Competition, with Béla Bartók placed second. He taught at the Royal Manchester College of Music in 1904 and at the Curtis Institute of Music in 1926, and made his American debut on 5 January 1912 in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto with Walter Damrosch and the New York Symphony Orchestra. He settled at Lugano in 1930 and he and his wife took Swiss citizenship in 1931, while he continued to work in Germany: he had met Hitler by May 1933, became an executive adviser to the Nazi organisation Kameradschaft der deutschen Künstler, and was granted a professorship by Hitler on 20 April 1936. He died at Villach, in Austria, on 5 July 1969, while engaged to perform; his last recital, at Ossiach, was recorded.
Backhaus is remembered as a Beethoven and Brahms player of the old German school, and his complete recorded cycles of the Beethoven sonatas and concertos are what his reputation chiefly rests on. His connection to that repertoire ran back unusually far: as a child he heard the Brahms concertos with Brahms conducting, and he studied privately with Eugen d’Albert.
He was also a pioneer of the gramophone in a literal sense. His abridged recording of the Grieg concerto in 1909 was the first recording of any concerto, and in 1928 he became the first pianist to record the complete Chopin études. Winning the Anton Rubinstein Competition in 1905, ahead of Béla Bartók, placed him among the leading players of his generation at twenty-one, and he was still concertising sixty-four years later; the recorded recital at Ossiach, days before his death, closes a discography of exceptional span.
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