Biography (read more)
Alfred Denis Cortot was born on 26 September 1877 at Nyon in the Swiss canton of Vaud, to a French father and a Swiss mother; he was a first cousin of the composer Edgard Varèse. At the Paris Conservatoire he studied with Émile Decombes, himself a pupil of Chopin, and with Louis Diémer, taking his premier prix in 1896. He made his debut with the Concerts Colonne in 1897 in Beethoven’s Third Concerto.
From 1898 to 1901 he worked at Bayreuth as a choral coach and assistant conductor, and in 1902 conducted the Paris premiere of Götterdämmerung; he founded the Société des Concerts to perform major classical and contemporary works. In 1905 he formed a trio with the violinist Jacques Thibaud and the cellist Pablo Casals. He was professor at the Paris Conservatoire from 1907 to 1923 and founded the École Normale de Musique de Paris in 1919. During the Second World War he accepted the post of High Commissioner for the arts in the Vichy government and sat on its National Council in 1941 and 1942, taking part in propaganda events while also intervening on behalf of imprisoned musicians and of Jewish musicians including the soprano Marya Freund; after the war he was found guilty of collaboration and suspended from performing for a year. He died at Lausanne on 15 June 1962, aged 84, of uremia following kidney failure.
Cortot’s standing rests on three separate things. As a player he was one of the defining Chopin and Schumann interpreters of the acoustic and early electrical era, and on 21 March 1925 he made what is recorded as the world’s first commercial electrical recording of classical music, of Chopin’s Impromptus and Schubert’s Litanei, for Victor. As a chamber musician, the trio he formed with Thibaud and Casals in 1905 was among the most celebrated ensembles of its time.
As an editor and teacher his reach was wider still. His annotated editions of Chopin, Liszt and Schumann for Éditions Durand, and his interpretive writings including the Rational Principles of Pianoforte Technique, carried a particular way of thinking about phrasing and technique into piano teaching well beyond France. The École Normale de Musique de Paris, which he founded in 1919, gave that outlook an institution of its own, and pianists as different as Clara Haskil and Dinu Lipatti passed through his orbit at the Conservatoire and in Paris.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Cortot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clara_Haskil
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinu_Lipatti