Biography (read more)
Artur Schnabel was born Aaron Schnabel on 17 April 1882 at Kunzendorf, then in Austria-Hungary and now in Poland. The family moved to Vienna in 1884; he began playing at four and took formal lessons from six with Hans Schmitt at the Vienna Conservatorium. From 1891 to 1897 he studied with Theodor Leschetizky, with technical instruction from Anna Yesipova and Malwine Brée, and studied composition with Eusebius Mandyczewski, through whom he gained access to Brahms’s circle. He made his official debut at the Bösendorfer-Saal in Vienna in 1897.
He moved to Berlin in 1898, debuting at the Bechstein-Saal, and built his reputation there in orchestral appearances under Arthur Nikisch and in chamber music. He married the contralto Therese Behr in 1905, and from 1925 taught at the Berlin State Academy, where his master classes became well known. Being Jewish, he left Berlin in 1933 after the Nazi Party came to power; he taught at the University of Michigan from 1939, became an American citizen in 1944 and settled in Switzerland after the war. He died of uremia at Axenstein, Switzerland, on 15 August 1951 and is buried at Schwyz. His son Karl Ulrich Schnabel was also a pianist and pedagogue.
Between 1932 and 1935 Schnabel made the first complete recording of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, for His Master’s Voice, issued through the subscription-funded Beethoven Sonata Society. In March 2018 the Library of Congress selected it for the National Recording Registry for its cultural and historical significance.
His repertoire was deliberately narrow and centred on the Austro-German classics, and his reputation is for structural seriousness rather than display. As a chamber musician he founded two trios, the first in 1902 with Alfred Wittenberg and Anton Hekking and a second in 1905 with Carl Flesch and Jean Gérardy, and he later worked with Bronisław Huberman, Paul Hindemith and Gregor Piatigorsky. His own compositions took an entirely different direction: three symphonies, five string quartets, a piano concerto and various chamber works, nearly all of them atonal and none in current repertoire.
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