Biography (read more)
Clara Haskil was born on 7 January 1895 in Bucharest into a Jewish family; her father Isaac, an immigrant from Bessarabia, died of pneumonia when she was four, and her mother Berthe was of Sephardi descent. She was the middle of three sisters; the younger, Jeanne, became a violinist. She studied in Vienna with Richard Robert, whose pupils also included Rudolf Serkin and George Szell, and briefly with Ferruccio Busoni, then moved to France, where she worked with Joseph Morpain, a pupil of Fauré whom she credited as a decisive influence. She entered the Conservatoire de Paris in 1905 nominally under Alfred Cortot, though most of her instruction came from Lazare Lévy and Mme Giraud-Latarse, and graduated at fifteen with a premier prix.
Her career was repeatedly broken by illness. In 1913 she was put in a plaster cast to arrest progressive scoliosis; stage fright set in from 1920, and frequent illness kept her in poverty for decades. Recognition arrived only after the Second World War, following concerts in the Netherlands in 1949. She settled at Vevey in Switzerland in 1951 and was appointed a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur. She died on 7 December 1960, aged 65, of injuries sustained in a fall on the stairs at the Brussels-South railway station, and is buried at Montparnasse in Paris.
Haskil is associated above all with Mozart and the early Romantic repertoire, and with Beethoven, Schumann and Scarlatti alongside them. Her best-known solo recording is of Mozart’s Piano Concertos Nos. 20 and 24, made in November 1960 with the Orchestre Lamoureux under Igor Markevitch, weeks before her death.
Much of her reputation rests on chamber playing. She performed with George Enescu, Pablo Casals, Dinu Lipatti, Joseph Szigeti, Géza Anda, Isaac Stern and Arthur Grumiaux, with whom she gave her final concert. Charlie Chaplin said of her that her touch was exquisite, her expression wonderful and her technique extraordinary. The Clara Haskil International Piano Competition, founded at Vevey in 1963, has been held biennially since.
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