Biography (read more)
Claudio Arrau was born on 6 February 1903 at Chillán in Chile, to the ophthalmologist Carlos Arrau and the piano teacher Lucrecia León Bravo de Villalba; his father died when he was one. He could read music before he could read words and gave his first concert at five. At eight the Chilean government granted him a ten-year stipend to study in Germany. He entered the Stern Conservatory in Berlin and became a pupil of Martin Krause, who had himself studied with Liszt; Krause’s death in Arrau’s fifth year of instruction ended his formal training when he was fifteen.
He won the Liszt Prize in Germany in 1919 and 1920 and the Grand Prix of the international pianists’ competition in Geneva in 1927, before a jury that included Arthur Rubinstein and Alfred Cortot. He married the mezzo-soprano Ruth Schneider in 1937, emigrated to the United States in 1941 and settled at Douglaston in Queens, New York, taking dual American and Chilean citizenship in 1979. Between the ages of forty and sixty he averaged 120 concerts a year, drawn from an estimated seventy-six recital programmes. He died on 9 June 1991 at Mürzzuschlag in Austria, of complications after emergency surgery for an intestinal blockage, and is buried at Chillán.
Arrau built his career on complete cycles at a time when they were rare: the complete keyboard works of Bach in twelve recitals in 1935, the complete Mozart in five recitals in 1936, and Beethoven’s complete piano sonatas and concertos, first given in Mexico City in 1938. He recorded the Beethoven sonatas twice, for Philips between 1962 and 1966 and again between 1984 and 1990, the later project accompanied by Mozart’s complete sonatas.
His teaching lineage was part of his identity as a player: Martin Krause had studied with Liszt, which placed Arrau one generation from a composer he performed throughout his life. The scale of his concert activity is itself part of the picture — an average of 120 appearances a year across two decades, carried on a repertoire of some seventy-six programmes — and it accounts for the breadth of a discography in which Beethoven remains the centre.
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