Biography (read more)
Edwin Fischer was born in Basel on 6 October 1886. He studied there with Hans Huber, and then at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin under Martin Krause. He came to prominence as a pianist after the First World War.
His work was divided between the keyboard and the podium. In 1926 he became conductor of the Lübeck Musikverein, and later conducted in Munich. In 1932 he formed his own chamber orchestra and returned to Berlin, succeeding Artur Schnabel at the Hochschule für Musik. He also played chamber music in a piano trio with the cellist Enrico Mainardi and the violinist Georg Kulenkampff, later succeeded by Wolfgang Schneiderhan.
In 1942 he moved to Switzerland, and after the war he gave master classes at Lucerne. He wrote three books on music, including guides to Beethoven’s piano sonatas and to Bach. He died in Zürich on 24 January 1960; he was cremated and his ashes were buried at the Friedental cemetery in Lucerne.
Fischer is regarded as one of the great interpreters of Bach and Mozart of the twentieth century. He made the first complete recording of Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, set down for EMI between 1933 and 1936, and it remains the reference point against which his reputation is usually taken. He also recorded Bach’s keyboard concertos and solo works, Mozart and Beethoven sonatas, Schubert’s Impromptus and the Wanderer Fantasy, and the Brahms Second Concerto with Furtwängler. In the 1950s he accompanied Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in Schubert lieder.
His influence on later playing runs largely through his teaching. Alfred Brendel, Paul Badura-Skoda, Daniel Barenboim, Reine Gianoli, Helena Sá e Costa, Mario Feninger and Anna Renfer all studied with him, and the Lucerne master classes he gave after the war became one of the routes by which an older central-European approach to the classical repertoire reached the postwar generation.
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