Biography (read more)
Géza Anda was born in Budapest on 19 November 1921. He studied with Imre Stefaniai and Imre Keéri-Szántó, and then at the Franz Liszt Academy with Ernst von Dohnányi and Zoltán Kodály. He won the Liszt Prize in 1940.
He made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1941 under Wilhelm Furtwängler, who called him a troubadour of the piano. In 1943 he settled in Switzerland, which remained his base for the rest of his life.
He taught as well as performed. He gave master classes at the Salzburg Mozarteum in the mid-1950s, and in 1960 became director of the Lucerne master classes, succeeding Edwin Fischer. Among his pupils was Per Enflo. He frequently conducted orchestras from the keyboard. He was named a Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1965 and an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1970. He married Helene Winterstein-Bosshard in 1953, and after their marriage ended in 1963 married Hortense Bührle in 1964; their son Gratian was born in 1969. He died in Zurich on 13 June 1976 of oesophageal cancer.
Anda was the first pianist to record the complete Mozart piano concertos, a project undertaken between 1961 and 1969 and made mostly for Deutsche Grammophon. It remains the achievement his name is attached to, and it established the pattern, since widely followed, of a soloist directing the concertos from the keyboard. His recording of the Concertos Nos. 17 and 21 won the Grand Prix du Disque in 1963, and one of his albums reached No. 115 on the United States Billboard chart in 1968, unusual placing for a classical release.
He was also regarded as the principal Bartók interpreter of his generation, and his repertoire took in Beethoven, Schumann and Brahms alongside the Mozart and the Bartók.
His influence on other players came through the master classes at the Salzburg Mozarteum and at Lucerne, where in 1960 he took over the teaching Edwin Fischer had built up, placing him in a direct line of succession within the central European tradition.
Sources: