Biography (read more)
Wilhelm Walter Friedrich Kempff was born in Jüterbog, Brandenburg, on 25 November 1895 and grew up in Potsdam, where his father was royal music director and organist at the Nikolaikirche; his grandfather was an organist too, and his brother Georg went on to direct church music at Erlangen. He entered the Berlin Hochschule für Musik at nine, studying composition with Robert Kahn and piano with Karl Heinrich Barth — Arthur Rubinstein’s teacher as well. His first major recital, in 1917, already carried the Hammerklavier and Brahms’s Paganini Variations. He toured Europe and far beyond for six decades, playing Japan ten times between 1936 and 1979, and died in Positano in 1991.
Kempff is held to be one of the chief exponents of the Germanic piano tradition of the twentieth century. His repertoire ran from Bach through Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms, but the centre was always Beethoven and Schubert — he recorded the complete sonatas of both, and his Beethoven cycles remain among the most compared recordings in the catalogue. His playing set poetry and clarity of line above display, which is precisely what makes his readings a fixed point of reference beside more percussive traditions: a listener comparing performances of a Beethoven sonata on this site will meet Kempff as one pole of the argument.
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