André Watts leveraged an early wave of attention stemming from his status among the initial Black performers to attain worldwide recognition within the classical sphere. He later distinguished himself as an instructor of note.
Born in Nuremberg, Germany, on June 20, 1946, to Herman Watts, a U.S. Army officer stationed in postwar Germany, and Maria Alexandra Gusmits, a Hungarian pianist, the young Watts began violin instruction at age four before turning two years afterward to piano under his mother’s guidance. After the family established itself in Philadelphia, he entered the Philadelphia Musical Academy, now integrated into the University of the Arts. His first public appearance occurred at age nine, when he performed a Haydn piano concerto alongside the Philadelphia Orchestra during one of its youth programs. At fourteen he joined the ensemble’s standard roster for a presentation of Franck’s Symphonic Variations. Two years after that, conductor Leonard Bernstein selected him for a nationally televised New York Philharmonic Young People’s Concert, where his confident reading of the Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 in E flat major earned widespread admiration. Bernstein soon called upon him again, this time as a last-minute replacement for the indisposed Glenn Gould; once more the Liszt concerto formed the centerpiece, and the results drew further critical praise.
These accomplishments secured Watts a place among the pupils of Leon Fleisher. He pursued advanced training at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory while maintaining an intensive touring calendar that reached as many as 150 engagements annually. Appearances in London, at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, and across several German cities, including his birthplace of Nuremberg, extended his reputation abroad. His Carnegie Hall debut took place at twenty, and on his twenty-first birthday he played the Brahms Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat, Op. 83, with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1969 he appeared at the inauguration of President Richard Nixon. Continued engagements at prominent New York halls culminated in 1976 with a televised recital on PBS’s “Live from Lincoln Center,” the first full-length solo piano program broadcast on American television. Audiences responded warmly to his stage presence both domestically and overseas; in 2000 he rejoined the Philadelphia Orchestra for its centennial celebration. Ongoing physical challenges prompted multiple operations on his hands, the final one in 2019 resulting in permanent nerve impairment to his left side. Even so, he prepared a right-hand adaptation of Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand for scheduled performances in 2020.
Watts signed with Columbia Masterworks in 1967 and issued the album The Exciting Debut of André Watts; subsequent affiliations included Angel/EMI and Telarc, while earlier recordings from his peak period later resurfaced on EMI and on Sony Classical, Columbia’s successor label. In 2000 he assumed an artist-in-residence position at the University of Maryland, followed in 2004 by a faculty appointment at Indiana University. Among the distinctions he received were the Avery Fisher Prize in 1988, the National Medal of Arts presented by President Obama in 2014, and election in 2020 to the American Philosophical Society. Watts died at age seventy-seven on July 12, 2023.
