Clara Haskil

Romanian pianist Clara Haskil entered the Bucharest Conservatory as a seven-year-old prodigy studying with Richard Robert and first appeared in public at ten. She completed her training in Alfred Cortot’s class at the Paris Conservatoire, receiving the Premier Prix upon graduation at fifteen. Four years later an attack of meningitis confined her to a body cast, the initial episode in a series of health crises that repeatedly interrupted her progress. Recovery eventually allowed a New York debut in 1924 and a London appearance two years afterward. Although her reputation later became inseparable from the Mozart piano concertos, her early work centered on the Romantic repertoire; her Schumann concerto performances with Leopold Stokowski in Philadelphia drew particular acclaim.

When war broke out she found herself confined in occupied Paris yet managed to reach Marseilles. There she underwent a covert operation to excise a tumor pressing on her optic nerve and was subsequently smuggled into Switzerland, where she made her permanent home in Vevey. Once hostilities ended she rebuilt her schedule, achieving her widest recognition through an intensive series of concerts and recordings that circled the globe. Her resilience finally gave way after a fall inside a Paris railway station in 1960; she died a month before turning sixty-six.

For Haskil, interpretive insight always outweighed mechanical considerations. Her unusually large hands permitted a twelfth to be spanned in the left hand using only fingers two through five. She also possessed a prodigious memory, enabling her to reproduce from a single hearing any composition she had not seen in score, even when several years had passed. In 1962 the Clara Haskil Prize was founded in Vevey to honor her legacy, the award being conferred biennially.