Claudio Arrau

Claudio Arrau earned widespread admiration as one of the foremost interpreters of the central Romantic piano literature, above all Beethoven and also Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, and Brahms. An amateur pianist, his mother provided his earliest instruction. He appeared in his first public recital at age five in Santiago and later worked with the teacher Paoli. A grant from the Chilean government allowed him to enter Stern’s Conservatory in Berlin at seven, where Martin Krause taught him from 1912 to 1918. By the time he reached fifteen, teacher and pupil both judged his technical command and artistic finish complete, so he never studied with anyone else. He had already received the Gustav Holländer Medal and the Ibach Prize, made a Berlin debut in 1914 that drew astonished praise, and toured Germany and Scandinavia through the First World War. His return to Chile in 1921 featured a triumphal homecoming concert, after which he traveled widely in the Western Hemisphere and reached the United States for the first time in 1924. That year he joined the faculty of Stern’s Conservatory, remaining affiliated there until 1940 while undertaking further tours and collecting major prizes. In 1925 he made history in Berlin by giving twelve recitals that presented the complete keyboard works of Johann Sebastian Bach, yet after 1940 he never performed Bach in public, believing the music unsuited to the piano. He went back to Chile in 1940 and founded a piano school in Santiago. The next year he settled permanently in New York. Audiences consistently noted the reflective depth of his readings, which suggested he had considered each score from every vantage point; the same deliberateness sometimes produced interpretations that struck listeners as overly measured and short on spontaneity. In 1978 he renounced his Chilean citizenship to protest Pinochet’s military regime, though he continued to be regarded as one of the most respected and beloved figures in his native country. His return tour in 1984 ranked among the most memorable musical events in South American history.