By Gina Thomas in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung:
… Brendel’s coffin was carried into the church to the strains of the long first movement of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major, performed by the Quator Hermès, one of the string ensembles the pianist had taught in later years . Then came the almost otherworldly strains of Beethoven’s “Thanksgiving of a Convalescent to the Deity in the Lydian Key” from Op. 132. But it was the first movement of Haydn’s E-flat major String Quartet, Op. 71, No. 3, that brought the funeral service to a close.
Brendel claimed not to have shed a tear over the end of his pianist career, but also to have had nothing against others crying. His son Adrian recounted how, after one of the farewell concerts, his father showed a postcard with a picture of a man laughing roaringly amidst sad-looking people and said, “That’s me.” Seventeen years later, these words have taken on new meaning. On Monday, his friends bid farewell not to the world-famous pianist and intellectual, but to Alfred Brendel the man and to the “double happiness of tones and love,” to which Goethe paid homage in his poem about the reconciling power of music, which Brendel particularly loved. It was recited at the ceremony by Richard Stokes, the expert on art song and co-translator of Brendel’s poems into English.
Despite the presence of celebrities such as pianist Murray Perahia and playwright Michael Frayn, the event, which also paid tribute to Brendel’s gift for friendship, remained distinctly familial. Frankfurt philosopher Andreas Dorschel emphasized that, despite all his success, Brendel had resisted stardom…
The irony that the Austro-Hungarian agnostic was bid farewell with a classic Anglican service at St. John-at-Hampstead probably reflected his sense of humour. In the church cemetery, which embodies Englishness as in Thomas Gray’s famous elegy, the cosmopolitan Alfred Brendel will find his final resting place next to the graves of the painter John Constable and John Harrison, the inventor of the longitude chronometer. This, too, is one of the paradoxes of his life.
Full report here.
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