Géza Anda
Géza Anda was a Hungarian-Swiss concert pianist, regarded by many as one of the leading pianists of the 20th century. He was known especially for interpretations of the Classical and Romantic piano repertoire, including Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms and Bartók.
Born in Budapest, Anda studied with Hungarian teachers including Imre Stefaniai and Imre Keeri-Szanto. He also studied for a time with Ernő Dohnányi and Zoltán Kodály at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music in Budapest. He won the Liszt Prize in 1940, and the following year gained international attention through his performance of Brahms's Second Piano Concerto. In 1941 he made his debut as a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic under Wilhelm Furtwängler, who called him the “troubadour of the piano.”
Anda settled in Switzerland in 1943 and became a Swiss citizen in 1955. In 1953 he appeared at the Lucerne Festival, where he achieved notable success with Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto, a central work in his repertoire. From the mid-1950s he gave masterclasses at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, and in 1961 he succeeded Edwin Fischer as director of the Lucerne masterclass organization.
He was particularly associated with Schumann; The New Grove Dictionary described his performances of Bartók and Schumann as “charismatic.” Although Mozart occupied little of his early repertoire, Anda became an important interpreter of the composer. Between 1967 and 1972, he became the first pianist to record all 27 Mozart piano concertos, directing from the piano. He wrote his own cadenzas for sixteen of them.
Anda was appointed a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 1965 and became an honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in 1970. Most of his recordings were issued by Deutsche Grammophon.
He gave his final performance in Innsbruck less than two weeks before his death, playing Schubert's Trout Quintet. Anda died of esophageal cancer in Zurich in 1976, aged 54. After his death, his reputation receded somewhat, and his Bartók interpretations came to be seen as less definitive than before.