Music, Sense and Nonsense: Collected Essays and Lectures

by Alfred Brendel

"The mix of thoughtfulness and brilliance that irradiates [Brendel's] performances infuses these spirited essays."—Susan Sontag Alfred Brendel, one of the greatest pianists of our time, is renowned for his masterly interpretations of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt, and has been credited with rescuing from oblivion the piano music of Schubert's last years. Far from having merely one string to his bow, however, Brendel is also one of the world's most remarkable writers on music—possessed of the rare ability to bring together the clarity and originality of expression that characterised his performances to the printed page. The definitive collection of his award-winning writings and essays, Music, Sense and Nonsense combines all of his work originally published in his two classic books, Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts and Music Sounded Out , along with significant new material on a lifetime of recording, performance habits, and reflections on life and art. As well as providing stimulating reading, this new edition yields a unique insight into the exceptional mind of one of the outstanding musicians of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Whether discussing Bach or Beethoven, Schubert or Schoenberg, Brendel's essays are both illuminating and challenging, a treasure for the specialist and the music lover alike. Alfred Brendel is known for his recordings, international concert appearances and writings. He was awarded an honorary knighthood in 1989.

Genres: Music, Essays, Nonfiction, Classical Music

464 pages, Hardcover

First published August 18, 2015

About the author

Alfred Brendel was a Czech-born Austrian classical pianist, poet, author, composer, and lecturer noted for his performances of music by Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt. He made three recordings of Beethoven's 32 piano sonatas and was the first pianist to record Beethoven's complete works for solo piano.

Reviews

[Vicki · Rating 2 out of 5]

First of all, this book is only for you if you're a serious pianophile interested in diving deep into the differences between Beethoven, Schubert, and Liszt sonatas. As a series of essays, it is best read in small doses, preferably with scores and recordings at hand. At least that's the excuse I'm using for why it took 9 months to finally finish it. It does get better towards the end.
Secondly, if you're over the age of 40 or ever need to squint to be able to read something, get the e-book so you can adjust the font size. The paperback is in the tiniest font I've ever seen in print.
Finally, if you're looking for a bunch of thoughts on piano and music and life from a great pianist, Stephen Hough did it much better in his book, Rough Ideas. Brendel himself did it better in A Pianist's A–Z and his poetry is worth a read, but this book should wait until after these others.

[Himanshu Damle · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Tanzania Laughter Epidemic

In 1962, three girl students at a Catholic Missionary School in Tanzania began to laugh, for no apparent reason. The laughter was contagious and soon enough about half the students joined in. The laughter then spread to the entire village, and after a month and a half when the laughter hadn’t died down, the school was closed and the girls were isolated. However, the school was reopened, and the laughter continued, after which the seminary was closed again. In the meantime, the laughter had spread to neighboring villages and the contagion spread. More than 1000 people were helpless with laughter, forcing the authorities to close down 14 schools. Eighteen months after the laugh-riot began, it ended abruptly, and the cause of it still remains a mystery. The episode has been narrated by the cognitive neuroscientist, Scott Weems in his book titled ‘Ha!’. But, why should this episode be reproduced here? It forms a crux of Alfred Brendel’s intellectual repertoire in his affiliations with humor, and more specifically with Dadaism, and forms an integral part of the book, ‘Music, Sense and Nonsense’. The musician and poet in Brendel had a foot planted in sense, while the other in nonsense, who looked for a dialectical connection between the two. Though, he welcomes the role of humor in music, not all music is comical, and invoking the Kantian dictum on music as aesthetically impure and overly dependent on nonsense, Brendel rebukes the German philosophical giant in closing by referring to music and humor as only next to love in the sublimity of a life he has led.

The celebrated pianist Alfred Brendel breathed his last on the 17th of June 2025 at the ripe age of 94. A performer for 60 years, he studied under Edwin Fischer, who himself studied under a pupil of Liszt. Born in Moravia in today’s Czech Republic, he spent his earlier childhood in Austria and Yugoslavia. In his own words, he was not a child prodigy and having learned music composition till 16, he was an autodidact thereafter. Having given his last public performance in Vienna in 2008, he began to pen down his scholarly pursuits and came out with ‘Music, Sense and Nonsense’, a clinically drafted sojourn of his musical journey. The eclecticism of his scholarship spanned literature, arts, cinema, and the Third Reich.

The 455-pager is divided into eight sections, the first six of which are Brendel’s train of thought running through some of his major inspirations, viz. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and Busoni, while the remaining two deal with programming, performances and conversations, including a Dadaist trilogue where Me, Myself and I form the core of the vagaries, but sticking on to musical explorations through the changing times, nevertheless.

The sections on composers are highly technical in nature, and their density is measured by how well known the repository of Brendel’s works are by the readers. These are literally outside the purview of those unaware of scores, notations and the musical lexicon in general. Brendel takes on Mozart in a philosophical tranquility exposing the nuances and paradoxes of the latter’s compositions. But, tranquility is a little far-fetched of a surgical strike, and Brendel expresses doubt about the expressively poetic Mozart, calling poetry to be the spice and not the main course. Rather than relying on the romantic excesses, Brendel’s treatment of Beethoven ranks high on the structural clarity, rhetorical shaping and moral expressiveness. Considered to be one of the most insightful interpreters of Beethoven, Brendel distills the architectural sonata forms with rhythmic precision employing textural transparency revealing counterpoint and motivic development along the way. Brendel’s is a mature emotional dive into Beethoven’s late sonata, especially the Diabelli Variations yielding a perfect balancing act between introspection and stoicism, rather than getting caught in the melodramatic sphere, alluded to above as the romantic excesses. A good example is the Maestro’s early sonatas, opp. 2 & 10, where Brendel exposes the germination of Beethoven’s later expansion, which, by the middle of the corpus, he clearly eschews the gratuitous rubato. This economizing is possible due to Brendel’s textual fidelity to Beethoven, thus staying clear of sustainable pedaling and overwrought dynamics. Brendel, no doubt has the distinction of recording the whole of Beethoven’s piano works, including the multiple recordings of the Diabelli Variations.

The section on Schubert is the deepest in the book, where musical lexicon aides Schubert’s mysterious connection with the life’s abyss. Brendel, who called Schubert a sleepwalker and a wanderer filled with the mystical unease unlike Beethoven’s architectonics, credits Arthur Schnabel and Edward Erdmann for the revelations that the Austrian Schubert was indeed a great piano composer and a supreme master of the sonata. Alfred Brendel not only brings back to life Schubert’s obscurity to sonata, he even goes on to challenge the misguided placement of Schubert in classicism, and squarely gives him the seat outside the rubric of enlightenment. If classicism accords security, a borderline of forms that could be overstepped in a funny or a menacing manner at will, ala Haydn, Schubert transgressed the borderlines with acute deformations of one’s consciousness, showing the darker side of romanticism that classicism consciously hid. The most striking instance of this comes in the middle section of the slow movement of Schubert’s penultimate sonata, his big A-major Sonata, where the most idyllically songful lyricism is broken by a shockingly ferocious outburst. Like an archaeologist, Brendel cuts through the tiers of Schubert’s psychological depth, and goes beyond categorically planting Schubert as a melancholic or a joyful performer by admonishing to capture the interplay between composer’s profound depression, and poetic intensity.

My favorite part of the book is the section on Liszt. Brendel thought of Liszt as a genius who was profoundly misunderstood, with the blame falling squarely on the performers for the superficiality surrounding Liszt. Liszt was a thoughtful provocateur of the virtuosity combining strong melodies with harmonic cleverness. Brendel preferred the later Liszt for the latter’s mastery of the musical form. But, what about the fragmentary nature of Liszt’s works, where may a times, no conclusion is arrived at? Brendel defends Liszt by calling such fragmentation the purest for of romanticism, and thus anyone who is disturbed by the fragmentary nature ought not to have understood romanticism. The music shouldn’t play itself, but rely on interpretations, and this is where the genius of Liszt lay, with Schumann even referring to Liszt as the ‘genius of interpretation’. Another reason why I love Liszt is the Tritone. Victor Hugo said, “The poet who paints hell, paints his own life”. The relation between the A Flat of the sonata 123 with the key D minor is the tritone, the diabolus in musica. According to Stradal, a pupil of Liszt, the tritone is a call for the spirits of the damned to rise. That the tritone was used by Tony Iommi in the late 1960s giving birth the genre of Heavy Metal is a most fitting tribute to the composer, Liszt. The last of the sections on composer deals with Ferruccio Busoni, whose Fantasia Contrappuntistica, Toccata and Doktor Faust is championed by Brendel as marrying the theoretical works with innovation. Though Busoni comes under Brendel’s scanner for overwriting his complex compositional piano concerto, Busoni is nonetheless lavishly praised for his operatic works describing them full of peculiar serenity.

Going back to the conversations section, a particular dialogue is extremely insightful. The dialogue in question takes place between Konrad Wolff and Brendel about the former’s book on Arthur Schnab el. This 18-pager dialogue brings to surface the analytical ingenuity of Brendel, who is confronted by Wolff, when he spots a contradiction or a disagreement with Schnabel’s details of phrasing, tempo and dynamics, a commonality with Brendel’s own recognition, but quite contrary to when Brendel breaks the rules set up by Schnabel while performing. This is an amazing exchange, but, unfortunately relies a bit too much on the musical lexicon.

In summation, this is a masterpiece of a literature, but must be accompanied by simultaneously listening to the works cited. The differences or the underlinings, at first might be obfuscated, but perseverance is the key to acquaint oneself with the universe of Alfred Brendel. The Tanzania Laughter Epidemic

In 1962, three girl students as a Catholic Missionary School in Tanzania began to laugh, for no apparent reason. The laughter was contagious and soon enough about half the students joined in. The laughter then spread to the entire village, and after a month and a half when the laughter hadn’t died down, the school was closed and the girls were isolated. However, the school was reopened, and the laughter continued, after which the seminary was closed again. In the meantime, the laughter had spread to neighboring villages and the contagion spread. More than 1000 people were helpless with laughter, forcing the authorities to close down 14 schools. Eighteen months after the laugh-riot began, it ended abruptly, and the cause of it still remains a mystery. The episode has been narrated by the cognitive neuroscientist, Scott Weems in his book titled ‘Ha!’. But, why should this episode be reproduced here? It forms a crux of Alfred Brendel’s intellectual repertoire in his affiliations with humor, and more specifically with Dadaism, and forms an integral part of the book, ‘Music, Sense and Nonsense’. The musician and poet in Brendel had a foot planted in sense, while the other in nonsense, who looked for a dialectical connection between the two. Though, he welcomes the role of humor in music, not all music is comical, and invoking the Kantian dictum on music as aesthetically impure and overly dependent on nonsense, Brendel rebukes the German philosophical giant in closing by referring to music and humor as only next to love in the sublimity of a life he has led.

The celebrated pianist Alfred Brendel breathed his last on the 17th of June 2025 at the ripe age of 94. A performer for 60 years, he studied under Edwin Fischer, who himself studied under a pupil of Liszt. Born in Moravia in today’s Czech Republic, he spent his earlier childhood in Austria and Yugoslavia. In his own words, he was not a child prodigy and having learned music composition till 16, he was an autodidact thereafter. Having given his last public performance in Vienna in 2008, he began to pen down his scholarly pursuits and came out with ‘Music, Sense and Nonsense’, a clinically drafted sojourn of his musical journey. The eclecticism of his scholarship spanned literature, arts, cinema, and the Third Reich.

The 455-pager is divided into eight sections, the first six of which are Brendel’s train of thought running through some of his major inspirations, viz. Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Liszt, and Busoni, while the remaining two deal with programming, performances and conversations, including a Dadaist trilogue where Me, Myself and I form the core of the vagaries, but sticking on to musical explorations through the changing times, nevertheless.

The sections on composers are highly technical in nature, and their density is measured by how well known the repository of Brendel’s works are by the readers. These are literally outside the purview of those unaware of scores, notations and the musical lexicon in general. Brendel takes on Mozart in a philosophical tranquility exposing the nuances and paradoxes of the latter’s compositions. But, tranquility is a little far-fetched of a surgical strike, and Brendel expresses doubt about the expressively poetic Mozart, calling poetry to be the spice and not the main course. Rather than relying on the romantic excesses, Brendel’s treatment of Beethoven ranks high on the structural clarity, rhetorical shaping and moral expressiveness. Considered to be one of the most insightful interpreters of Beethoven, Brendel distills the architectural sonata forms with rhythmic precision employing textural transparency revealing counterpoint and motivic development along the way. Brendel’s is a mature emotional dive into Beethoven’s late sonata, especially the Diabelli Variations yielding a perfect balancing act between introspection and stoicism, rather than getting caught in the melodramatic sphere, alluded to above as the romantic excesses. A good example is the Maestro’s early sonatas, opp. 2 & 10, where Brendel exposes the germination of Beethoven’s later expansion, which, by the middle of the corpus, he clearly eschews the gratuitous rubato. This economizing is possible due to Brendel’s textual fidelity to Beethoven, thus staying clear of sustainable pedaling and overwrought dynamics. Brendel, no doubt has the distinction of recording the whole of Beethoven’s piano works, including the multiple recordings of the Diabelli Variations.

The section on Schubert is the deepest in the book, where musical lexicon aides Schubert’s mysterious connection with the life’s abyss. Brendel, who called Schubert a sleepwalker and a wanderer filled with the mystical unease unlike Beethoven’s architectonics, credits Arthur Schnabel and Edward Erdmann for the revelations that the Austrian Schubert was indeed a great piano composer and a supreme master of the sonata. Alfred Brendel not only brings back to life Schubert’s obscurity to sonata, he even goes on to challenge the misguided placement of Schubert in classicism, and squarely gives him the seat outside the rubric of enlightenment. If classicism accords security, a borderline of forms that could be overstepped in a funny or a menacing manner at will, ala Haydn, Schubert transgressed the borderlines with acute deformations of one’s consciousness, showing the darker side of romanticism that classicism consciously hid. The most striking instance of this comes in the middle section of the slow movement of Schubert’s penultimate sonata, his big A-major Sonata, where the most idyllically songful lyricism is broken by a shockingly ferocious outburst. Like an archaeologist, Brendel cuts through the tiers of Schubert’s psychological depth, and goes beyond categorically planting Schubert as a melancholic or a joyful performer by admonishing to capture the interplay between composer’s profound depression, and poetic intensity.

My favorite part of the book is the section on Liszt. Brendel thought of Liszt as a genius who was profoundly misunderstood, with the blame falling squarely on the performers for the superficiality surrounding Liszt. Liszt was a thoughtful provocateur of the virtuosity combining strong melodies with harmonic cleverness. Brendel preferred the later Liszt for the latter’s mastery of the musical form. But, what about the fragmentary nature of Liszt’s works, where may a times, no conclusion is arrived at? Brendel defends Liszt by calling such fragmentation the purest for of romanticism, and thus anyone who is disturbed by the fragmentary nature ought not to have understood romanticism. The music shouldn’t play itself, but rely on interpretations, and this is where the genius of Liszt lay, with Schumann even referring to Liszt as the ‘genius of interpretation’. Another reason why I love Liszt is the Tritone. Victor Hugo said, “The poet who paints hell, paints his own life”. The relation between the A Flat of the sonata 123 with the key D minor is the tritone, the diabolus in musica. According to Stradal, a pupil of Liszt, the tritone is a call for the spirits of the damned to rise. That the tritone was used by Tony Iommi in the late 1960s giving birth the genre of Heavy Metal is a most fitting tribute to the composer, Liszt. The last of the sections on composer deals with Ferruccio Busoni, whose Fantasia Contrappuntistica, Toccata and Doktor Faust is championed by Brendel as marrying the theoretical works with innovation. Though Busoni comes under Brendel’s scanner for overwriting his complex compositional piano concerto, Busoni is nonetheless lavishly praised for his operatic works describing them full of peculiar serenity.

Going back to the conversations section, a particular dialogue is extremely insightful. The dialogue in question takes place between Konrad Wolff and Brendel about the former’s book on Arthur Schnabel. This 18-pager dialogue brings to surface the analytical ingenuity of Brendel, who is confronted by Wolff, when he spots a contradiction or a disagreement with Schnabel’s details of phrasing, tempo and dynamics, a commonality with Brendel’s own recognition, but quite contrary to when Brendel breaks the rules set up by Schnabel while performing. This is an amazing exchange, but, unfortunately relies a bit too much on the musical lexicon.

In summation, this is a masterpiece of a literature, but must be accompanied by simultaneously listening to the works cited. The differences or the underlinings, at first might be obfuscated, but perseverance is the key to acquaint oneself with the universe of Alfred Brendel.

[Joe Q. · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this book, Alfred Brendel shows himself to be a thoughtful writer as well as a top-notch pianist. As an amateur musician, I enjoyed his insights into the musical character of the repertoire he plays so well, but struggled to understand many of his references and comments. Professional pianists who are intimately familiar with the classical repertoire (and who can instantly conjure up an idea of the melody of a piece solely based on its key and the name of the composer) will likely get a lot more out of the book than I did.

[Jeffrey Green · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although I read it from beginning to end, a lot of the essays in this book were far too specialized for me and could only have been read properly by someone who is deeply familiar with the great piano literature of Mozart, Beethoven, Liszt, etc. Or someone who was willing to take the time to listen to the pieces Brendel discusses in the light of his discussion.
Brendel, who has retired as a performing musician, was a leading pianist, who has also left a large body of recorded performances. He writes clearly and insightfully.
My interest in it was to see how an intelligent classical musician thinks about his art, and I got that, all right.
Brendel is extremely conscientious. He examines the manuscripts of the pieces he plays to see whether the composer's intentions were faithfully published when the pieces were printed. He has a lot of interests beyond music, and he is very well read in German (his native language) and English.

[Greer H · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book because I love listening to Schubert, and Brendel is my favorite Schubert interpreter. I didn't know what to expect, but this far surpassed anything I could have imagined.

What I most admire is (despite his humble insistence to the contrary) Brendel's astonishing depth of musical understanding, and from that understanding his ability to form and articulate his viewpoints. He clearly has a deep intellectual and emotional basis for his interpretations, and I perceive his intellectual / emotional framework in his recordings. I don't know (yet) whether I would arrive at similar viewpoints or interpretations - for example, I personally prefer Zimmerman's interpretation of Liszt's Sonata in B minor to Brendel's. However, I would hope that whatever views / frameworks / interpretations I do arrive at would arise from a musical understanding and imagination even partially as rich as Brendel's.

I feel very fortunate that these essays were written, translated from German (some were written in English originally), and collected here so that we could have a window into maestro Brendel's mind. I sincerely wish I could have met Brendel, but seeing as it is too late (RIP 17/06/2025) this is the next best thing.

[Algirdas Kraunaitis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a fine collection of essays and musings of a venerated artist. After reading all of them I realized that they display the good, as well as the bad. I find Brendel's rather stubbord approach towards interpretation puzzling, considering the many different ways he allowed himself to look at so many other things. But, having known so many pianists and piano students, his dedicated analyses of musical pieces is admirable. His narrow, but dedicated approach toward specific composers hints at a need to dig deeper, not wider. One gets a sense that throughout his working career Brendel never really stopped thinking and learning.

[charlotte]

I think I would have enjoyed this more were it a selection rather than just EVERYTHING