Troubadour of the wire cabinet

We find ourselves in a chamber music class in the Liszt Academy, in room XXIII, sometime in the middle of the last century. The students commence playing and the bespectacled professor listens for a short while. A few minutes later he motions for them to stop. He turns to the young virtuoso violinist who is considered an exceptional talent by his fellow students. "Did anyone ever tell you, son, that you play the violin very well?" The answer is suitably modest, "Yes, professor." At which point the professor replies, "Don't believe them!"

This master of legendary severity was Leo Weiner. The students were terrified of him and yet they flocked to his classes. Among them was the young Géza Anda. Later he recalled that he learned most about the essence of music from Weiner. The other musician who defined the artistic career of Anda was Ernő Dohnányi. The boy was just eight when he heard one of Dohnányi's youth concerts. His parents preferred he choose a "proper" profession, for example, teaching. However, the magic of Dohnányi playing the piano that evening captivated the child to such an extent that after a while even his parents gave up their hopeless struggle.

In 1933, at the age of 12, Géza Anda started regular musical studies under the direction of Imre Stefániai, Emánuel Hegyi and Imre Keéri-Szántó. Finally, in 1939 he was admitted to the Dohnányi masters' school. The then director of the Liszt Academy was not such an exacting teacher as Weiner. He had little to say in classes; instead he sat at the piano and demonstrated what he expected of his pupils. In this he perfectly complemented the Weiner school. Anda acquired his generous elegancy and the virtually disembodied beauty of his piano sound from him.

Soon he was performing in front of an audience: he played the Piano Concerto in B flat by Brahms, with the orchestra under the baton of no less a genius than Willem Mengelberg. In the wake of his stunning Budapest debut, first place in the Liszt competition in 1940, and completion of masters' school, the 20-year-old musician continued his studies with a state scholarship in Berlin. Here, too, Fortuna did not abandon him. An elderly lady observed his talent and invited him to a soirée. Tea, cakes, a little piano playing and chat with a few ladies. Not really the ideal scene for a 20-year-old. Anda tried to excuse himself from further invitations, but eventually relented and went again. This time his performance deeply impressed another lady, who was none other than the wife of Wilhelm Furtwängler. "Willy, you must hear this!" Like a good husband, he obeyed and was forced to admit that his wife was quite right. Another concert, this time with the Berlin Philharmonic. The performance of Symphonic Variations by César Franck so captured the famous conductor that
he dubbed the young pianist the "troubadour of the piano".

It was a glittering start to a career – but fate was to take a twist. Anda had no desire to visit the picturesque Don Bend by bicycle, choosing instead poverty in neutral Switzerland. There is no irony intended in the previous sentence, since at the beginning, his life in Switzerland was truly penurious: he was looked upon as a barely tolerated refugee, nothing more. Concert halls started reopening their doors to him at the end of the 1940s. In 1951, he appeared at the famous Salzburg Festival. The characteristic Budapest cocktail (Dohnányi + Weiner), combined with astounding virtuosity, had its impact here too. Anda became a world star. Flights, luxury hotels. At the beginning it was pure adventure – and then increasingly a tiring routine. Meanwhile he held masterclasses in Salzburg, Lucerne (as successor to Edwin Fischer), and later in Zurich.

In his youth Anda primarily stuck to playing the Romantic masterpieces of the genre. Bartók joined this repertoire. There were occasions when he played all three of Bartók's piano concertos in a single evening. He played the Piano Concert No. 2 nearly 300 times at public concerts. Then came Mozart. In a short time Anda recorded all of Mozart's piano concertos, he himself directed the orchestra (similarly to Edwin Fischer), and he composed the missing cadenzas. This series of recordings was also considered a model of its kind until the practice of historical performance became widely fashionable. Anda did not agree with this latter approach. "It gets on my nerves when people think that they have the telephone number of Bach or Beethoven," he once commented. He had a healthy amount of self-awareness in him: he knew that he was one of the best. He believed it was his task to learn the works as thoroughly as possible, and to form his concept of their ideal performance. Only in this way could he bring to life the score set down on paper, how he could breathe life into the piano or, as he called it once in an interview, the "wire cabinet".

He revisited the land of his birth in 1967. His Budapest appearance was preceded by huge expectation, and he proved a massive success. "There are only very few similarly attractive piano sounds in the world," enthused György Kroó, the most influential critic of the day. Nobody suspected at that time that Anda's days on this earth were numbered. In his final years he dealt primarily with Chopin; he completed a wonderful recording of the waltzes. His memory is also preserved in film recordings, as he speaks about Chopin by the piano at his home, illustrating his comments by casually running through a few devilishly difficult passages with the inevitable cigarette in his mouth. This is probably one of the reasons that he never lived to see his 55^th birthday.