Géza Anda

Géza Anda (born Nov. 19, 1921, Budapest, Hung.—died June 14, 1976, Zürich, Switz.) was a Hungarian pianist and conductor.

Anda studied at the Musical Academy in Budapest under Ernst von Dohnányi and Zoltán Kodály. For his debut, in 1939, he performed Johannes Brahms’s second Piano Concerto in B-flat Major, conducted by Willem Mengelberg. In 1943 Anda gave up his post as the soloist of the Berlin Philharmonic and fled to Switzerland, where he was granted citizenship in 1955. He held master classes in Lucerne from 1960 (succeeding eminent Swiss classical pianist Edwin Fischer) and in Zürich from 1969. In the course of an international career that began in 1947, Anda first achieved fame with virtuoso performances of the works of Franz Liszt, Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, and Frédéric Chopin; later he became a specialist in German romantic ballads and the compositions of Béla Bartók. Anda adapted Mozart’s piano concertos for the keyboard and made recordings of them with the Camerata Academica of Salzburg. He was critical of the musical pedantry of the authentic performance of older music; where no original cadenzas existed, he published his own cadenzas. Anda’s interpretations were highly personal, and he evoked sentimentality and emotionalism in his music.