Paul Badura-Skoda

Austrian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda first came to prominence in 1947 when he won first prize in the Austrian Music Competition. A student of Viola Thern and Owen Schulhof at the Konservatorium der Stadt Wien, and then Edwin Fischer in Lucerne, he graduated in 1948 with the highest distinction in both piano playing and conducting. In 1949 he was invited to play as a soloist by both Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan in concerts in Vienna before standing in for Fischer at short notice at the Salzburg Festival in 1950. Badura-Skoda was a pioneer of the use of period instruments and historically informed practice. He collected and restored period instruments, including keyboards by Broadwood, Graf, Schneider and Schantz. His speciality as a performer was the Viennese Classics, in particular the works of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. In the mid-1970s, he started a series of recordings which he worked on until the mid-1990s with the support of record company owner and producer Michel Bernstein and recording engineer Charlotte Gilart de Keranflec'h. The recordings consisted of a selection of Haydn's piano sonatas and the complete piano sonatas of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on 27 discs, recorded on 12 of his own historical instruments. Along with conductor Nikolaus Harnoncourt and pianist Jörg Demus, Badura-Skoda rethought the nature of classical music performance and turned Vienna into an exciting centre of musical research from the 1950s onwards. They explored the possibilities of the use of historical instruments and rebuilt the foundations of the music as it was intended to be performed by the composers. Badura-Skoda was the first and only artist to record the complete piano sonatas of Beethoven, Mozart and Schubert on both period and modern instruments. Badura-Skoda was in demand as a conductor, working firstly with the Vienna Symphony Orchestra's chamber ensemble with whom he toured Italy in 1956, then led them in a series of concerts and recordings as their conductor. He was also a composer, his notable works being 'Missa in D' (1950), 'Elégie' for Piano (1982) and two works for violin or flute and piano, 'Sonata Romantique' and 'Sonatina Romantique' in 1984. He wrote cadenzas for many piano concertos, including those of Mozart and Haydn. He was well known for his prolific output of articles and scholarly editions of the works of many composers including Brahms, Schumann, Mozart, Bach, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert. He provided editions for several different publishers, especially for the Bärenreiter Neue Mozart-Ausgabe with his wife, musicologist Eva Badura-Skoda. Together they wrote books on the piano music of Mozart and keyboard music of Bach, which have been translated into several languages. He was active in all aspects of performance and academia until his death aged 91 in 2019.

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