With a mixture of sincere envy and happy gratitude, anyone who had ever experienced the manual pitfalls of playing the piano or could feel them with a sensitive ear had to admire the pianist Ingrid Haebler. The fine-grained pebbles and trickles of her passage work, the Jeu perlé of the old style, which combined flow and evenness, care, splendour, but also liveliness, made her one of the greats of her guild. She was able to phras clearly, i.e. give the music structure and goal without tugging at the measure of time. She set priorities through volume control, through well-considered, often architecturally inspired pedal use and through her vividly pointed articulation. In her, the piano music of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart had found an ideal interpreter, hardly ever surpassed.

Jan Brachmann

Editor in the feuilleton.

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The fact that Haebler became so famous as a Mozart player certainly had historical reasons. In the nineteenth century, when composers and performers began to separate as role models and for the first time a repertoire culture emerged that also kept works by the dead alive on a large scale, Mozart's piano works were considered children's stuff and women's business. Men played Beethoven and Liszt, composers who ostensibly demanded power and the expression of a strong ego. On the other hand, the first women to appear as professional pianists, especially in France, made Mozart their cause - ostensibly the composer of delicacy, elegance and evenness. This gave them two advantages: as interest in Mozart's instrumental music continued to grow in the twentieth century, women such as Annie Fischer and Clara Haskil - alongside the brilliant outsider Mieczysław Horszowski - had taken on a leading role in Mozart's interpretation. And secondly, they had long since discovered other things in Mozart's piano music than the clatter of mocha cups in a rococo causerie.

Desire for spectacle

Just listen to Mozart's provocative piano variations in G major, K. 455, which are rich in intellectual and technical brilliance, on "Our stupid rabble thinks" from "The Pilgrims of Mecca" by Christoph Willibald Gluck with Haebler: her forte in the performance of the theme is powerful, vocally and warmly grounded, bound by clever pedal use in the octave melody. But then, in the variations, she unleashes a completely different Mozart than that of domestic staidness: a desire for spectacle can be heard, for astonishment and foolishness; Music that seeks intoxication and risk, that tests how much you can put at risk if you just keep the elegance. She plays the polyphonic intricacies in the imitated movement with a fantastic independence of articulation between the two hands. In the Adagio of the penultimate variation, she beats true peacock wheels in the upwardly shooting coloratura to the core notes of the theme. The staccato in the final variation is rebellious. One experiences a composer whose wit is a form of anger because his spirit can hardly stand "our stupid rabble". Haebler, however, captures this spirit with his sharp polish, his provocations, his high tempo in the good tone of elevated conversation, which does not betray the fundamental benevolence of conviviality. It is a masterpiece of balance between attack and conciliation.

Haebler came from a former aristocratic family. As the daughter of Baron Armin von Haebler and his wife Charlotte (née von Schüch), she was born on 20 June 1929 in Vienna, but grew up in Poland, where her father came from. With the beginning of the Second World War, the family moved to Salzburg, and shortly afterwards the eleven-year-old made her debut as a pianist and composer. In addition to her mother, Paul Weingarten in Vienna became pedagogically groundbreaking for her. After 1950 she studied with the Russian pianist Nikita Magaloff, who had belonged to the Swiss émigré circle around Sergei Rachmaninoff, and with Marguerite Long in Paris, a preferred interpreter (and temporary lover) of Gabriel Fauré and the world premiere interpreter of Maurice Ravel's G major Piano Concerto. From the brilliance of Haebler's Mozart playing, one can hear that the pianist had learned something of the culture of Rachmaninov and Ravel.

Since the end of the sixties, Haebler himself taught at the Mozarteum in Salzburg. In addition to Mozart, his patron and friend Johann Christian Bach, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian, was also part of her repertoire. She made his piano concertos accessible to a wider audience in several recordings. The box contains almost sixty CDs with their recordings, which was recently released on the Decca label. In addition to a lot of Mozart, it also contains works by Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin and César Franck. And if you listen to their interpretations of the music of Franz Schubert, you will not meet a composer "who has neither father nor mother" and fell "like a stone from the moon to the earth", as Nikolaus Harnoncourt once claimed. No, one encounters a Vienna Boys' Choir who had received Mozart's spirit from Salieri's hands: a classic of small-scale contrast, not a monologist of the soul that fears losing language as soon as it speaks, but a musician of discourse who thrives on saying and contradiction.

Haebler enjoyed the admiration of great colleagues such as Claudio Arrau and Robert Casadesus. The violinist Henryk Szeryng recorded Mozart's violin sonatas with her. Her own repertoire ranged as far as Igor Stravinsky. Close friends of the pianist have now told the press that Ingrid Haebler died on Sunday, five weeks before her 94th birthday.