Blessed with a colossal technique and a superabundance of musicianship and intelligence, Egon Petri was one of the supremely gifted pianists of the first half of this century. So why, during his years in the concert hall, did he fail to attract the type of public admiration enjoyed by so many of his less-gifted contemporaries? And why, several decades after his death, is it difficult to find anything resembling an accurate assessment of his genius in current reference books or even a representative cross-section of his sizeable discography? More puzzling still, why is Petri not universally held in awe by connoisseurs of the piano and piano recordings, many of whom, it has to be acknowledged, have been known to cast a dismissive sneer at the mention of his name?

While there is no easy answer to this enigma, it can in part be explained by the pianist’s personality. Petri was a man of modest demeanour who abhorred the publicity merry-go-round. Furthermore, he was an unusually tall man who dwarfed the concert grand, his large hands seemingly covering vast stretches of the keyboard with little or no effort. In short, he could achieve the most spectacular of results without even a hint of flamboyancy. Farewell the gallery audience! Petri’s interpretations were invariably searching and all-embracingly comprehensive yet they were never born of attention-seeking bravura performances. Farewell, then, a sizeable portion of the stalls! Equally significant, Petri made demands of his audiences: his recitals were (in)famous both on account of their duration and their intellectual demands. Farewell a further section of the stalls! Only those left seemed capable of recognizing and appreciating the Petri paradox: playing that was as fastidious as it was full of flair and panache, playing that was as sober as it was full of excitement and drama.

Egon Petri was born of professional Dutch musicians. His mother, Kathi, was a singer of rare intelligence while his father, Henri, was an established violinist. A pupil of Joachim, Henri had abandoned a solo career to become one of Europe’s most familiar concertmasters. At the time of Egon’s birth, on 23 March 1881, he was leading the orchestra of the Hanover Royal Opera. In 1883 his appointment as leader of the Gewandhaus Orchestra under Arthur Nikisch dictated a move to Leipzig, while the family found themselves in Dresden some five years later when Petri senior assumed the post of concertmaster of the Opera House under the baton of Ernst von Schuch. Not surprisingly, the young Egon received the basic rudiments of music in general and the violin in particular under his father’s guidance, though he soon graduated to some of the most important tutors in Leipzig and Dresden, not least Hermann Kretzschmar (composition), Richard Buchmayer (piano) and Felix Draeseke (theory). By the time the boy had entered his teens he was recognized as a highly proficient pianist, organist and horn player, though with appearances in his father’s string quartet and the orchestra of the Dresden Opera it was the violin which dominated his musical activities.

During their encampment at three of the most musical centres in Germany the Petri family inevitably befriended many of the greatest musicians then working in Europe, not least Brahms, Joachim, Clara Schumann and Busoni. Another colleague was the volcanic Teresa Carreño who undoubtedly was responsible for laying the foundation of Petri’s leonine keyboard technique, though the greatest single influence upon the boy was the presence of Ferruccio Busoni. The Italian entered Egon’s world as a result of his close friendship with Henri Petri, the champion of both of Busoni’s string quartets (the second of which is dedicated to him—other tributes, incidentally, include the Bagatelles for violin and piano, Op 28, written for the seven-year-old Egon). Despite the difference in their ages, Busoni and Egon Petri thrived on the honesty and trust of a mentor/friend relationship. As a consequence, Busoni readily felt free to dispense advice, never more so than when he recommended that Egon should concentrate on the piano rather than violin—Paderewski came up with a similar verdict at about the same time—and in warning him of the dangers of becoming too much the scholar and for having too little ambition as a performer.

Certainly it was Busoni’s endorsement and belief in him that gave the twenty-year-old Egon Petri the confidence to begin a musical career at the keyboard. One of his first ventures outside Germany was his British debut in 1904, an appearance which ultimately led to his first major post: in 1905 he succeeded Wilhelm Backhaus as professor of piano at the Royal Manchester College of Music. Aside from his teaching duties Petri gave countless recitals, predominantly devoted to Bach and Beethoven, but these were solely within the confines of the Manchester area and as a result he began to feel trapped. At this point in his career he regarded his teaching post more as a regular source of income than as a vocation; his goal was undoubtedly the international concert platform. In 1911 Petri took the decision to quit Manchester. Quite exceptionally, he aired his disillusionment publicly via a letter to The Daily News. Its touching honesty says as much about Petri as it does about the prevailing musical attitudes of the time:

I feel I am born to play the pianoforte, not to teach it, and I have come to the conclusion that I never shall make my way as a pianist as long as I am in Manchester. Why this should be so I do not know; but the fact is there, nobody will engage you as long as you hold a provincial post. The circle of towns where I played has become smaller and smaller during those five years, till now I merely play in Manchester and suburbs—becoming a sort of local slum-pianist. In England they do not want me, because I am in England; on the Continent they do not want me either—also because I am in England…

I have no appointment in view, and, for all I know, I may be selling matches grinding an organ in the streets of Berlin next winter. But even so, I shall risk it. Berlin is the town where a pianist has a chance—it is also the town where I have friends, and my best friend, Busoni.

And then I may get on. They may even engage me in Liverpool or London, which they have not done a single time in the last five years, as, for concert-agents, the distance between Liverpool and Berlin is smaller than the distance between Liverpool and Manchester.

Petri’s departure—undertaken with no ill-feeling against either the College or the city itself—coincided with Richter’s farewell concert with the Hallé Orchestra. Typically, Petri’s contribution was Franck’s Symphonic variations and Liszt’s Totentanz. (He was, of course, to return in happier times, one of the most celebrated occasions being in 1934 when he played the Busoni concerto.)

Returning to Europe, he first took a teaching post at the Basle Conservatoire before becoming a professor at the Hochschule in Berlin, the city where he acquired the reputation which had so far eluded him—and where he found his name mentioned in the same breath as Artur Schnabel and Edwin Fischer. Although the 1920s found him successfully combining teaching and performing—he is reputed to have been the first artist to have visited Soviet Russia where he enjoyed such acclaim that he gave 31 concerts within the space of 40 days—his heyday as a public performer was undoubtedly in the 1930s, a fact reflected in his activities in the recording studio.

The Second World War shattered the scrupulously maintained order of Petri’s busy life. He had long been resident in the Polish town of Zakopane. All of a sudden he was forced to flee in the teeth of the invading German armies. In common with so many other displaced musicians, Petri looked to America for salvation. His sorry plight is apparent from a letter written in Utrecht on 17 October 1939 informing EMI of his whereabouts:

We left Zakopane on Aug 25th—just in time—and I have been sitting around here waiting for a boat to take us to America…

I have probably lost all my belongings in Poland (there is absolutely no news—terrible. Poor, poor Poland!) & certainly all my concerts in England so far. Today I should have played in Zurich, but as I did not know when we should be able to sail I had to cancel it…Fortunately I had enough funds to tide me over these 2 months here and if I get safely to America I shall be allright—at least financially.

We shall sail this Saturday. Let us hope there won’t be any torpedoes or mines!

Petri was no stranger to America—he had made his debut there in 1932—and he quickly secured a teaching post at the Malkan Conservatory in Boston though he soon moved to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. His life was now more or less equally divided between teaching, which he relished more and more, and the concert platform. It was a heart attack in the Spring of 1946 which determined him to abandon public performances. His decision to concentrate on teaching was confirmed when he accepted the post of ‘Pianist in Residence’ at Mills College, Oakland, California. He was, he confessed, relieved to lessen the burden of travelling. He enjoyed such a remarkably successful recuperation, however, that he did reappear in public though this was, more often than not, centred upon his place of teaching and in recital.

As a teacher Petri was committed, hardworking and often unorthodox. He was, for example, not one to promote exercises and scales, preferring instead to encourage his pupils to analyse their own particular difficulties and problems. To discover that he was always urging his pupils to listen closely to individual harmonies, that he was continually stressing the importance of structure, comes as no surprise when one hears his recordings. Students were also quick to discover Petri’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the piano literature: his colossal performing repertoire, which embraced all the accepted masterpieces of his time, including all the Beethoven sonatas, as well as Busoni, Alkan and Medtner was, it seems, simply the tip of the iceberg. (It should also not be forgotten that Petri took part in the first Berlin performance of Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire.) His impressive roster of students included Eugene Istomin, Grant Johannesen, Charles Lynch, John Ogdon, Ruth Slenczynska, Karol Szreter and Earl Wild.

Egon Petri died at Berkeley, California, on 27 May 1962.