“Mozart is a garden, Schubert is a forest in light and shade, but Beethoven is a mountain range.”
Artur Schnabel was one the most influential pianists of the early 20th century. He’s best remembered as “the man who invented Beethoven.”
When he played the complete Beethoven sonatas in a series of pioneering programs in Berlin in 1927, (the composer’s centenary year) it was an historic event that changed the perception of Beethoven’s works. Harold C. Schonberg, the long-time New York Times music critic, later dubbed him “the man who invented Beethoven.”
Five years after the Berlin concerts, a few months short of his fiftieth birthday, Schnabel repeated the feat in London and accepted an offer from HMV to record all the sonatas and Beethoven’s concertos. No pianist of consequence had ever presented the complete sonatas as a comprehensive body of work and the later sonatas were rarely played at that time, and widely thought to be a little weird. Schnabel’s recordings have remained in print almost continuously since their original release on 78s.