Alfred Brendel retired from performing in 2008 following a career spanning more than six decades that saw him rise to become one of the leading interpreters of his age. At the core of his vast repertoire on which he built his formidable reputation was the music of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven and Schubert.

‘The works I play regularly are those I think one can happily spend a lifetime with – to which one can return in certain intervals with increasing pleasure,’ says Brendel. ‘I am not someone who has ever felt drawn towards the idea of playing pieces by as many composers as possible. I have tended to have my base in a certain repertory that for me is the most important – the central European, which unquestionably presents much of the greatest music ever written.’

However, Brendel does not subscribe to the view that a masterwork's potential is literally infinite: ‘I feel that every piece has a certain character, or includes a variety of characters, within its structure. These should dictate the boundaries within which the performer has a certain amount of freedom and room for exploration. In order to make good sense of a piece the detail is just as important as the whole. It may, however, take a long time before the right character and the right detail emerges. I am always bringing things into question. I am never completely satisfied and I don't think that something can ever be entirely solved. But every once in a while I may give a performance that I feel is as good as I can manage!’

I suggest that the harmonic shockwaves sent out by Beethoven in his most advanced scores have lost their sting – not in an absolute sense, but in an experiential context. Is it our job to find a way of replicating the impact this music would have had at the time, or should we embrace change? ‘Well, I think that if we are talking about great music, it has the energy to renew itself, at least within certain boundaries – not in the sense of turning it completely upside-down. I confess that when I listen to chromaticism in Mozart, Gesualdo or Wagner, it has certainly not lost any of its impact for me. It feels as hair-raising as ever. Even though we now live in a later period there is still something virulent about the greatest masterpieces that is indestructible.

‘If we consider the diminished seventh, for example, its significance as being extraterritorial to tonality still cannot be overestimated, and its poignancy in Beethoven is colossal. This is something that the player must still be aware of in its historical context. Soon after, the diminished seventh in Berlioz and Liszt and Tchaikovsky's Francesca da Rimini was used wholesale.

‘For me the criterion of great music is that it contributes something new. What does a given masterpiece do that no other piece had done before? What elements, no matter how familiar in themselves, are combined in an entirely novel way? I think that we have to play with an awareness of the special contribution that a given piece made to the music of its time and not in the context of our present-day culture. Some performers indulge in novel effects, or consciously play in a different way reacting to how someone has played it before. But I would suggest that great music gives you all the information you need if you look hard enough. It is the outcome of the music's unfolding that counts, not the coin that you put into the interpretative slot machine.’

Looking back, we can perhaps view the authenticity movement as having been spurred on not just by the need to remind us how music may have originally sounded, but also to replenish the interpretative tradition in our own time. ‘Performances on original instruments have their merits but are not without problems. For example, in a concert hall the violins of an authentic orchestra do not possess the weight and penetration of their modern counterparts. That said, there are certain kinds of music that nowadays would be unthinkable on modern instruments – Monteverdi, for example.

‘Regarding piano music, my position is that one should not feel tied to the exact sound that a historical piano made, let alone the precise sound made by a given piano of a certain vintage by a particular maker. The piano works of nearly all the great composers served as receptacles for all sorts of sounds, whether vocal, orchestral or atmospheric. While these sounds remained latent, the modern piano can bring them better to the fore. In historical performances I sometimes object to the mannered articulation of phrases or two-note groups and the all-too-mechanical emphasis on strong beats, even where the character of the music would seem to suggest that it should float. I also take exception to excessive embellishments, which sometimes become a plague, and a sound production that to my ears appears artificial more often than not. I recently heard a recording of Beethoven's violin sonatas played on original instruments, and could hardly detect any difference between pianissimo and piano, or fortissimo and forte. Yet these are of paramount importance in Beethoven's music – not just in terms of volume, but in their emotional value.’

How does Brendel now feel about some of the virtuoso warhorses he tackled earlier in his career? ‘There are certain Liszt pieces – the Bénédiction de Dieu, for example – which thrilled me very much when I played them in my twenties and thirties. But nowadays I feel there is an excessive amount of musical “incense” in this work. I simply can't take the pentatonic intoxication any more. There are some pieces, such as Balakirev's Islamey, which I haven't returned to since I recorded them. I remember learning Islamey alongside Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka, by comparison with which it felt almost like a holiday! Petrushka represented the beginning of my wearing plasters on my fingers. If I could now give any advice to myself at age 25, it would be, “Don't play Petrushka - it ruins the fingernails”.’

It would be wrong, however, to assume that Brendel was indifferent to the music he chose not to perform in public. He retains a soft spot for Islamey, and I was delighted to discover his enthusiasm for some pieces which lie outside the Austro-German tradition. ‘One of the reasons I did not tend to stray into, say, the French repertoire is that the piano literature is so vast and one simply cannot do everything. I enjoy some French music a great deal. Take Ravel. A piece like Le tombeau de Couperin, for example, has its limitations, but Gaspard de la nuit strikes me as perhaps the supreme piano masterpiece of the 20th century. L'enfant et les sortilèges is also unquestionably one of the finest operas of its period. I should also mention in this particular context that I greatly admire Debussy's Préludes.’

What about Chopin? Apparently in a conversation with Delacroix just before his death, Chopin insisted that counterpoint at its deepest structural level was the most fundamental aspect of his creative thinking. ‘There is a convincing balance between counterpoint and harmony in his best music’, Brendel agrees. ‘Yet some of the miniatures lean rather more towards a predominance of melody, while in the sonatas – take the development section of the B minor's opening movement, for example – Chopin's passion for counterpoint sounds slightly laboured. I am the greatest admirer of the Préludes, however – no one could admire them more – but in some of his larger structures the music creates the impression of stopping and starting – although, needless to say, the performer should not!’

Of Chopin's contemporaries, Schumann is particularly challenging when it comes to striking a balance between surface characterisation and structural rigour. What does Brendel feel about music so tantalisingly poised between the medium and the message? ‘Schumann's music is particularly demanding for the player. He requires a fair degree of elasticity and volatility,’ he reasons, ‘although I frequently hear his piano music being distorted by the kind of volatility that has lost touch with the music's pulse. In his own canon entitled Musical Rules for Home and in Life, Schumann is strict about rhythmical matters. It is very easy, for example, to break up the first movement of the C major Fantasie into a series of fragments, when what it rather needs is to be given an overall continuity. There is a very nice word that Schumann coined – Gefühlsdeutlichkeit (‘distinctiveness of feeling’), which, however, should not lead to distortion.

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‘Take Kreisleriana, for example, in which two completely different worlds coexist – one is Kapellmeister Kreisler, the other is Clara; one is basically in G minor, the other is essentially in B-flat major. Yet they alternate in the most inevitable way. Harmonically there isn't anything much more going on at a basic level, so in a sense the relationship and contrast between the two keys gives the piece its astonishing tension.’

Is there any justification, therefore, for viewing music as a metaphor for human experience – a sequence of events that no matter how ingeniously structured ultimately reveals a composer's innermost psyche? ‘I would say that there is very clearly a human connection – a connection with human emotions, reactions, drama and characters relating to one another. But I would not go too far in trying to find the character of the person who composed the music in the piece itself. I feel that the works of the great composers by far surpass in scope and variety the peculiar attributes of their creators.

‘Music does not only connect with human experience, but also operates outside ourselves, over and above the confines of the composer's day-to-day life and thinking. The notion of linking the detailed personality of a person with his creative offspring is something that, for example, the film historian David Thomson has attempted in his celebrated Biographical Dictionary of Film – sometimes, it seems to me, with highly questionable results.

‘That said, there are, of course, special cases, such as Beethoven's Op 110 Sonata – we know that he was suffering from jaundice at this time and was virtually brought back from the brink. We hear this in the exhausted lament that is the A-flat minor Arioso, which is then given life by the fugue that twice follows.’

Brendel's understanding of the music he plays is so individual that I am curious what happened on the rare occasions when he played alongside colleagues. Did working with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, for example, involve a certain degree of compromise, or was it invigorating to have someone else to spark ideas off? ‘I am not an “accompanist”, and when Fischer-Dieskau invited me to play alongside him he wasn't looking for one,’ Brendel explains. ‘He wanted someone who would bring their own ideas and be an inspiration. Ours were not cut-and-dried performances – we gave many concerts virtually without rehearsal as we both knew Winterreise and each other very well.

‘The earlier tradition of playing along with a singer was more passive, but I think we have outgrown this phase. When you listen to some early Lieder recordings you get the impression that some singers barely knew what the piano was doing – during the interludes the poor accompanist would often fade apologetically into the background. Gerald Moore was probably the first to really change the singer's perception of the piano's role in Lieder.’

But what about the special relationship between an artist and his public? Does the presence of a warm and sympathetic audience have a perceivable impact on an artist's playing? ‘No one can or should be immune to such things, but on the whole I start from the basis that I am on the podium first and foremost for the music and its composer – secondly and thirdly for myself and for the audience. It would be ludicrous to try and shut out the audience, they must be included – after all, one is up on a stage and not merely playing at home. One therefore has to learn how to get something across. The concentration from me on the stage hopefully spreads to the audience, becomes magnified and comes back to me like an electric circuit.’

Brendel was indeed renowned for his tremendous powers of concentration, both in concert and the recording studio. I wondered whether he ever referred back to his own recordings. ‘I occasionally check to see how my perception of a work has changed and whether my opinion of the recorded performance has altered,’ he admits. ‘But I have never listened to my recordings in order to say, “Yesterday I played a piece this way, now tomorrow it shall be completely different.” It is also very rare that I stumble upon a recording of mine and feel it is as good as I would dream it to be. I remember once having breakfast in a hotel and Mozart's A minor Rondo was playing over the system. I stopped drinking my tea and thought that whoever was playing had evidently heard one of my performances, but he or she had improved certain things – to my amazement it turned out to be me!’

This interview originally appeared in the January/February 2006 edition of International Piano