For the past hundred years, classical music lovers have gotten to know the work of the great pianists through their recordings.

Today we’re looking at the final recordings that six great pianists made. In some cases, these recordings were made just weeks or days before their deaths.

Vladimir Horowitz

Horowitz Plays Tristan and Isolde

Vladimir Horowitz was eighty-six years old when he sat down at the piano to make his final recording.

Just as he had done when recording the album Horowitz at Home, he eschewed a studio in favour of the familiarity of his New York apartment.

Vladimir Horowitz

The result of those sessions is, appropriately enough, titled Horowitz: The Last Recording.

The final track is Liszt’s transcription of the Liebestod (Love’s Death) from Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. Most of it was recorded on 1 November 1989, the last day that Horowitz played for the microphones.

Horowitz would die of a heart attack later that week, making the Liebestod performance even more bittersweet than it already was.

Arthur Rubinstein

SCHUMANN: 8 Fantasiestücke op. 12 / Rubinstein

Over three days in late April 1976, Arthur Rubinstein visited the famous Abbey Road Studios in London to set down what would be his final recording. He was eighty-nine years old.

Arthur Rubinstein, 1971

For this final session, he chose to record Robert Schumann’s 8 Fantasiestücke and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 18.

One would never guess his age based on the performance’s energy and fluidity.

Rubinstein gave his final public concert a month later, in May 1976. His performing career had lasted for an astonishing eighty-two years.

Despite his advanced age, his love life became tumultuous after this record was made. In 1977, he left his longtime wife for thirty-three-year-old concert manager Annabelle Whitestone. They settled down together in Geneva, and she helped him assemble the second volume of his memoirs.

Rubinstein died in his sleep a few days before Christmas 1982.

Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould Plays Strauss’ Sonata in B minor, Op.5

Glenn Gould was an iconoclast among piano soloists.

In later years, he preferred recording in a studio over live concerts, and he was free with his criticism of established canonised composers. (He once said of Chopin’s music, “I play it in a weak moment—maybe once a year or twice a year for myself. But it doesn’t convince me.”)

Glenn Gould

He gave his final concert in 1964 and afterwards focused on making studio recordings.

He made his last recording on 3 September 1982, recording Richard Strauss’s Piano Sonata, Op. 5, which Strauss wrote when he was just seventeen years old. This was one of the first recordings of the sonata ever made.

On 27 September, Gould had a stroke that paralysed the left side of his body. Over the following week, his condition deteriorated, and his father made the difficult decision to take him off of life support. He died on October 4 at the age of fifty.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

Rachmaninoff Plays Lilacs Op. 21-5 Rec.1942

Sergei Rachmaninoff began recording in 1919. The following year, he signed with the Victor Talking Machine Company (later known as RCA Victor), where he made regular recordings until the end of his career.

Sergei Rachmaninoff

In February 1942, Rachmaninoff went into the studio to record a number of pieces by Schubert, Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, and transcriptions of Bach and Fritz Kreisler. He also recorded his own work, “Lilacs.”

Although Rachmaninoff would live for more than a year, he was unable to return to the studio again due to a labour dispute.

In August 1942, the American Federation of Musicians went on strike over royalty payments, forbidding their members from making commercial recordings for commercial labels. The strike lasted for an astonishing twenty-seven months, only ending in November 1944.

But the settlement happened too late for Rachmaninoff, who had died in March 1943.

Interestingly, the strike helped to popularise vocalists who, unlike instrumentalists, were not in the AFM.

Sviatoslav Richter

Mozart – Piano Concertos K.37, K.175, K.456 – Sviatoslav Richter, Rudolf Barshai (1994)

Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter was born in present-day Ukraine in 1915. He gave his first recital in 1934, and he continued performing for decades after.

He enjoyed an international career and became one of the most respected pianists of his generation.

Sviatoslav Richter

Sixty years after his first recital, when he was almost eighty years old, he made his final recording in Japan, performing three Mozart piano concertos with the Japan Shinsei Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Soviet conductor Rudolf Barshai.

The concertos he chose were Mozart’s first (written when the composer was just eleven), fifth (written when he was seventeen), and eighteenth (written when he was twenty-eight). It was a touching overview of a great composer’s growth.

This legendary performance took place in March 1994. Richter died of a heart attack in Moscow a few months later, in August.

Dame Myra Hess

Myra Hess Plays Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring

Myra Hess (later Dame Myra Hess) was born in London in 1890. She made her concert debut in 1907 as a teenager under Sir Thomas Beecham, playing Beethoven’s fourth piano concerto.

Myra Hess at the National Gallery

Her career continued for decades, but she reached a new level of fame in the 1940s, when, during World War II, she began organising lunchtime concerts at the National Gallery during the Blitz.

Even if the Gallery was bombed, Hess would simply relocate the performances instead of canceling. All in all, she organized 1700 concerts, playing in 150.

For her work bolstering British morale in wartime, King George VI made her a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

She continued performing and recording for years after the war.

She made her final recording on 12 October 1957. During that session, she re-recorded the first piece she’d ever recorded, all the way back in 1928: her arrangement of the Bach chorale nowadays known as “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring.”

Hess died in 1965 in London of a heart attack.

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