The top pianist in the world, John Cage, died Saturday at age 95.
Cage’s obituary says that he died at the age of 95, but he was born in 1926.
The pianist who would become his best-known and most famous collaborator, Gustav Mahler, died in 1938.
And the first pianist to perform at Carnegie Hall was a Polish immigrant, Anton Klemperer, who was born to a Jewish family in the town of Bialystok.
There were no German-Jewish pianists until the 1950s.
The most famous of these is pianist Erich Ludwig Kirchner, whose obit in The New York Times said that Kirchners performance at Carnegie was the “most beautiful piano performance ever done.”
But his obit also said that he had never played with Mahler.
Mahler’s obituaries have been more popular, and his piano has been the subject of countless documentary films and books.
His performance at the piano was described by his biographer, John Steinbeck, as “the greatest performance of all time.”
