As befits a specialist in the music of Mozart and Schubert, Ingrid Haebler, who has died aged probably 96, was a native of Vienna. She made her debut as a child in Salzburg, going on to study at the Mozarteum there, as well as at the Vienna Music Academy. Indeed, the sensibility she brought to her playing of the classics, highlighting delicacy and charm, could be regarded as quintessentially Viennese.
Stanley Sadie’s entry in New Grove speaks of her “gentle and unassertive” style, as well as her “natural, Viennese feeling for a shapely line” and her “crystalline passage-work”. But her interpretations of Mozart, characterised by an elegance and stylishness that bordered on reverence, reflected an old-school view of the composer before Peter Shaffer’s play Amadeus popularised a somewhat more earthy persona.
Her ultra-refined readings of the Viennese classics were considered by sterner critics as inhibited and lacking the full emotional range. In Mozart’s Sonata in F major, K332, for example, the childlike simplicity of her playing veered perilously close to prettification. Even in the Piano Concerto No 20, K466, whose D minor tonality is generally regarded as inhabiting a similar world to that of Don Giovanni (which begins in the same key) her gracefully executed reading sought introspection rather than emotional turmoil.
Although she toured widely, not only in Europe (where she appeared at the Edinburgh, Holland and Prague festivals) but also in the US, the USSR, Japan and Australia, it was always through her recordings that she was principally known, and indeed it could be argued that the intimacy of her approach was better suited to the recording studio than to larger halls.
Her catalogue of recordings is overwhelmingly dominated by Mozart and Schubert (she recorded all Mozart’s piano concertos, most of them twice, and all the sonatas of each composer), though scattered among them are pieces by Haydn, Beethoven, Schumann (including the Piano Concerto), Chopin and Franck (the Symphonic Variations).
She was also receptive at an early stage to period instruments and recorded the keyboard concertos of JC Bach on a fortepiano with the Capella Academica Wien under Eduard Melkus. Johann Christian, the youngest son of Johann Sebastian Bach, was living in London by the time of Mozart’s visit as a boy, and shortly after his death the younger composer based the Andante of his Piano Concerto No 12, K414, on a theme by him.
JS Bach and even early 20th-century composers (Stravinsky, for example) featured occasionally in her early international tours. An accomplished performer, she brought a high degree of artistry to the repertory in which she specialised, notwithstanding the relatively circumscribed emotional range of her interpretations.
The year of her birth was probably 1926 (the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung celebrated her 90th birthday in its issue of 20 June 2016), though 1929 is given in some sources; she was subsequently as discreet about her personal life as she was on this point.
Her father, Baron Armin von Haebler, was a Polish-born businessman with interests in the glass and metal industries, her mother, Sissy (nee von Schüch), a pianist who gave Ingrid her first lessons. Her parents emigrated to Poland shortly after her birth and the family remained there until the outbreak of the second world war. Following her studies in Austria, she attended the Geneva Conservatory (participating in the masterclasses of Nikita Magaloff) and then studied in Paris with Marguerite Long.
In 1954 she performed as a soloist in Britain with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and two years later held the Wigmore Hall audience “spellbound”, according to one review of her recital.
She made her American debut in 1959 with the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra, playing a concerto by Mozart. Her first solo recital in New York was at Hunter College in 1976, when she added works by Schubert and Debussy to her Mozart items, which were “cloudless, untroubled”, according to the local reviewer.
She formed a rewarding partnership with the violinist Henryk Szeryng, whose freer, more demonstrative style of playing called forth a similar response in their recorded cycles of sonatas by Mozart and Beethoven. In the latter’s Kreutzer Sonata, for example, her clean, crisp articulation helps to drive the music forward.
In 1969 she became a professor at the Salzburg Mozarteum. A 58-CD box set of her recordings for Philips was released on Decca last year.
• Ingrid Haebler, pianist, born 20 June 1926 (or 1929); died 14 May 2023
