In a Vienna studio, the Austrian pianist Paul Badura-Skoda sat down to record the same Schubert sonata three separate times, each take on a piano from a different century. One instrument dated from the 1820s, another from the 1920s, and the third had been built in the early 2000s. He was not being indecisive. He was making a point about classical music that most performers never dared to make so literally: the piano itself is part of the interpretation. Paul Badura-Skoda was born on October 6, 1927.
Vienna training and early breakthrough
Badura-Skoda was born in Vienna on 6 October 1927 and spent his life inside the city's deep classical tradition. He trained at the Vienna Conservatory and broke through early, winning a performers' competition in Salzburg in 1947. Two years later, the conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Herbert von Karajan both took notice of him. From that moment he never stopped giving concerts, but the stage was only half of his obsession. The other half was the instrument under his hands.
He became known for playing on historical pianos, and he did not just borrow them for special occasions. He collected and restored fortepianos from the late eighteenth and mid-nineteenth centuries, building a private collection that became his laboratory. His complete recording of Schubert's piano sonatas was made on five different instruments from that collection. The idea was simple and radical: a sonata written for a light, wooden-framed piano of Schubert's day sounds different from the same notes played on a modern concert grand, and both versions deserve to be heard.
A discography built on comparison
That obsession turned his discography into something closer to a comparative study than a standard catalogue. He made more than 200 recordings, and many of them exist in multiple versions created specifically to demonstrate how different pianos change the music. In 2013 he recorded Schubert's last sonata three times, once on each of those instruments from the 1820s, the 1920s and the early 2000s. One of his boxed sets of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas included three separate versions of the 'Hammerklavier' sonata alone.
This approach made him unique in the history of recorded classical music. He is the only pianist who recorded the complete piano sonatas of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on both historical and modern instruments. Think of that as two full libraries of the central piano repertoire, built side by side, each one arguing with the other about tempo, touch, resonance and silence. No one else has ever assembled such a complete double archive.
The 27-CD historical instrument series
The scale of the project became clear in the 1980s, when he began a series of recordings of selected Haydn sonatas and the complete sonatas of Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. It eventually ran to 27 CDs, played on roughly a dozen historical instruments. Each disc was not just a performance but a demonstration: here is what this music sounds like when the piano is the same age as the score.
Badura-Skoda never treated this as a niche experiment. He was a central figure in Viennese musical life, often grouped with Friedrich Gulda and Jörg Demus as part of the so-called Viennese troika. His work as a scholar and editor, including volumes of Mozart's piano concertos for the Neue Mozart-Ausgabe, gave his performances a documentary weight. When he played, audiences heard not just a pianist but a historian making a case.
He died in Vienna on 25 September 2019 after a three-year struggle with cancer. He was 91 years old. The pianos he restored and recorded on remain in his collection, each one a different answer to the same question he spent his life asking: what did this music actually sound like when it was new?
The Schubert sonata he recorded three times in 2013 is the clearest example of his method. The same notes, the same pianist, three different machines, three different worlds of sound. Paul Badura-Skoda did not want listeners to choose one. He wanted them to hear that the choice itself is the music.
Paul Badura-Skoda did not want listeners to choose one. He wanted them to hear that the choice itself is the music.