Music world mourns pianist Weissenberg

Bulgarian-born French pianist Alexis Weissenberg, whose love of music was his life, has died, aged 82.

Luck sometimes produces tiny miracles...

From the age of three his passion for music saved him and his mother from a German prison camp during World War II, and carried him to the musical heights of performances with Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein.

Bulgaria’s Ministry of Culture confirmed the death of Mr Weissenberg, who was born into a Jewish family in the capital Sofia but spent most of his life abroad and became a French citizen.

Mr Weissenberg suffered from Parkinson’s disease and died on Sunday in Lugano, Switzerland where his family had settled.

An only child, Mr Weissenberg recalled sharing musical toys, learning the piano and listening to recordings and concerts with his mother, before studying music with famous Bulgarian composer, Pancho Vladigerov.

When he and his mother tried to flee German-occupied Bulgaria for Turkey with faked ID and visa papers in 1941 they ended up in a concentration camp for people crossing the border illegally.

He said the camp probably was intended to send people to Poland – and extermination.

They arrived with few belongings other than a small bag, a large cardboard box, a few sandwiches and an old accordion given to him as a birthday gift by a wealthy aunt.

They were lucky: After three months in the unspecified camp, a German guard who enjoyed listening to him play Schubert on the accordion helped them escape by train.

“He decided one chaotic day to come and fetch us hurriedly, bring us to the station, push our belongings in the cardboard box through the door train compartment door and literally throw the accordion through the window of the compartment,” he recalled.

The guard told his mother: “Good luck”, then vanished. Half-an-hour later, they were over the border and no one asked for passports. The next day they arrived in Istanbul.

He said: “Luck sometimes produces tiny miracles and our piece of luck was a musical instrument, the dear old accordion.”

They wound up in Israel where he performed Beethoven with the Israel Philharmonic led by Leonard Bernstein.

After the war, he moved to New York to study at the Juilliard School of Music. Then, in the 1950s, he moved to Paris and became a French citizen.