At the age of thirty-nine, and to the supreme benefit of posterity, Brendel signed a recording deal, one of those astonishing mid–Nineteen Seventies agreements which no longer exist but without which we would know precious little about our own musical heritage. Consider the sprawling legacies of not just Brendel, but of everyone from Pierre Boulez to Claudio Arrau, Benjamin Britten to Vladimir Horowitz, Serge Celibidace to Arthur Rubinstein, all of whom come down through history only due to the strength of their legal binding. And so, in celebration of his Eighty-Fifth Birthday, Decca has released an exquisite, scholarly, must-have boxed set of his complete — or damn near — recordings made on what was once called the Philips Label.

“If I belong to any tradition,” Brendel said, “it is the tradition which makes the masterpiece tell the performer what to do, and not the performer tell the masterpiece what to do.” And as straightforward as this sounds, Brendel on record is a mire of personal complexities: with this box we get to know the deeply shy public person, the studied and learned musical soul who is, in essence, entirely self-taught, the austere thinker who delights in the Far Side cartoons of Gary Larson, all through careful listening and re-listening. And yet the collected box has three — three! — separate traversals of the Beethoven Piano Concertos, each quite different, though that can easily be explained as collaborations between the pianist and separate conductors? But what does one make of his two tours through the complete Beethoven Piano Sonatas, or his dual recordings of the Late Schubert Sonatas? “As an interpreter — that is, in my threefold function of curator, executor and obstetrician,” he says in his justifiably beloved essay “Form and Psychology in Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas,” “I am not interested in clichés, but in what is special and unique.” Which means as one changes, one’s own interests change, and therefore a multiple assaying of the same pieces can teach us plenty. Think of Glenn Gould and the two Goldberg recordings, both transformational, both important — even necessary — and radically different.

Brendel attempts to find the funny, to winnow down whether there is any possibility that music, in and of itself, can actually make one laugh aloud — in the way that Beckett, Cervantes, Dali, Borges, Pynchon, Mozart and even Schoenberg can make us giggle. His essay “Must Classical Music Be Entirely Serious?” quite literally poses this question, and in his own sly fashion he goes deep chapter-and-verse into how Haydn was funny (“. . .his sudden rests and fermatas at unlikely places and his extended repetitions of the same chord”), how Beethoven was funny (“. . .one may call it an alternation of whispering and stentorian laughter, or of tiptoeing and stamping”), how Mozart is not funny (his imagination, like that of Schubert, was “predominantly vocal” and “Singing, like sensuality, is hardly funny”), along the way invoking Homer, Hegel, and Pliny the Younger’s (by way of Umberto Eco) famous maxim, which in translation reads: “Sometimes I laugh, I joke, I play, I am human.” This profound look at absurdity applies to Brendel as well: should proof be needed look no further than his near-hysterical recording of, of all things, Für Elise. His galumphing, almost drunken approach to this overplayed dilettante’s bon-bon is funny in and of itself, but also funny that he deigned to record it at all. But from an author who opted to title his collected essays Music, Sense and Nonsense, this hardly seems out of character.