Bain News Service, publisher · Public domain

An Austrian pianist who, between 1932 and 1935, became the first person to record the complete Beethoven piano sonatas, a landmark project the Library of Congress later inducted into its National Recording Registry. Critic Harold Schonberg called him "the man who invented Beethoven," for a style prized for intellectual seriousness over technical showmanship in the Austro-German repertoire of Beethoven, Schubert, and Mozart.