André Watts, a pianist whose mighty technique and magnetic charm wowed audiences and made him one of the first black superstars in classical music, died Wednesday at his home in Bloomington, Ind. He was 77.
The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Brand Watts.
Mr. Watts was an old-fashioned virtuoso – his idol was the composer and showman Franz Liszt – with a knack for electricity and emotion. He sometimes hummed, stamped his feet, and moved his head as he played, and some critics blamed him for excess. But his charisma and his technical skills were unquestionable, which helped him rise to the world’s best concert halls.
“My greatest satisfaction is performing,” said Mr. Watts in 1971 to DailyExpertNews when he was 25. “Ego plays a big part in it, but it’s far from everything. Performing is my way of being part of humanity – of sharing.”
“There is something beautiful,” he added, “in getting an entire audience to hang on to a single note.”
Mr. Watts, whose father was black and whose mother was white, was a rarity in a field where musicians of color had long been underrepresented. While he preferred not to discuss race, he was celebrated as a pioneer who defied stereotypes about classical music and helped open doors for aspiring artists of color.
His own coming into the spotlight was promising. In 1963, when he was 16, he won an audition to appear with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic as part of the maestro’s nationally broadcast series Young People’s Concerts.
Mr. Bernstein was exuberant when he introduced him the young pianist to the audience in Philharmonic Hall. “He sat down at the piano and ripped into the opening bars of a Liszt concert so much that we just flipped,” Mr. Bernstein said of the young pianist’s audition.
Mr. Watts then lived in relative obscurity in Philadelphia, practicing on a worn-out piano with 26 missing strings. But he emerged from his performance of Liszt’s Piano Concerto No. 1 as a bona fide star.
A few weeks later, Mr. Bernstein is introducing him for his formal Philharmonic debut, replacing the eminent pianist Glenn Gould. He later credited Mr. Bernstein for giving him a career “from nothing”.
“It was like being Almighty God when I was 16,” he told The Times.
André Watts was born on June 20, 1946 in Nuremberg, Germany, to Herman Watts, a non-commissioned officer stationed abroad for the United States Army, and Maria (Gusmits) Watts, an amateur pianist from Hungary.
His mother, who loved playing Strauss waltzes on the family’s Blüthner piano, encouraged André’s musical studies, and as a 6-year-old he began playing the piano after flirting with the violin.
“I loved the sound,” he recalled during a 1993 television appearance. “I’d hold down the pedal for pages and pages of music and just let this mushroom sound go.”
When he was 8, his family moved to the United States for his father’s work, eventually settling in Philadelphia. But his parents’ relationship became strained and they divorced when he was 13. He rarely saw his father in the ensuing decades.
His mother, who worked as a receptionist at an art gallery to help pay for his piano lessons, became a dominant influence. When he was young, she served as a teacher, coach and manager, enforcing a strict exercise regimen.
André struggled to fit in at school, fighting with teachers and classmates (he taught himself judo to deter bullies). He sometimes felt isolated, he recalled in interviews, because he identified as neither black nor white.
When he went to Florida to perform as a teenager, his manager, citing the state’s history of discrimination against interracial couples, warned that he could be viewed with suspicion.
But his mother told him not to blame racism for his problems. “If someone isn’t nice to you,” Mr. Watts recalls saying when interviewed by The Christian Science Monitor in 1982, “it doesn’t necessarily have to be because of your skin color.”
“This kind of advice has taught me that if I’m in a complex personal situation, I don’t have to conclude it’s a racial issue,” he said. “The more subtle things in interpersonal exchange are never detectable as racist in the first place anyway. So it is a waste of time.”
He later credited Mr. Bernstein with helping him gain acceptance in the classical music industry, long seen as the rule of the whites and wealthy. At the introduction of Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert described Mr. Bernstein his international background and said, “I like that kind of story.”
In 1964, the year after his debut with Mr. Bernstein, Mr. Watts a Grammy Award for Most Promising New Classical Artist. Despite his early success, he tried to stay grounded, adopting a motto, “Even this shall pass,” taken from a poem by 19th-century poet and abolitionist Theodore Tilton. (His mother had the phrase engraved on a gold locket he wore around his neck.)
He graduated from the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore in 1972, where he studied with educator and performer Leon Fleisher. By the time he graduated, he was already a regular on the worldwide concert circuit, playing the Liszt Concerto for which he was known, as well as works by Chopin, Franck, Saint-Saëns and others, to sold-out crowds in Boston, Los Angeles . Angeles, London and elsewhere.
Mr. Watts received mixed reviews early in his career; critics said that while he had flair and confidence, he could get carried away at times. But they agreed that he possessed a special ability to communicate through the keyboard.
“He has that kind of personal magic that turns a concert into an event, and Philharmonic Hall had that electric feel that comes only when a major artist is at work,” wrote Harold C. Schonberg of DailyExpertNews in 1970. cannot be taught, this mysterious transference from stage to audience, and Mr. Watts has it to a very great extent.
While Mr. Watts did well on stage, recording was more challenging; he said he tended to clap without an audience. And at times he had financial and management problems, including in 1992 when he was ordered by a New York State appeals court to pay Columbia Artists Management nearly $300,000 in disputed commissions.
But he maintained his popularity, performing at White House state dinners, making regular appearances on television, and becoming one of classical music’s most bankable stars. His success brought new luxuries and curiosities. He became fond of Montecristo cigars, fine wines and caviar, and began to study Zen Buddhism.
In 1987, Mr. Watts was featured in an episode of “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood” about learning from mistakes.
“When I’m feeling unhappy,” he said on the program, “going to the piano and just playing softly and listening to sounds, everything slowly seems to be okay.”
His associates described him as a musician with supernatural talent who was always looking to improve. The conductor Robert Spano said that Mr. Watts never performed a piece the same way twice, intending to find new meaning each time.
“Every night was a new adventure,” said Mr. Spano. “He radiated love to people and to music, and it was undeniable. That’s why he was so loved as an artist, because of the generosity with which he made music.”
He was also a role model for many black musicians. The conductor Thomas Wilkins, a colleague of Mr. Watts at Indiana University, where Mr. Watts has been teaching since 2004, remembered him as a dedicated teacher who was only too happy to pass on “the cruelty of trying to get better.”
“Whenever we were on stage together, there was an unspoken acknowledgment that we were in a world that many people think we shouldn’t be in,” said Mr. Wilkins, who is black. “It was confirmation.”
In addition to his wife, Mr. Watts is survived by a stepson, William Dalton; a stepdaughter, Amanda Rees; and seven step-grandchildren.
At the start of the 2020 pandemic, Mr. Watts, who was diagnosed with stage 4 prostate cancer in 2016, had a performance planned: He would play Ravel’s piano concerto for the left hand in a version he had reworked for the right hand. hand (his left was recovering from nerve damage). As he practiced on his twin Yamaha pianos, he took daily inspiration from a one-legged starling that showed up outside his home in Bloomington.
Ultimately, Mr. Watts was unable to perform the concert due to health concerns and the pandemic. He usually stopped playing the piano after the concerts were cancelled, instead spending time with students.
His wife said music had sustained him throughout his life, starting with his demanding childhood and through his health struggles.
“Music was how he endured and how he survived,” she said. “When he actually played he was happy. It really lifted his soul.
He described music as a sacred space where he felt he could breathe and flourish.
“Your relationship with your music is the most important thing you have, and it’s, in the sense of private and sacred, something you should protect,” he said before a concert in Baltimore in 2012. life is very, very powerful and very strong. So you have to protect your special bond with your music.”
Kirsten Noyes contributed research.
