André Watts, internationally acclaimed pianist, dies at 77

His death was announced by Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music, where Mr. Watts had joined the faculty in 2004. The cause was prostate cancer, said his wife, Joan Watts.

Mr. Watts, the son of an African American soldier and a Hungarian refugee of World War II, was often described as one of the first Black classical musicians to reach stardom on the international stage.

For his part, he rejected the terms “Black” and “White” — “they’re both inaccurate,” he remarked — and said that “a person’s color should be recognized as a means of physical description, and then dismissed.”

Mr. Watts spent his early years in West Germany, where his father was stationed by the U.S. Army, and absorbed classical music from a young age. His mother played the piano and instilled in him an affinity for Franz Liszt, the Hungarian composer whose works were later among Mr. Watts’s calling cards.

He was, by all accounts, a prodigy. After moving with his parents to Philadelphia, he auditioned for a youth concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra and was selected to perform — at age 10 — a Haydn concerto.

At 16, he played for Bernstein, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, who was astounded by Mr. Watts’s talent and chose him to appear in an upcoming performance of the Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concert series.

The concert, which aired on television in January 1963, featured Mr. Watts playing Liszt’s Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major. It was a sensation. But an even greater sensation followed weeks later, when Bernstein asked Mr. Watts to fill in for Glenn Gould, one of the most celebrated pianists of the 20th century, who had canceled a performance with the Philharmonic because of ill health.

“There were 2,000 people sitting out there, waiting to hear Gould, and then out walks this 16‐year‐old kid,” Mr. Watts told the New York Times years later. “It all happened so suddenly that I didn’t have time to think that this was my one big chance. I just played the best way I knew, and it turned out O.K. Bernstein actually made me play better than I would have ordinarily. The audience went wild, the standing ovation just went on and on. It was kind of insane.”

Even the orchestra stood to applaud him.

Mr. Watts fulfilled, if not exceeded, the promise of his youth. For decades, he was one of the most sought-after classical pianists in the world, frequently performing before sold-out crowds, and was a recording artist under contract with Columbia.

He was known for his interpretations of Liszt and Rachmaninoff, sprawling works of Romantic-era ardor, but also excelled in the delicacy of Schubert. One of his signature pieces was Beethoven’s “Emperor” concerto.

Mr. Watts was a powerful presence onstage, swaying with the tides of the music, his face nearly grazing the piano keys, his foot sometimes stomping as if in involuntary motion. Some listeners found his outward presentation distracting. But admirers saw in it the mark of an artist swept away by his music.

“He plays out of his body. That’s what excites people,” Gunther Schuller, a conductor and composer who collaborated with Mr. Watts, told the Christian Science Monitor in 1982.

He plays “out of inner resources both physical and emotional beyond just what the mind can analytically, intelligently understand,” Schuller continued. “It is something amidst his emotions and heart, something subconscious and subliminal — many people don’t understand this.”

André Watts was born June 20, 1946, in Nuremberg, Germany. His first memory, he said, was of the sheet music — Strauss waltzes — that his mother kept on the piano.

She regarded music as central to his education, on a par with reading and mathematics. Mr. Watts began studying the violin at age 4 but soon showed greater interest in the piano.

When he was roughly 8, the family moved to Philadelphia. After his parents divorced, his was raised by his mother. They endured periods when he didn’t have enough money “even to buy pretzels casually,” he told the Times. He practiced on a piano that had 26 missing strings. To finance his lessons, his mother worked in an art gallery.

Mr. Watts cited his mother and Bernstein as the great influences on his musical life. “I always say Bernstein basically handed me a career on a plate and said, ‘Here, kid, you want this, you can have it, it’s yours,’” he told the Orange County Register years later.

Introducing Mr. Watts at the Young People’s Concert that was to air on national television, Bernstein declared: “Now we come to a young man who is so remarkable that I am tempted to give him a tremendous buildup, but I’d almost rather not so that you might have the same unexpected shock of pleasure and wonderment that I had when I first him play.”

When he “sat down at the piano and tore into the opening bars of a Liszt concerto,” Bernstein recounted, “we simply flipped.”

Mr. Watts studied at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music before enrolling at the Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins University, where he studied with the pianist Leon Fleisher. He received an artist diploma in 1972.

Mr. Watts was decorated from the beginning of his career until the end. He received a 1963 Grammy Award for most promising new classical recording artist and a 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.

In his later years, Mr. Watts suffered repeated health setbacks, including a subdural hematoma and nerve damage that for a period prevented him from playing with his left hand.

Survivors include his wife of 28 years, the former Joan Brand, of Bloomington; two stepchildren, William Dalton of Beaufort, S.C., and Amanda Rees of Franklin, Ind.; and seven grandchildren

“Performing is my way of being part of humanity — of sharing,” Mr. Watts once said. “I don’t want to play for a few people, I want to play for thousands. … There’s something beautiful about having an entire audience hanging on a single note.”