Annie Fischer (July 5, 1914April 10, 1995) was a Hungarian classical pianist. Biography Fischer was born into a Jewish family in Budapest and studied at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music with Ernő Dohnányi and Arnold Szekely. She began her career as a concert pianist in 1924 at age ten, making her debut performance with Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 1. When she was 12, she appeared with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, performing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 and Robert Schumann's Piano Concerto. In 1933, Fischer won the International Franz Liszt Piano Competition in her native city with a performance of Franz Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor. Throughout her career she played mainly in Europe and Australia. She was seldom heard in the United States until late in her lifetime, giving only two concerts there by that time. She was married to the influential critic and musicologist (and later director of the Budapest Opera) Aládar Tóth and is buried with him in Budapest. Fischer fled with her husband to Sweden in 1940, after Hungary joined the Axis powers. After the war, in 1946, she and Tóth returned to Budapest. She died there in 1995. Fischer's playing has been praised for its "characteristic intensity" and "effortless manner of phrasing" (David Hurwitz), as well as its technical power and spiritual depth. She was greatly admired by such contemporaries as Otto Klemperer and Sviatoslav Richter; Richter wrote, "Annie Fischer is a great artist imbued with a spirit of greatness and genuine profundity." The Italian pianist Maurizio Pollini praised the "childlike simplicity, immediacy and wonder" he found in her playing. Her interpretations of Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert and Schumann, as well as Hungarian composers like Bartók have been critically acclaimed. Fischer made studio recordings in the 1950s with Otto Klemperer and Wolfgang Sawallisch, but felt that any interpretation created in the absence of an audience would necessarily be artificially constricting, as no interpretation was ever "finished." Her legacy today thus includes many live concert recordings that have been released on CD and DVD (including a performance of Beethoven's "Emperor" concerto (available on YouTube), and Beethoven's third piano concerto with Antal Doráti conducting). Her greatest legacy, however, is a studio-made integral set of the complete Beethoven piano sonatas. She worked on this set for 15 years beginning in 1977. A self-critical perfectionist, she did not allow the set to be released in her lifetime