The official website of the Polish Chopin Society reports that internationally renowned pianist Fu Cong died in the United Kingdom on Monday at the age of 86. The Wikipedia entry for “Fu Cong” also updated his “year of death” to Dec. 28, 2020, mentioning that he died in the United Kingdom after contracting Wuhan pneumonia.
The Punch News website on Sunday quoted Fu’s student and Chinese professor at the Royal College of Music, Kong Jianing, as leaving a message in his WeChat circle of friends, saying that Fu had been hospitalized for two weeks and that his lungs were a bit complicated a week ago and he had not yet needed a ventilator. Shanghai Perseus also quoted Shanghai Conservatory of Music professor and pianist Li Minduo’s message that Fu Cong was hospitalized in London and doctors had been giving oxygen, and that Fu’s wife had been admitted to the hospital but had been discharged after her condition improved.
Fu Cong was born in Shanghai in 1934, his father was a famous translator and writer Fu Lei, who was persecuted to death during the Cultural Revolution. He was the first Chinese musician to win a prize in an international piano competition, and the first Chinese musician to shine in the world music scene, and is considered the embodiment of modern Chopin.
In 1983, he was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters by the University of Hong Kong, and according to the University’s introduction at the time, he studied piano technique as a child with the Italian pianist and conductor Mario Paci. In 1955, he won the third place and the special prize in the International Competition of Chopin’s works in Warsaw. Before 1957, he had performed more than 500 times in Eastern European countries.
Since 1958. He became an internationally renowned pianist, as he continued to give recitals in England, the Far East and throughout America. In the late seventies, he was an advisor to the Shanghai Conservatory of Music and other music academies in Beijing and visited China frequently. As a result of his many visits to the Far East, Hong Kong often had the opportunity to give recitals for Foucault, many of them with the Hong Kong Green Orchestra.
The Nobel Prize-winning German writer Hermann Hesse once praised Fu as a pianist who truly knew how to interpret Chopin.
He was once married to the daughter of the internationally renowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin and had a son. After their divorce, he remarried to a female musician from China.
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