Tessa Birnie

Tessa Daphne Birnie OAM (19 July 192410 March 2008) was an internationally acclaimed New Zealand and Australian concert pianist.

Biography Birnie was born in Ashburton, on the South Island of New Zealand, in 1924. She first heard a piano in a local hall when she was three or four, and decided then that the piano was to be her destiny. Her mother Edna took her to the North Island when she was 10, and she did not see her father again until she was an adult. She achieved the Royal School of Music's licentiate when she was 14. Instead of attending secondary school, she was taught by private tutors. Her music teachers included the Viennese Jewish refugee pianist Paul Schramm (1892–1953) who was living in Wellington, and French pianists Nadia Boulanger and Yvonne Lefébure.

Birnie made many recordings, including a 1977 recording of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, played at its original lower pitch with the composer's original pedals, and rediscovered numerous forgotten pieces for piano from the 17th and 18th centuries. Highly acclaimed for her marathon performances in Australia and Europe, she also performed the entire cycle of Schubert sonatas in San Francisco in 1961 and Haydn's complete keyboard works in 1982. In 1985 she was awarded the Medal of the Order of Australia (OAM).

She wrote numerous texts on keyboard music, as well as a 1997 autobiography entitled I'm Going to Be a Pianist! (Sydney: Azzano Press, ). Birnie did not marry, and "her comforts were Jane Austen's novels and chocolates". She died in Sydney in 2008, aged 83.