Friedrich Gulda was a classical pianist first, and one of the most celebrated of the postwar era. He was born in Vienna on May 16, 1930, the son of a teacher, and began piano at seven with Felix Pazofsky at the Wiener Volkskonservatorium. In 1942 he entered the Vienna Music Academy, where he studied piano with Bruno Seidlhofer and theory with Joseph Marx. As teenagers during the war, he and his friend Joe Zawinul played forbidden music, jazz included, in defiance of the ban on it. In 1946 he won first prize at the Geneva International Music Competition, in a final vote that left one juror storming out in protest, and he made his Carnegie Hall debut in 1950. With his fellow Viennese Jörg Demus and Paul Badura-Skoda he formed what was called the "Viennese troika" of young postwar pianists.

His reputation rested on Mozart and Beethoven. In the late 1960s he recorded the complete Beethoven piano sonatas (Amadeo, 1968), and his recordings of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier are well regarded; he often played Bach on the clavichord. He composed his own cadenzas for two Mozart concertos and recorded them, Nos. 20 and 21 for Deutsche Grammophon (1975), with his former pupil Claudio Abbado conducting the Vienna Philharmonic; his Mozart recordings often carried improvisations of his own. His students included Martha Argerich, who called him her most important influence, and Abbado himself. Philips included him in its Great Pianists of the 20th Century series in 1999.

The jazz side was never a late hobby. From the 1950s on he cultivated a serious interest in the music, and in June 1956 he played two weeks at Birdland in New York. John Hammond produced the recordings, made on June 28 and 29 with a septet of Idrees Sulieman (trumpet), Jimmy Cleveland (trombone), Phil Woods (alto saxophone), Seldon Powell (tenor saxophone), Aaron Bell (bass) and Nick Stabulas (drums). They were issued as Friedrich Gulda at Birdland (RCA Victor, 1957) and A Man of Letters (Decca). He is also documented at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival. Back in Europe he led workshop bands and recorded for Columbia: the Jazz Workshop concert at the 1962 Ruhrfestspiele with Herb Geller, Toots Thielemans and Hans Koller, Music for Piano and Band (recorded September 28 to 30, 1962 in Saarbrücken), and From Vienna with Jazz (Columbia, 1964) with his own big band. In April 1964 he recorded the trio album Gulda Jazz in São Paulo, and in 1965 Ineffable: The Unique Jazz Piano of Friedrich Gulda for Columbia, produced by Hammond, with bassist Bob Cranshaw and drummer Albert Heath. He also played baritone saxophone on some of these dates.

In the mid-1960s he built a crossover repertoire for big band and soloists. He founded and led the Eurojazz Orchestra from 1964 to 1966. His Music for 4 Soloists and Band No. 1, composed in 1964 and premiered in Munich on September 9, 1965, was written for piano, trombone, trumpet and baritone saxophone, and the recording features J.J. Johnson, Freddie Hubbard and Sahib Shihab beside Gulda; the credited band includes Kenny Wheeler, Ron Carter, Mel Lewis and Herb Geller. Johnson spent time in Vienna in 1965 recording his Eurosuite with Gulda's orchestra, and the album Eurosuite / Variations (Preiser) pairs it with Gulda's Variations for Two Pianos and Band, on which Zawinul plays as a guest. In 1966 Gulda organized the International Competition for Modern Jazz in Vienna; the bassist George Mraz was among the entrants. In 1968 he founded the International Musikforum at Ossiach, a school for students who wanted to learn improvisation.

From the late 1960s he recorded jazz and open improvisation at MPS in the Black Forest with the producer Hans Georg Brunner-Schwer: the solo The Air from Other Planets (February 1969), the trio set As You Like It (1970, with bassist Johann Anton Rettenbacher and drummer Klaus Weiss), It's All One, The Long Road to Freedom (1971), whose "Variations on 'Light My Fire'" turned the Doors song into a piano piece, and Fata Morgana, recorded live at the Domicile in Munich in April 1971. Under the pseudonym Albert Golowin he also recorded Viennese-dialect songs, and critics were fooled for years about who he was. In 1972 to 1978 he played free improvised music with Paul and Limpe Fuchs in the trio Anima, and later as a duo with his partner, the singer and percussionist Ursula Anders. It's Up to You (Preiser, 1974) brought in Albert Mangelsdorff and Barre Phillips, and Nachricht vom Lande (1976), recorded live at Schloss Moosham in Salzburg province, featured Gulda on clavichord and piano with Cecil Taylor, Phillips, John Surman and Stu Martin. At the 1979 Salzburg Weltmusiktage he recorded Tales of World Music, which has one track with Dizzy Gillespie.

In 1982 he teamed up with Chick Corea for The Meeting, a live two-piano concert recorded at the Munich Piano Summer on June 27, 1982 and released by Philips, and the two later recorded Mozart's Concerto for Two Pianos with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and the Concertgebouw Orchestra (Teldec, 1984). His Concerto for Myself, scored for piano, electric bass, drums and symphony orchestra, premiered in Munich on March 9, 1988 with Gulda as soloist and conductor. In May 1988 he recorded Music for Two Pianos in Cologne with Zawinul and the WDR Big Band. That same year he cancelled a Salzburg Festival appearance after festival officials objected to Zawinul on the program. The organist Barbara Dennerlein played on his Mozart No End and the Paradise Band (Sony Classical, 1991). He also wrote a Concerto for Cello and Wind Orchestra, written for the cellist Heinrich Schiff.

Gulda cultivated a deliberately provocative image, and the press called him the "terrorist pianist." In 1969 he accepted the Beethoven Ring of the Vienna Music Academy and then handed it back, and he refused to announce his programs in advance. In 1999 he announced his own death in a press release, so that a concert at the Vienna Konzerthaus could be billed as a resurrection party. He passed away from heart failure at his home at Weissenbach am Attersee on January 27, 2000, Mozart's birthday, a date he had said he wanted. He left instructions that there be no obituary, and he is buried at Steinbach am Attersee. He was married twice, to the actress Paola Loew (1956 to 1966) and to Yuko Wakiyama (1967 to 1973); his sons Paul and Rico both became pianists. His honors included the Austrian Cross of Honour for Science and Art (1959) and the Honorary Ring of the City of Vienna (1989).

Gulda was a classical pianist of the first rank who insisted on being taken seriously as a jazz player as well, and the jazz side was documented in public from Birdland in 1956 to the Cologne concerts with Joe Zawinul in 1988. His classical playing was exact, rhythmically sharp and unsentimental, which is the same quality that makes his jazz piano swing in a clean, driving, bop-rooted way on records such as At Birdland and Ineffable. He said he valued jazz for its rhythmic drive and its element of risk, in contrast to the polished academic approach he had been taught. His improvising ranged from straight-ahead swing and bop standards through the rock-flavored trio recordings of 1970, such as his version of "Light My Fire," to free improvisation on electrically amplified clavichord with Cecil Taylor, Albert Mangelsdorff, Barre Phillips and John Surman. He worked in the third-stream tradition of writing for jazz soloists and a large band, and Concerto for Myself carried that idea into the concerto form. Some classical critics were slow to accept the crossings, and his stage conduct, including programs that changed on the night, kept the argument alive. Chick Corea and Zawinul both recorded with him as partners.