Bernard Peiffer (pronounced "pay-FAIR") was born on October 23, 1922, in Épinal, in the Vosges in north-eastern France. He was a pianist, composer and teacher who made his name in Paris, Nice and Monte Carlo in the 1940s and early 1950s and spent the last twenty-two years of his life in Philadelphia. His father, a former army man, played the violin and loved chamber music, and an uncle, Georges Peiffer, was a composer and church organist. He began piano and harmony at nine with Pierre Maire, a pupil of Nadia Boulanger, and astonished older students by playing back long stretches of classical pieces by ear. He went on studying through his teens at the École Normale in Paris, the Marseille Conservatoire and the Paris Conservatoire, where he won the first prize in piano.

Drawn to the freedom of improvising and to the playing of Fats Waller and Art Tatum, he made his professional debut in 1943, at twenty, with the alto saxophonist André Ekyan, and soon afterwards was working with Django Reinhardt at the Bœuf sur le Toit in Paris; he later credited Reinhardt with teaching him the music business. After he saw a friend shot by the Gestapo in a Paris street he joined the Resistance, was captured, and spent more than a year in prison. Out of the army in 1946, he returned to music with concerts for the Hot Club de France at the Salle Pleyel, picked up again with Reinhardt, and toured with Hubert Rostaing and with Jacques Hélian's orchestra.

In February 1948 he played at the festival in Nice, often described as the first jazz festival, and his playing so impressed the Ellington alumnus Rex Stewart that Stewart hired him for a tour and recordings. Records for the Swing and Blue Star labels followed: behind the tenor saxophonist Don Byas and the trumpeter Bill Coleman in January 1949, with the saxophonist James Moody in July 1949, and with the alto saxophonist Hubert Fol's Be-Bop Minstrels and the drummer Kenny Clarke in October 1949, alongside sides under his own name. By 1949 he was a national name. He won a Jazz Hot magazine prize, led a quintet at the Club Saint-Germain and at the Ringside, wrote music for films, including Jacques Becker's Rendez-vous de juillet (1949) and Jean-Pierre Melville's Quand tu liras cette lettre (1953), and in 1953 won the Grand Prix du Disque, a prize French Wikipedia credits to the Académie Charles-Cros. Visiting Americans heard him in the clubs of Paris, Monte Carlo and Nice, among them Oscar Peterson, Lionel Hampton and Hazel Scott, and the American critic Barry Ulanov wrote in Metronome in 1953 that nobody he had heard matched Peiffer's skills as an improviser or his knowledge of the instrument.

On December 20, 1954, he left France for the United States and settled in Philadelphia, where his wife Corine and their baby daughter Rebecca soon joined him. His American career began well: he played at Carnegie Hall, Birdland, the Composer Room, the Academy of Music and the Newport Festival, appeared on television and radio, and made about seven albums, among them Bernie's Tunes for EmArcy, recorded in New York in May 1956 with the guitarist Joe Puma, the bassists Oscar Pettiford and Chuck Andrus, and the drummer Ed Thigpen. The critic Leonard Feather wrote that he could not recall a jazz pianist other than Art Tatum blessed with such mastery. Against that stood poor management and promotion, long gaps in his work and trouble with record companies. The death of his daughter Pascale, born in 1956, at the age of two lies behind his piece "Poem for a Lonely Child"; his son Stephan was born in 1962.

His last commercially issued album appeared in 1965. After kidney surgery at the end of that decade he performed less and taught more, mostly in the Philadelphia area, leading a trio with the bassist Al Stauffer and, in different years, the drummers Jim Paxson and Billy Jones, giving college concerts, and travelling to Los Angeles for engagements at Donte's in September 1970. In 1974 he played the solo piano night of the Newport-New York Festival at Carnegie Hall. He kept teaching and performing around Philadelphia until his kidney trouble worsened, and he passed away on September 7, 1976, at the age of 53. His students included Uri Caine, Annie Gosfield, Sumi Tonooka, Tom Lawton and Don Glanden. Glanden and Stephan Peiffer later assembled about sixty-seven reels of solo, duo and trio tapes made around Philadelphia between 1970 and 1975 into the solo album Formidable...! (2005).

His claim to be counted among French jazz musicians rests on his birth in Épinal and on the eleven years from his 1943 debut to his departure in 1954, when his reputation was made in Paris and on the Riviera; the American half of his career, from 1954 to 1976, was spent in Philadelphia.

Peiffer came to jazz from a full classical training, and the two sides stayed visible: he improvised a prelude and fugue on George Shearing's "Lullaby of Birdland" as a closing number at concerts, and recorded it in 1965 beside a "Hommage à J.S. Bach". He was shaped by Fats Waller and Art Tatum, and critics kept returning to Tatum when they described his speed and command of the keyboard; the tribute piece "Requiem (For Art Tatum)" is on The Astounding Bernard Peiffer (1958). His composition "Black Moon", on Bernie's Tunes, is built on Schoenberg's twelve-tone system, which Don Glanden describes as one of the first introductions of atonal improvisation to a jazz audience. Victor Schermer, reviewing the solo tapes, found his playing transparent in its articulation of ideas and impossible to pin to one label. Leonard Feather, Barry Ulanov, Nat Hentoff and Burt Korall all wrote about him in notes or reviews. As a teacher in Philadelphia he passed these habits on to Uri Caine and other pianists.