A recent discussion with a pianist colleague broached the topic of ‘process pianists’ versus ‘product pianists’. Process pianists thrive on spontaneity, audience contact, acoustics, the instrument itself, and just simply being in the moment. Two antipodal process pianists, Vladimir Horowitz and Rudolf Serkin, never played twice the same way, nor do Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim, Alicia de Larrocha, Evgeny Kissin, and Frederic Rzewski today. Process pianists, to be sure, are often perfectionists, but they show up differently from product pianists. Product pianists think twice before moving, so to speak, and nearly nothing in their art happens overnight. To them, process usually occurs prior to rather than during concert time. Sergey Rachmaninov, Rosalyn Tureck and Dinu Lipatti typify product pianists, and, more recently, Krystian Zimerman, and Piotr Anderszewski, both of whom emulate the late Glenn Gould’s painstaking approach to recording.

Whether or not Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was the 20th century’s ultimate product pianist, his legendary and enigmatic standing in the international classical music arena continues to make good copy. In many respects, he fuelled the flames of mystery that surrounded him. Like Gould, Horowitz, Argerich, and Richter, Michelangeli harboured a reclusive streak, did not enjoy the most robust health, and was prone to cancel engagements, or even whole tours, at the last minute. One wonders if he cancelled more concerts than he actually played. He proved equally parsimonious with the works he chose to perform in public, and it’s safe to say that Michelangeli had the smallest active repertoire of any great pianist. (In private, however, his students and colleagues attested to the enormous amount of music he knew.)

According to his wife’s memoirs, Michelangeli likened playing piano to being a waiter. ‘Waiters,’ he said, ‘carry trays full of glasses with two hands and all goes well. But a pebble is enough to make them trip and cause everything to drop.’ The ‘pebble’ in question was often the piano itself. Like the princess distracted by the small pea buried under 14 mattresses, Michelangeli’s hypersensitive fingers and exacting ears could ascertain the tiniest imperfections in a piano’s action, tuning, or voicing. ‘No piano in the world,’ he supposedly claimed, ‘is good enough for Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit.’ In later years he travelled with his own Steinway Models C and D, sometimes using both pianos in the same recital. His friend and frequent collaborator, conductor Sergiu Celibidache, witnessed four technicians ‘trying for a whole day to make his instrument playable for his ear, and his consciousness’.

Although he was playing piano in public by the age of seven, Michelangeli claimed not to have liked the instrument, finding it ‘far too percussive’. He recalled his childhood violin and organ studies in a 1977 New York Times article, saying how ‘out of these studies, I found my own way of playing the piano. I discovered that the sounds made by the organ and the violin could be translated into pianistic terms. If you speak of my tone, then you must think not of the piano but a combination of the violin and the organ.’ A shoulder ailment, however, forced him to give up the violin and concentrate on the piano. The boy progressed rapidly. During his mid-teens Michelangeli introduced Schoenberg’s piano music to Italian audiences. He programmed demanding fare like Gaspard de la nuit, Brahms’s Paganini Variations, Bach-Busoni’s Chaconne, Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto and Op 111 Sonata, the Schumann and Grieg concertos, plus Chopin’s B flat minor Scherzo: all works that would remain his lifelong repertoire fixtures. He also spent a year at the Laverna monastery, but plans to become a Franciscan brother fell through.

In 1938 Michelangeli entered the second Eugene Ysaÿe International Music Contest in Brussels, where Emil Gilels won first prize. Michelangeli was placed seventh, but his special qualities did not go unnoticed. ‘The martial passages [of his Grieg Concerto] were handled in a marked manner, this affirming his transcendent as well as transparent technique, especially in the rhythm,’ wrote the music critic from Le Nationale (May 30, 1938). The next year Michelangeli won first prize at the Geneva International Competition, where Ignacy Jan Paderewski chaired the jury. One of the jurors, Alfred Cortot, crowned Michelangeli ‘a new Liszt’. An incomplete recording of that composer’s E flat Concerto survives from the occasion, and Michelangeli’s blazing, yet impeccably poised virtuosity justifies Cortot’s praise.

The pianist’s first commercial recordings soon followed, and already he sounded like Michelangeli. The sheer beauty and control of sound he brought to his 1941 HMV Beethoven Op 2 No 3 Sonata transcends the work’s purely pyrotechnical considerations. In the slow movement of Bach’s Italian Concerto, the fullness of tone and specificity of shape make an indelible impression, as they also do in his Scarlatti playing. Pianist and writer John Bell Young aptly defined the components of Michelangeli’s imposingly groomed surface style, writing that ‘the cumulative power of his rhythm relies heavily on motivic definition and micro-dynamics, where even the smallest metrical (and motivic) units give way to discreet affective shading; to ignore this for a theory that a beautiful sound alone can hold a work together is nothing if not unintelligible’.

Michelangeli’s technical mastery has rarely, if ever, been questioned, yet certain aspects of his musicianship still arouse dispute. Even his friend and colleague Sviatoslav Richter (no stranger to controversy himself!) wrote that ‘[Michelangeli’s] fanaticism and the extreme instrumental standards he sets for himself prevent his imagination from taking flight, and stop him from expressing any real love for the work he’s performing so impeccably.’ ‘He really is a modern pianist who tries to be Romantic, but he simply does not feel Romanticism,’ wrote Harold Schonberg in The New York Times. ‘All his Romantic devices sound arbitrarily superimposed, and, as such, forced and artificial. In Michelangeli’s playing there was no consecutive sweep. Lines were constantly being broken, and both the (Beethoven Op 111) C minor and the (Chopin) B flat minor Scherzo came out as a collection of details. The piano itself, and certain pianistic devices, appeared more important than the consecutive flow of the music.’ Harris Goldsmith described ‘the patiently coaxed detail and ultraclarity of partwriting’ in a DG recording of Beethoven’s Op 7 Sonata, where ‘inner lines emerge from the fabric with a spatial immediacy, the result of endless hours of drudgery and experimentation. Yet,’ he went on to ask, ‘is it really desirable for each strand of sound to come forth in glorious technicolour? Must every detail unsubtly pounce upon the unsuspecting listener like a fierce panther upon its prey?’

Another bone of contention concerned Michelangeli’s frequent non-synchronisation of the hands – a trait common to Romantic pianists (in the same way today’s period-instrument ensembles are fond of dynamic swells), but taboo among modern keyboard practitioners. His pupil, Renato Premezzi, suggested that Michelangeli used the device for structural and expressive ends, allowing the bass to set up and enhance the treble, adding dimension to the texture and sonority. Sometimes the effect is disconcerting, but when it works, it works beautifully, as in his late recording of the Mozart C major Concerto, K415. In the Andante, Michelangeli offsets the right hand cantilena against the left-hand accompaniment to ravishing effect, suggesting two distinct pianos in different acoustic spaces. His earlier 1953 performance (EMI), by contrast, is polished, yet relatively conventional. Astute listeners may also catch the pianist’s idiosyncratic textual emendations: filled-in bass octaves in Schumann’s Carnaval and a coda of his own making in Clementi’s Sonata Op 12 No 1. No 20th century pianist was more closely identified with Brahms’s Paganini Variations, yet Michelangeli had no qualms about regrouping Brahms’s own sequence, omitting a variation or two, making a cut in Book One’s finale or rewriting a tricky rhythmic figure in order to ensure absolute note perfection.

No musical compromises, however, mark the frightening poise of Michelangeli’s peerless way with Schumann’s Faschingsschwank aus Wien, or the hair-trigger scintillation that breathes fire and ice in Rachmaninov’s G minor Concerto. Some will find it easier than others to reconcile his command and authority with his sectionalised, studied accounts of Chopin’s First Ballade and Second Scherzo. With the French Impressionists, he set Empyrean standards. His classic 1957 Ravel G major Concerto is a case in point; its seamless, eerily perfect ‘singing sword’ trills in the first movement proving that one can indeed ‘bend’ notes on a piano. Two years later, a BBC studio Gaspard honours Ravel’s precise dynamic, pedalling, and phrasing directives via inhumanly contoured gradations of touch and tone. Listen to Debussy’s Images on DG, and you’ll understand why Michelangeli regarded the piano pedals as the instrument’s lungs.

Lastly, Michelangeli’s reputation as a teacher plays a major role in his artistic legacy. He taught regularly until the mid-1970s. The late Walter Klein recalled learning a lot concerning touch and the use of the pedal. ‘There are no lessons in the usual sense. A lesson would last an afternoon or a whole morning. I didn’t work technique with him, just expression, phrasing, breathing.’ Other students like Martha Argerich, however, received less attention. On the subject of her former teacher, Argerich told writer Dean Elder, ‘Once he said to David Ruben from Steinway, “Oh, I’ve done a lot for that girl.” And David said, “But Maestro I know that you gave her only four lessons.” And he said, “Yes, but I taught her the music of silence.” It’s all very mysterious.’ 

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