With Joseph Villa, any notion of controversy gives way to a more singular and tragic state of neglect, of critical indifference beyond a dedicated band of enthusiasts. Villa was not a pianist to provoke wild disagreement and conflicting assessment. He was considered – when he was considered at all – only by a small coterie of admirers, who attended and vociferously applauded his pitifully small number of engagements. You are left to wonder how it is possible for a pianist of such stature and vision to remain largely unrecognised. Even with the support and admiration of artists of the calibre of Claudio Arrau, Arthur Rubinstein and Alicia de Larrocha, Villa remained unknown to a wide public. And it is when you listen to his surprisingly large number of mostly unofficial recordings, thankfully now available to hear online, that this sense of omission becomes overwhelming.

Was Villa career-shy, disinclined to seek out the right contacts and connections, to make the necessary telephone calls, to move smoothly along the corridors of power, to accept and embrace a commercial world at the heart of the music scene? Those who were close to him will doubtless have answers, but for the rest of us there remains a bleak conundrum. Here, after all, was one of the greatest American pianists, one, while wholly individual, to rank with William Kapell, Leon Fleisher, Byron Janis and the early Van Cliburn. He died at the age of 46 at the height of his powers.

Joseph Villa studied with the American pianist Sascha Gorodnitzki, whose style of teaching was described as supportive and intimidating. Gorodnitzki taught a wide variety of pianists, many of whom went on to have successful and sustained careers. But such a list would not include any mention of Joseph Villa, who, unlike many of his fellow students, failed to emerge into the limelight.

And so to the recordings, both live and studio. Villa’s repertoire ranged far and wide, but given his red-blooded virtuosity and fullness of expression it is hardly surprising that he specialised in the Romantics, primarily in Liszt. Villa’s technical command and effulgent sonority, radiating warmth and, in Liszt’s own terms, breathing ‘the breath of life’, found an ideal outlet in Liszt’s rhetoric, never more so than in the re-creations and reflections of a devout faith, in works such as the two St Francis Legends and in the ‘Invocation’ and ‘Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude’ from the Harmonies poétiques et religieuses. It is hardly excessive to say that Villa’s playing of such music mirrors a sense of otherness, above and beyond pianistic glory. Perhaps conscious of the world of retribution, of a price paid for indulgence and extravagance, he makes something truly formidable of the Don Juan Fantasy, maintaining yet soaring far above the image of Liszt the virtuoso. His way with the Second Ballade, too, has a visceral impact, the opening left-hand uproar storming and swelling in intimidating evocation. In the second subject there is a special awareness of Liszt the storyteller, and in the glow of Villa’s cantabile in the closing theme, a rich and glorious easing of the preceding drama. He makes you recall Sacheverell Sitwell’s poetic description of music that, unlike the Ballades of Chopin, is more concerned with ‘great happenings on an epic scale, barbarian invasions, cities in flames – tragedies of public, rather than private, import’.

Yet Villa is no less responsive to the intimate than to the outsize, to miniatures such as the D flat major Consolation, the Valse-impromptu and, perhaps most of all, the hallucinatory and prophetic world of the second Valse oubliée. And then there is the whole of the Suisse book of Années de pèlerinage. Calm and measured in the opening tribute to William Tell, Switzerland’s national hero, with Alpine horns echoing across the mountains, in ‘Orage’ his playing is of a nerve-shredding force and fury. In extreme contrast there is poetic delicacy in ‘Au lac de Wallenstadt’, where Marie d’Agoult, Liszt’s mistress of the moment, heard ‘a melancholy harmony, imitative of the sigh of waves and the cadence of oars’, and in ‘Pastorale’, Liszt’s playful reworking of the theme from the finale of Beethoven’s Pastoral Piano Sonata, Op 28. Villa’s affection, too, in ‘Les cloches de Genève’ conveys all of Liszt’s distant chimes and soaring ecstasy even when set in a Calvinist city that expressed disapproval of Liszt’s open liaison with a married woman. Few pianists have sustained the massive spans of ‘Vallée d’Obermann’, the nodal heart of this collection, or captured more of its Byronic gloom.

Liszt may have been at the centre of Villa’s repertoire, but he was scarcely less in thrall to Schumann, to the contrasting characters of Eusebius and Florestan that lie at the heart of the contradictions in the composer’s fraught, fluctuating and ultimately tragic nature. He has all of the Humoreske’s alternations of brio and introspection at his fingertips, is fearless in the octave whirl at the centre of the Intermezzo from the ‘Einfach und zart’ third movement, while in the Études symphoniques he is notably responsive to the music’s symphonic quality and includes all the repeats (unlike Géza Anda, who once told me they made the piece become elephantine). Villa omits the extra variations, yet just as you feel he is a pianist born to play Liszt, he makes you believe that he is also born for Schumann.

Chopin is less generously represented, but in a sizeable selection of Mazurkas – Chopin’s confessional diary and his most subtle challenge – he erases the notion that only pianists of Slavic origin can unlock their secrets. I would also count the Second Piano Concerto among Villa’s finest offerings. Here he makes you conscious of the wide gulf between the personalities of Chopin and Liszt. There is nobility, restraint and a refusal to succumb to a more sentimental or decorative view. Chopin may have composed his Concerto to display his novel pianistic skills to an astonished audience in Vienna, but you could never accuse him of the relatively empty ‘chandelier glitter’ of other fashionable pianist-composers of the time. Villa’s musical authority not surprisingly won the admiration of Arthur Rubinstein, a pianist who fought for many years to erase the image of Chopin as a salon composer.

If there is too little Bach, Beethoven, Mozart or Schubert, and – returning to Villa’s beloved Romantics – no Liszt Sonata, Chopin Ballades, Scherzos or sonatas, we must remain grateful for recordings that also include magical Scriabin, Borodin (the charming A flat major Scherzo) and a brief visit to Spain in Falla’s ‘Danza de la molinera’ and Granados’s ‘Quejas, o La maja y el ruiseñor’ – all this and so much more.

Villa was happy to share his immense gifts with colleagues: he was a supreme chamber-music player and a favourite partner of artists of the stature of Jesse Norman and Joseph Fuchs. Yet perhaps reassuringly – and despite having run the risk of what may well seem uncritical adulation – there are many examples of a fallibility that reveals that Villa was human after all. There is an uncomfortable Schumann Carnaval that finds him impatient with the composer’s parade of ballroom characters. Here, for once, he is, like Shakespeare’s Richard III, ‘not in the giving vein’. His way, too, with Rachmaninov’s Second Sonata is such a virtuoso maelstrom that it makes you wonder what demons lurked inside his outwardly genial nature – a performance not for the faint-hearted.

Yet if asked where to turn for the ultimate glory in Villa’s playing, though hard-pressed, I would opt for Liszt’s ‘Invocation’, where he delivers the glory of the music to an unforgettable degree, and most of all for Liszt’s transcription of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. This is surely Villa’s ultimate triumph, confirming Donald Tovey’s view that these arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies prove that ‘Liszt was by far the most wonderful interpreter of orchestral scores on the pianoforte the world is ever likely to see’.

Once more, the sense of a glorious gift tragically cut short is ever-present. More positively, Villa’s recordings, available on YouTube, offer rich compensation. As one of his admirers, himself among the world’s leading pianists, so succinctly put it, ‘Joseph Villa was not a big star, merely a magnificent pianist’. IP

This feature originally appeared in the SPRING 2025 issue of International Piano