Reluctant Master

"Without any doubt the most powerful pianistic technique in the world today!" raved the Paris-Presse. Rubinstein? Horowitz? No--and to most the name on the billboards meant nothing. But the audience that packed into Paris' Theatre des Champs-Elysees included, as one observer put it, "more pianists per square foot than ever before assembled." For among these professionals, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli has long been recognized as one of the world's best--if least known--pianists.

A strapping, hamhanded man with slicked-back hair and brooding mustache, Michelangeli ambled onstage with the baleful nonchalance of a boxer bent on mayhem. Once he settled at the keyboard, his touch was featherweight light, his attack crisp and restrained through Debussy's liquid Images and Beethoven's soaring Sonata in C Major (Opus 2, No. 3). After two encores and a dozen curtain calls, he unconcernedly ambled offstage to a standing ovation. Typically, following his triumph, he repaired last week to the regenerative quietude of a month-long teaching engagement at Siena's Accademia Musicale Chigiana. Untypically, he will return in August to meet a full schedule of performances on the summer music-festival circuit.

Detestable World. Michelangeli's concert career has been a case of separation with visiting rights. For the better part of the past 15 years, he performed only when the mood and the need for money was upon him. Now, at 45, like an old lover in pursuit of a forgotten love, he has returned full time to the concert stage.

Son of a music teacher and sometime composer, Michelangeli was a child prodigy who taught at Bologna's conservatory when he was just 16, was heralded as "the new Liszt" at 19. After serving in the Italian air force during World War II, he returned to wage his own private war on the concert circuit, soon became known as "the Callas of the piano" for such transgressions as walking out on recording sessions and playing before a white-tie audience with his overcoat on. Performing, he decided, was "a detestable world of managers and journalists, of tricks and schemes in which the only nobility rests in music."

Withdrawing to a mansion in Arezzo with his pianist wife, he established a renowned year-round school for some 40 hand-picked students, including Argentina's Martha Argerich, who this year won Poland's prestigious International Chopin Piano Competition (TIME, March 26). More like a Renaissance patron than a schoolmaster, Michelangeli also instructed his students in the selection of fine wines and gourmet foods ("I cannot teach if I cannot also teach the art of living and cooking").

He refused to accept fees from his students, subsisted by playing concerts in Italy for the top fee of $3,200 per performance.

Young Pianos. A perfectionist with a penchant for turtleneck pullovers and gold-tipped Turkish cigarettes, Michelangeli has made only a few recordings because he has "never quite been satisfied with the quality of the sound." On tour he travels with his own Steinway ("Can you imagine Oistrakh playing with Stern's violin?") and personal piano tuner, 71-year-old Cesare Augustus Tallone. With a surgeon's knowledge of the piano's inner workings, Michelangeli treats his Steinway like a high-strung child, recently relinquished it to be overhauled, explaining: "It's still too young and hasn't been broken in yet." For the Paris concert, Tallone scoured the city for days to find a substitute piano, then spent 20 hours preparing it for the master's hands--and feet. "The pedals are like my lungs," explains Michelangeli. "Three notes with the right pedal work can become another world."

Unlike the pianists who open doors with their elbows, Michelangeli is not one to pamper his "strangler's hands." He is an avid skier, mountain climber and high-speed sports-car enthusiast (as a prewar professional driver, he once won the Mille Miglia). As a result he cannot find an insurance company that will insure his hands. Or his future. Even his manager, marveling at Michelangeli's "sudden return to the world," openly wonders: "How long will it continue?" Hopefully until next January, when the reluctant master is scheduled to perform in the U.S. for the first time in 17 years.

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