Even as he approaches 80, Earl Wild remains a pianist without pieties, an iconoclast of the keyboard.
He has parlayed his performances of big, splashy 19th Century Romantic works into one of the most remarkable careers in classical music. A throwback to the vanished age of the great showmen-virtuosi of the keyboard, he plays the most demanding repertory with a fire-breathing gusto that makes few concessions to age.
At the same time, his determination to march to the beat of a different drummer makes the white-haired, blue-eyed pianist something of an anomaly in today’s regimented music world.
Although Wild has been cutting back on concerts in recent years, this season he is packing up his Baldwin concert grand and hitting the road for a series of 80th birthday recitals that will include an Allied Arts program at 3 p.m. Nov. 19 at Orchestra Hall. Carnegie Hall will hear the same program on Nov. 27, one day after the pianist’s actual birthday.
In a telephone interview from his home in Columbus, Ohio, Wild says he was initially reluctant to turn this milestone into a big public celebration. “Actually, I just wanted my friends in New York to know it’s my 80th birthday. I would have preferred to just let it go,” he explains. Once the publicity wheels began turning on his behalf, however, that became impossible.
His Chicago program is typical of the recital fare the pianist has been offering his devoted public for years. At the center is Liszt’s “Dante” Sonata, surrounded by Chopin’s “Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise” and Beethoven’s Sonata No. 18 in E-flat. Rounding out the agenda will be Wild’s own transcriptions of Handel’s “Harmonious Blacksmith” and a Rachmaninoff song, along with Pabst’s elaborate paraphrase of themes from Tchaikovsky’s “Sleeping Beauty.”
“I’ve programmed pieces I particularly like, such as the `Sleeping Beauty’ paraphrase, which I have never played in public before. Chicago will be the first time. I’ve always wanted to play it, so I thought I’d do it now before it was too late,” the pianist says.
The knuckle-busting Tchaikovsky-Pabst piece is one of 13 virtuoso piano transcriptions included on Wild’s latest recording, “The Romantic Master,” which Sony Classical is releasing this month in honor of his birthday.
Perhaps no pianist has done more to bring transcriptions–so beloved of pianists of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, so disparaged in modern times–back into the repertory.
Wild was the first pianist ever to play an entire program of them, in Carnegie Hall in 1981, and he taught them to his students at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music in the ’70s and ’80s. He continues to do so at Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, where he serves as visiting professor.
Born in Pittsburgh, Wild was an authentic prodigy who, at the age of four, could reproduce on the piano any music he heard. It was no accident he became one of the foremost Liszt pianists of our day: His teacher, Selmar Jansen, studied with pianists Eugene d’Albert and Xaver Scharwenka, both pupils of Liszt; he also studied with Egon Petri, a pupil of Ferruccio Busoni.
Petri had a profound effect on his playing, he recalled in a 1976 interview with the New York Times. “The first time I heard him play, I was absolutely floored,” Wild said. “He made a crescendo while he was in the middle of a piece by hardly moving a muscle, and it sounded like somebody was shoveling sound onto the audience. He changed my entire approach to the piano. I had played with high fingers before, very clear, but not much body of sound. In one lesson he cured me of that.”
Wild came to maturity during the Depression, when American audiences trusted only pianists with exotic Polish and Russian names, so the possibility of building a career seemed remote. He made ends meet by doing orchestrations; the rest of the time he played anything he could to earn a living.
In 1937 he joined the NBC Symphony as its staff pianist under Arturo Toscanini. Two years later he became the first American pianist to perform on the then-experimental medium of television. In 1942 Toscanini chose him to be soloist in the maestro’s first performance of Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue.” It was Wild’s first as well.
Thanks to the radio broadcast, Wild became a household name–and an instant Gershwin specialist. “The day after, I was an authority on Gershwin. It sort of put the curse on me. It was very difficult to overcome that,” he admits.
But overcome it he did. By the mid-1950s the American pianist had become known as an exponent of Liszt’s piano works. Critics have tried to fathom the reasons behind his success in this repertory, but the best comes from the pianist himself, in an interview he gave David Dubal for the latter’s 1984 book, “Reflections From the Keyboard: The World of the Concert Pianist.”
“When I was young,” said Wild, “I played in many orchestras–cello, bass and later the flute. The experience left me with a wonderful feeling for the orchestra. Now when I play Liszt, I feel the latent orchestral palette in his piano writing. He placed the orchestra in the piano with unimagined ingenuity. . . . It’s that which has always attracted me to Liszt.”
From Liszt, Wild began to delve into the forgotten 19th Century Romantics, bringing back the works of such fabled pianist-composers as Ignace Paderewski, D’Albert and Scharwenka. In fact, his huge repertory shows how timid and lacking in imagination most of today’s pianists are. His discography runs to some 300 works, from Albeniz’s “Triana” to a large chunk of solo Liszt to his own “Variations on a Theme of Stephen Foster (Doo-Dah Variations) for Piano and Orchestra.”
Today Wild admits he cultivated this unusual repertory, in part, out of practical necessity. When he was young, he explains, he avoided the standard literature because that territory was already the preserve of big-name pianists like Rudolf Serkin and Arthur Rubinstein. Sixty years later, what would be the point of his taking up a classic everyone plays, like the Beethoven Fourth Concerto?
“It would be just an ego trip for me to do that,” Wild declares. “I don’t have that kind of ego and I don’t want to get into a contest.”
All his favorite pianists are long-dead ones: Petri, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Josef Hofmann top his list. “When Hofmann was at his best, before he began drinking to excess, he had a clarity and an elegance in his playing, which were very hard to come by,” Wild recalls.
“But Rachmaninoff was the one I most admired, because his recitals were always so well prepared. He played everything as if he wrote it. His sense of rhythm and sound were absolutely unique. Since he was always associated with Romantic music, he felt rather strange playing Beethoven. During one of his rare performances of the Beethoven First Concerto he turned to the orchestra and said, `Gentlemen, since I am not a Beethoven expert, let’s play this piece in tempo!’ “
Wild taught small groups of students at Juilliard for 10 years, until 1987. Then, distressed by the competitiveness of Manhattan’s musical jungle, he fled New York for the comparative tranquillity of Columbus, Ohio. He took a teaching position at Ohio State University, from which he resigned last year.
He says he enjoys his new academic post at Carnegie-Mellon but is interested in working only with students who can demonstrate a degree of individual musical feeling. The idea of turning out yet another correct but faceless automaton or, worse, a whiz-kid who is all personality but no talent, is anathema to him.
Which is why Wild avoids serving on the juries of piano competitions. “They’re awful. So many of the pianists who win I don’t think are even adequate,” he observes dryly. It also helps to explain why he is so picky when auditioning potential students. “I look for any indication of emotion or exaggeration, because then I can work with them. The ones who play so perfectly are such bores, you can’t do anything with them.”
With an outlook such as that, Wild and his new teaching position at Carnegie-Mellon should be a perfect fit. Music department chair Marilyn Taft Thomas evidently agrees. “He is an extraordinary pianist, with a depth of knowledge and artistic experience that will greatly enrich our educational program–a senior statesman of the profession,” she recently said of Wild in an interview with Robert Croan of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Wild says he is gradually tapering off from a schedule that in recent years has included some 35 concerts a year, although he rigorously maintains his practice schedule of five hours a day. After playing his birthday program in New York, he looks forward to making more recordings–the three Brahms piano sonatas and the Chopin Nocturnes–and to taking it easy for a while.
Nevertheless, retirement is not a word that falls trippingly off the tongue of Earl Wild.
“The thing is, playing the piano and being in music keep you alive,” he says, cheerfully. “This way I still like what I do and I have fun with it. I’d rather work a little harder and live a little longer. Otherwise, you buy a pair of checkered pants, go to Florida and drop dead!”
A WILD CD SAMPLING
Here, culled from Earl Wild’s immense discography, are some recommended recordings (all are CDs):
Rachmaninoff: Piano Sonata No. 2; 10 Preludes, Opus 23; 8 Preludes, Opus 32. Chesky 114.
Chopin: Ballades and Scherzos. Chesky 44.
The Art of the Transcription: Live From Carnegie Hall. Works by Gluck-Sgambati, Wagner-Moszkowski, Rossini-Thalberg, Mendelssohn-Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky-Wild, Strauss-Schulz-Evler and others. Audiofon 72008-2, 2 CDs.
Copland and Menotti: Piano Concertos. Symphony of the Air, Aaron Copland and Jorge Mester, conductors. Vanguard Classics 4029.
The Demonic Liszt. Mephisto Waltz, Waltzes from Faust, Reminiscences of Don Juan, Gnomenreigen, other works. Vanguard Classics 4035.
The Virtuoso Piano. Works by Rossini-Herz, Donizetti-Thalberg, Strauss-Godowsky, Hummel, Anton Rubinstein and Paderewski. Vanguard Classics 4033.
Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue, Concerto in F, I Got Rhythm Variations (with An American in Paris). Boston Pops Orchestra, Arthur Fiedler, conductor. RCA Victor Gold Seal 6519-2.
Wild: Variations on a Theme of Stephen Foster, for Piano and Orchestra (with Gershwin Piano Concerto). Des Moines Symphony, Joseph Giunta, conductor. Chesky 98.
