Biography (read more)
Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli was born on 5 January 1920 near Brescia. His father, a count and composer, gave him his first instruction; he studied the violin at the Venturi Institute before turning to the piano under Paolo Chimeri, took private lessons in Milan with Giovanni Anfossi from the age of nine, entered the Milan Conservatory at ten and graduated with honours at fourteen. His parents would have preferred him to study medicine.
He won first prize at the Geneva International Music Competition in 1939, on which occasion Alfred Cortot called him a new Liszt, and was subsequently appointed to teach at the Martini Conservatory in Bologna. The war interrupted everything: he was drafted into the Italian air force and resumed his career only after 1945. He made his Carnegie Hall orchestral debut in November 1948 in Schumann’s concerto with the New York Philharmonic under Dimitri Mitropoulos, and a solo recital debut there in January 1949. He married the pianist Giulia Linda Guidetti on 20 September 1943; they separated in 1970, after which he lived in Switzerland and refused to perform in Italy for over a decade. A ruptured abdominal aneurysm during a Bordeaux concert in 1988 required seven hours of surgery, but he returned to play Mozart concertos in 1989 and 1990. His last public performance was in Hamburg on 7 May 1993, and he died at Lugano on 12 June 1995.
Michelangeli recorded chiefly for Deutsche Grammophon between 1957 and 1990, and his Ravel, Debussy, Chopin, Schumann, Beethoven and Mozart make up most of what survives; Gaspard de la nuit, the Chopin Mazurkas and Second Sonata, and the Beethoven concertos are the recordings most often cited. Sergiu Celibidache said he makes colours and is a conductor; David Dubal thought him at his finest in early Beethoven and demonic in the Bach-Busoni Chaconne and the Brahms Paganini Variations, and less secure in Chopin.
He was also a teacher of consequence, with Maurizio Pollini, Martha Argerich and Ivan Moravec among his pupils, and taught in Venice, Berlin, Geneva, Budapest, Arezzo from 1952 to 1964, Moncalieri, Siena and Lugano. His reputation for cancelled concerts and for obsessive attention to the mechanics of the instrument is inseparable from the rest; The New York Times described him as perhaps the most reclusive, enigmatic and obsessive of the legendary pianists, and the result is a small discography for a career of more than fifty years.
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