Great Performers: Earl Wild

At eleven Wild began working with his first major teacher, Selmar Janson, who exposed his young student to a broad range of Romantic transcriptions and works by lesser-known 19th-century composers, launching Wild's lifelong curiosity and advocacy on behalf of the piano repertoire's neglected corners. By his teens, Wild already was earning a living from music. He composed and arranged on a freelance basis, and often could be found playing piano and celesta parts in Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra concerts.

Barely out of his teens, Wild came to New York and got a full time job as a staff pianist at the NBC Radio Network, where he played weekly chamber concerts, accompanied singers, performed solos, and covered keyboard solos in the NBC Symphony. His talents caught the ear of the orchestra's legendary conductor Arturo Toscanini, who selected Wild to be the soloist in his 1942 broadcast performance of Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue'. In 1939 he became the first American pianist to broadcast a recital over a new invention called television, and later worked for the ABC television network.

At the same time, Wild continued to develop his artistry, drawing inspiration from pianists such as Sergei Rachmaninoff, Josef Hofmann and the young Vladimir Horowitz, who represented what he later called an era of "big piano playing". The legendary Dutch virtuoso and Busoni pupil Egon Petri further expanded Wild's tonal palette and guided his innate facility towards a true virtuoso technique characterized by elegance, style and no apparent effort, with nothing forced.

Wild's career gained considerable visibility in the 1960s when the romantic revival held sway. His 1965 Rachmaninoff concerto cycle with Jascha Horenstein remains a sonic and interpretive point of reference to this day, as do his Gershwin collaborations with Arthur Fiedler. At seventy, Wild embarked on an ambitious Liszt cycle in concert and on disc. At eighty, Wild entered his most artistically fruitful decade, and produced some of his finest playing on disc, including inspired versions of the Barber Sonata, the Brahms F Minor Sonata and the Chopin Nocturnes. In conversation, the elder Wild held no respect for sacred musical cows nor received opinion, although one suspects that he enjoyed being the provocateur (his autobiography is a gossip maven's treasure trove). Up until the end, Wild remained independent-minded, true to himself, yet always practical and consummately professional: in other words, an American success story.