"There’s no more room left for the “personal point of view”, for humanistic faith. In whatever place were things handled by men, feelings and death, now a blazon bursts out: colour and design, powerful and meaningful signs”. Such an assertion, stated by Giorgio Manganelli with reference to the tensions in Italian painting between the two world wars, might also fit to describe Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s pianism (1920-1995). An awkwardness in his music making has often been remarked - an awkwardness meant as rigorous control of sound, cast to an ideal perfection which was a result, for instance, of his passionate concern for the mechanics of the instrument - a Steinway which was following him everywhere, as well as his faithful piano tuner, Tallone, indispensable to set his “sound prodigy”. Michelangeli’s art has been referred to as “severe and cerebral, ascetic and lyrical”, just to quote De Chirico’s famous words about metaphysics; it was an art cast towards an ideal of perfection but cultivated in his lonely, discreet personality, which would therefore disregard the society life and the star-system. Michelangeli had grown up between the two world wars: it was a very particular historical and aesthetic period, characterized by the attempt to work out a synthesis between the weight of tradition and the experimentation of new tendencies. Such in a perspective, Michelangeli’s personality, so deeply concerned in the development of an ideal of absolute sound, recalls the aesthetic research carried out by Carlo Emilio Gadda in literature and Giorgio De Chirico - and by the circle of metaphysic painters - in painting. A comparison even stricter if another aspect, a determining element of Michelangeli’s personality, is taken into consideration, the repetitiveness of is repertory - a feature often discussed, by the way. During his career, Michelangeli has always been extremely selective in his choice of programs, and even if friends and pupils witness of the wide range of his musical readings, the pieces he would finally perform were always a very restricted number. Such an attitude is also a result of his research for perfection that he also carried out in the attention for sound, its extreme consequence being the frequent re-proposition of some pieces in the attempt of catching every possible nuance. Each performance of the same piece - as the many live recordings stand to prove, for our good luck - is only apparently equal to another, but, actually, each one reveals its own autonomy, for the subtle and sometime imperceptible variants of sound to its slightest gradation. |
