Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli at the piano, Bolzano, December 1960. Arnoldo Mondadori Editore, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain).
Zurich, 1986. On the day of the recital, fresh air is let into the hall. It seems a courtesy to the audience, and yet it has consequences: the new air changes the temperature and the humidity, the steel strings and the wood of the soundboard settle, the tuning shifts by that small amount an ordinary ear does not register. Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli registers it, and refuses to continue the concert. The news agencies will tell the story nine years later, in the obituaries, among the episodes that defined him.
To understand what lay behind it we need a document from twenty years earlier. In July 1965 Time devotes an article to him and follows him on tour. Michelangeli travels with his Steinway and his technician, Cesare Augusto Tallone, himself a piano builder. In Paris, the magazine reports, for the concert at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées Tallone spends twenty hours on the substitute piano before the evening can begin. Of his own Steinway Michelangeli says it is still too young and has not been tamed. Then he utters the sentence that explains everything else: the pedals are like his lungs, and three notes with the right work of the right pedal can become another world. In the same article he describes the world of concerts as a detestable one of impresarios and journalists, of tricks and manoeuvres. The piano is the only thing in that world he can control, and he controls it down to the last screw.
For almost all pianists the instrument is a starting condition, good or bad, to be reckoned with. For Michelangeli it was part of the score. His sound, that transparency that made Debussy seem engraved in glass, depended on variables measured in fractions: the hardness of the hammer felts, the exact point at which the pedal begins to lift the dampers, a string flat by a few hundredths of a semitone. If one of these variables gave way, the concert he had in mind could no longer be played, and what was left did not interest him. A piano that sounded perfect the day before could become another instrument after a rainy night or a journey in a truck. Hence the last-minute cancellations, which audiences around the world learned to factor in along with the price of the ticket.
His biography also contains a cruel reverse. On 13 June 1968 a bailiff appears at the Teatro Novelli in Rimini, where Michelangeli is playing, and serves him with a seizure order: the record company BDM, of which he was a partner, has been put into liquidation, and the creditors are claiming his assets. Caught in the seizure are the fee for the evening and the two mountain chalets at Rabbi, in Trentino, with their furnishings. Among the furnishings are two grand pianos. The man who would not play on the wrong instrument sees his own carried off. He leaves Italy, settles in Switzerland, in the canton of Ticino, and declares that he will no longer play in his own country.
From then on his career grows ever more rarefied, and every announced concert becomes a gamble. In 1988, in Bordeaux, he falls ill on stage and is taken to hospital; he returns to play. His last recital he gives in Hamburg on 7 May 1993.