By Stuart Isacoff

Pianist Earl Wild performed a small miracle last July in the form of a recital at New York’s Mannes College International Keyboard Institute and Festival. In anticipation of his 90th birthday recital tour scheduled for the fall, which would include Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and culminate in November at Carnegie Hall, he used the occasion to negotiate the difficulties of Beethoven, Chopin, and Liszt with remarkable technical ease, entrancing vitality, and a stunningly beautiful tone. Impulsive and rapturous at one moment, elegantly placid the next, the playing held innumerable charms; commenting in The New York Times, Anthony Tomassini noted Wild’s rendering of Liszt’s Jeux d’Eau à la Villa d’Este as “a marvel of watery textures and fetching colors.”

Playing the piano is an illusionist’s art—pianists must conjure a mechanical contraption of wire, hammers, and wood to sing, or thunder, or impart to listeners the image of fountain streams at the Villa d’Este—and Musical America’s Instrumentalist of the Year is certainly an old hand at this kind of magic. But the evening was miraculous nonetheless: Just nine months earlier, his career had nearly come to an abrupt end, with one medical crisis following another. There was quadruple bypass surgery and additional work on his carotid arteries; the removal of cataracts from both eyes; treatments for macular degeneration (he still doesn’t see very well); and a host of other difficulties. He lost 35 pounds.

“When I first looked at the piano again I couldn’t play a note,” he recalled after the concert last summer. “I thought it was over—but I was determined. I began to practice slowly. Little by little, it started to come back. They said it would take a year for me. Well, I have three more months to go.”

It was only the most recent adventure in an eclectic rollercoaster career that has taken him from the depths (a National Concert Artists tour of small-town Texas during which one mayor told him that what the town really needed was “some goddamned wrestling”); to the heights (becoming the first pianist ever to give a recital on American television); to the sublimely ridiculous (five years as music director for Sid Caesar). He worked as staff pianist for the NBC Symphony under Toscanini, with whom he performed Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, gave the premiere of Paul Creston’s Piano Concerto in 1949 in Paris, and played Paderewski’s A-minor Piano Concerto with the American Symphony Orchestra under Stokowski. His improvisational inclinations have led him to produce a library of concert transcriptions, including marvelously effective and treacherously difficult piano Etudes on songs of George Gershwin. (The transcriptions and a number of important recordings are now available through Ivory Classics.) His current projects include new arrangements of popular songs of the 1920s. “Perhaps in 50 or 75 years,” he explains, “people will play them as an example of American dances of that period. They are charming and make you laugh. And there are so few pieces that make you laugh.”

If purists regarded this wildly inclusive world as somewhat lacking in seriousness, it never gave him a moment’s hesitation. “The teacher I loved the most was Egon Petri,” he reports. “We got along so well because we both improvised. One day he improvised for me tunes from Götterdämmerung combined with ‘Roll Out the Barrel.’ It was hilarious but wonderful.” And it was just the kind of musical hi-jinx that landed him an extremely lucrative position with Sid Caesar, who had enlisted his help in pulling off a mock-opera with a nonmusical cast of comedic characters. “I even created an overture, and he had Milton Cross sitting in a box, describing the proceedings.

“Afterward, he didn’t want to let me go, and the money offer kept climbing until it was so high I couldn’t afford to say no. It was a great work experience. To write something that is operatic and at the same time comes across as comedy—well, that’s what Mozart did. It helped me, structure-wise. It also made me love money. But I never turned my back on classical music.”

Nor has he made concessions to critics who find his approach somewhat out of step with modern trends. One often hears Earl Wild described as a “throwback” to the Romantic tradition, suggesting a quaint relic from a time of musical libertinism. Yet the truth is, if he seems at times to wield a rogue rubato, or unduly exaggerate an inner voice, these are matters that have been carefully thought through with an inexorable logic—though one uninfected by what he calls “the good taste virus.”

It is a sign of our musical culture that we now favor probing and pounding over sentiment, preferring pianists who transcend the personal. Objectification and conquest are the order of the day. Earl Wild’s art embraces a softer, more fully human standard, choosing, as Lionel Trilling would have it, sincerity over authenticity. And stressing, above all, communicativeness. As he told one student at an afternoon master class on the day following his July recital, “There is nothing worse than playing phrases that say nothing. I don’t care if you say crazy things, but say something.” This is a clue to what is missing in so much modern playing—why it so often seems that the age of musical greatness recedes with each passing year. (It’s an old complaint, of course: Back in the classical era, the famed German pianist and pedagogue Johann Baptist Cramer charged that, “formerly piano playing was mighty good, now it’s good and mighty.”)

That master class showed Earl Wild at his humorous, insightful, effusive, casually bawdy best, instructing one young student to stop expressing the music through body language (“the only place that will get you anywhere is at the YMCA”), another to be more generous with the pedal (“keep it down, otherwise it’s like staring at bad wallpaper in a cheap motel”), and another to deal more carefully with the architecture of a piece (“you’re tearing it apart with emotion”).

It was good, solid advice based on a lifetime’s experience and mastery. At the end, pianist Jerome Rose, who directs the Mannes Festival, announced that he had signed a contract to ensure that Earl Wild would return continually for the next 90 years. Sign me up for a full subscription.

Stuart Isacoff is the author of Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization (Vintage), and editor of the magazine Piano Today.