World-Renowned Pianist Earl Wild Dies In Palm Springs

PALM SPRINGS – Earl Wild, a world-renowned classical pianist and leader of the Romantic revival, died at his home in Palm Springs at age 94.

He died Saturday of heart failure, his long-time partner, Michael Rolland Davis, said.

There will be no funeral, Davis said.

“He said have a party, that’s all I want,” Davis said.

Davis added that he is considering having a memorial service to honor Wild later this month.

Wild performed for six presidents, including John F. Kennedy at his 1961 inauguration.

He served as the musical director of the Palm Springs Desert Museum — now the Palm Springs Art Museum — during the 1970s.

In 1976, he organized the Palm Springs Desert Museum Piano Festival to showcase new international piano talent.

Wild was born on Nov. 26, 1915, in Pittsburgh, and began taking piano lessons when he was 4 years old. When he was 12, he studied under a protege Franz Liszt, who helped create the Romantic movement in music.

Wild began giving radio recitals in Pittsburgh when he was 12 and began playing with the Pittsburgh Symphony when he was 14.

He learned to play numerous other instruments at Carnegie Tech — now Carnegie Mellon University — including cello, bass and flute. During World War II, he was a flutist in the U.S. Navy Band and a pianist in the Navy Orchestra, which performed the Star Spangled Banner before some of Eleanor Roosevelt’s speeches.

In 1937, he joined the NBC network as a staff pianist, and in 1939 he became the first pianist to give a recital on television. After he left the Navy in 1944, be became a staff pianist, conductor and composer at ABC, a position he held until 1968.

In the following years, he toured and recorded prolifically. Many of his recordings are available on his own imprint, Ivory Classics. He also taught at the Eastman School of Music, Penn State University, Ohio State University, Carnegie Mellon, the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School.

His last performance was at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles on Feb. 5, 2008, when he was awarded the President’s Merit Award by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

Before he passed away he was writing his memoirs, which are to be published later this year by Carnegie Mellon Press, Davis said.