Barefoot at the Keyboard: The Sacred Devotion of Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli: From La Verna’s Silence to the Concert Hall’s Benediction (2)

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli would walk toward the piano with the composure of one entering a sanctuary. Even before he touched a key, the atmosphere in the hall was transformed. The noise of the world fell away, replaced by a stillness so complete that it felt like the prelude to a rite. He was not there to entertain. He was there to serve. For him, music was never a display of skill but a sacrament, an offering to be made in purity, without blemish. His Catholic convictions, rooted in the discipline of service, informed everything he did. The work on the stand before him was not his property. It was a trust, handed down by its Creator, demanding to be returned unaltered yet made alive. He had sworn himself to that task, and such vows are not taken lightly.

The discipline that defined him was absolute. He would not play on a poorly maintained piano or in a hall with inadequate acoustics. This was not arrogance; it was fidelity. Just as a priest will not celebrate Mass with tarnished chalices or soiled vestments, Michelangeli refused to compromise the vessel through which the music was to be poured. The instrument, the room, and the conditions all had to be worthy of the work. The same principle guided his preparation. Every note, every balance of inner voices, every gradation of colour was refined until nothing extraneous remained. The score was an architectural plan, and he would no more distort its proportions than an architect would undermine the foundation of a cathedral.

Catholicism, particularly in its Italian form, embraces the tangible and sanctifies it. Michelangeli’s sound was the musical equivalent of a carved marble figure or an illuminated manuscript, an embodied beauty that pointed beyond itself. His playing was never a vague haze of colour. Each tone was shaped with the precision of a sculptor’s chisel. His pedalling was exact, not for the sake of cleanliness but because the life of the harmony depended on it. Beauty, for him, was inseparable from truth, and truth was inseparable from order. Even in Debussy’s most elusive music, he built form as carefully as the architects who raised domes and colonnades to the glory of God.

Michelangeli’s mysticism was not sentimental religiosity, but a deep Catholic interior life. His was a faith woven into the marrow, silent yet unshakable, sustained by prayer and an unceasing awareness of the divine presence. The connection between his art and his God was direct and lived. He believed that every talent was a grace received, and that to misuse it, even through negligence, was a form of ingratitude. For him, preparing for a concert was not unlike a priest preparing for the Eucharist: a cleansing of the mind, a readiness of the heart, a marshalling of the body so that nothing would stand between the sacred act and the One it was meant to honour.

This connection to God was shaped not only by his discipline but also by a brief and little-known association with the Franciscan order. Michelangeli spent a year at the La Verna monastery, the mountain sanctuary where Saint Francis of Assisi received the stigmata. He had planned to join the order as a Franciscan brother, and in those months, he breathed the same air of prayer, poverty, and humility that had formed generations of friars. Ultimately, his plans to take vows fell through, yet the Franciscan imprint remained upon him for life. It infused his art with a tenderness that balanced his perfectionism—a tenderness born of seeing God in the most minor things, of treating each note not as an abstract tone but as a living fragment of creation.

The mysticism of the Franciscans does not shimmer with the stern austerity of a monastery built on stone and iron; it breathes instead with the fragrance of fields after rain, with the warmth of human breath in prayer, with the trembling tenderness of a hand outstretched to a beggar. It is a mysticism that sees God not primarily in visions removed from the world, but in the soil beneath one’s feet, in the sparrow’s song, in the worn face of the poor. Saint Francis taught that to strip oneself of all pretence, all ownership, all power, was to stand bare before the Creator in the freedom of Adam before the Fall. Michelangeli, though he did not remain in the order, seemed to carry this spirit into his playing: an unclenching of the fist around self-importance, a refusal to use music as personal display, an openness that allowed the divine to dwell in the space the ego had vacated.

For the Franciscan, poverty is not deprivation but freedom, the freedom to see clearly, unmarred by greed or possession. Michelangeli’s own artistic “poverty” was a stripping away of everything not essential. He practised the uncluttered truth, never padding a phrase for effect or ornamenting for self-praise. His devotion to the slightest inflexion mirrored the Franciscan habit of finding God in a blade of grass or the call of a bird. Where other mystics might seek God through intellectual ascent or ascetic withdrawal from the senses, the Franciscan finds Him in the world’s wounds and wonders alike. Michelangeli, too, saw Him in the lived moment of sound: in the balance of a chord, in the decay of a note into silence, in the brief shimmer of a harmonic overtone.

The stigmata that marked Saint Francis’s body were the seal of intimacy with Christ’s suffering; Michelangeli bore no such visible sign, but his playing carried a kind of inner stigmata, a willingness to share in the vulnerability of music itself, to bear the weight of serving it without compromise. His art was not a shield against the world’s imperfection, but a deliberate, loving act offered within it. Just as the Franciscan friar’s prayer flows into daily acts of care, Michelangeli’s devotion flowed into each performance, each rehearsal, each lesson. The hall became his cloister, the audience his brothers and sisters, the score his psalter.

Though some have been tempted to draw parallels between Michelangeli’s self-effacement at the keyboard and the non-ego of Zen practice, the spirit that animated his art could not be further from the Zen path. Zen seeks the dissolution of all distinctions, the emptying of form into formlessness, the release of clinging not by perfecting the vessel but by transcending it entirely. Michelangeli’s Catholic and Franciscan mysticism was the very opposite: it sanctified form, it revered the vessel, it sought God not in the abandonment of structure but in its consecration. For Zen, the sound of a note might be valued for its passing, its impermanence; for Michelangeli, that same note was a fragment of divine architecture, carrying eternal meaning. Zen aims for liberation through detachment from all that is named or shaped, while Michelangeli’s devotion was to the particular, the shaped, the crafted, because in these he perceived the Creator’s imprint. His silence at the piano was not the Zen void, but the pregnant stillness of a church before the liturgy begins, a stillness that anticipates not dissolution, but the revelation of form in all its God-given perfection.

For the listener, attending one of his concerts was not merely a musical event; it was an initiation into a way of hearing. His performances demanded the kind of attentiveness that Catholic worship demands from the faithful: focus, receptivity, and humility. You could not listen to him casually. He would not allow it. His precision, his control of tone and timing, the balance of voices, these were not technical ends but moral ones. To hear him live was to enter a space in which beauty and truth had aligned, and to feel, even if only for an hour, that the world was ordered toward something higher.

It must also be said without evasion: no recording, however perfect, can convey what it was to hear Michelangeli in person. The microphones capture the notes but not the air that moved between pianist and listener, the vibration that altered the very space. They preserve the sound but not the sacrament. To write of him without having sat in his presence is like describing a cathedral from postcards. One can note the arches, the windows, the proportions, but one will never feel the cool weight of the stone, the way the sound moves like incense through the nave, the way breath itself changes in such a place. Those who were there carry the knowledge like a private relic. They know that he did not merely play the piano. He altered the atmosphere, and in that altered space, the slightest nuance could feel like a revelation. His sound had dimensions no loudspeaker can measure; his silences had weight and substance. These were not matters of interpretation alone. They were the lived reality of his art, and they cannot be reproduced.

Words can only serve as candles in that vastness, small flames to remember the great fire. Michelangeli played not for himself but for the mystery from which all beauty flows. Those who heard him live know that the experience could not be repeated or recorded, only witnessed. And in that witnessing, one understood that this was not merely art. It was an act of devotion, a living prayer offered by a man who, through unshakable belief and discipline, and touched by the spirit of Saint Francis, had learned to stand at the meeting point of music and God.