IC 76003 Booklet - Ivory Classics

immediately to piano lessons.
At six, he had a fluent technique and could read music easily. Before his
twelfth birthday, he was accepted as a pupil of the famous teacher Selmar
Janson, who had studied with Eugen d’Albert (1864-1932) and Xaver
Scharwenka (1850-1924), both students of the great virtuoso pianist / composer
Franz Liszt (1811-1886). He was then placed into a program for artistically
gifted young people at Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Tech (the Institute of
Technology) -- now Carnegie Mellon University. Enrolled throughout Junior
High, High School, and College years, he graduated from Carnegie Tech in
1937. By nineteen, he was a concert hall veteran.
He was invited at the age of twelve to perform on radio station KDKA in
Pittsburgh (the first radio station in the United States). Mr. Wild had already
composed many compositions and piano transcriptions as well as arrangements
for chamber orchestra that were regularly performed on KDKA radio.
At twelve, he made such an impression that he was asked to work for the station
on a regular basis for the next eight years. Mr. Wild was only fourteen
when he was hired to play the Piano and Celeste in the Pittsburgh Symphony
Orchestra under the batons of many different conductors; Otto Klemperer
and Fritz Reiner being two of the more well-known personalities.
Mr. Wild’s other teachers included the great Dutch pianist Egon Petri
(1881-1962), who was a student of Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924); the distinguished
French pianist Paul Doguereau (1909-2000), who was a pupil of
Ignace Jan Paderewski (1860-1941) and Marguerite Long (1874-1966), who
studied the works of Gabriel Fauré and Claude Debussy with Jean Roger-
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