Orson Welles, Musician

Orson Welles showed glimmerings of genius from an early age, but at first his talent seemed to be for music. His mother, Beatrice Ives Welles, was a skilled pianist who had studied with the Polish-born pianist-composer Leopold Godowsky. She arranged for Orson to receive piano and violin lessons, and the boy demonstrated sufficient ability that he was treated as a wunderkind in his home town of Kenosha, Wisconsin. As I noted in my recent article on Welles, he apparently made his stage début as Dolore, or Sorrow, the infant in “Madama Butterfly,” in a performance at the Ravinia Festival. (The archives of the Chicago Tribune contain an amusing account of one unnamed child performer’s troubled outing in “Butterfly.”) Orson disliked practicing, however, and once threatened to throw himself out of a window if he had to play another scale. “Oh, just tell him to go ahead!” his mother replied.