Birth of a brilliant piano teacher
Norma Fisher was a soughtafter concert pianist, until disaster struck. But it wasn’t the end, she tells Ivan Hewett
The moment Norma Fisher had been dreading came one night during a performance at the Royal Festival Hall. A pianist of exceptional talent, Fisher was one of the world’s foremost interpreters of the German romantics and Liszt, and in demand all over the world. But in recent months, her body had started to fail her.
“It happened when I was away from the piano, doing something completely different like watching television,” the 78-year-old recalls now.
“I would suddenly feel my wrist rise into an odd position and then lock, of its own accord. It would strike at unexpected moments such as when I was whisking an egg, or dialling a telephone, as we used to do in those days.”
The condition Fisher had was focal dystonia – a failure of the muscle control system and something that had bedevilled the careers of several pianists, even the great Vladimir Horowitz.
“At first it didn’t affect my playing, but then it started to happen while I was practising, and I was terrified it would happen when I was performing,” she says. And – in the middle of a sonata by Mozart – it did.
“My right hand started to bend and lock as if it was saying, ‘I don’t want to play this.’ I made it through to the end, and the performance actually went well, surprisingly, but it was terrifying,” Fisher says.
This was the beginning of the end of her performing career. However, far from sinking into despondency and brooding on fate’s cruelty, Fisher reinvented herself as a piano teacher. And, over the past four decades, she has built up a reputation as one of the best in the business, dedicating herself to the advancement of pianists, many of whom are now enjoying the sort of career for which she herself was once destined.
“I [had] always refused the idea of being a full-time teacher,” she says.
“I thought of myself as a performer. But over time it just grew naturally. Colleagues and friends would come to me, and I discovered I just loved sorting out technical and musical problems.
“In a strange way, I forgot about myself, because now I was responsible for all these wonderful talents. It became the most important thing in my life, and it still is.”
We’re meeting in the northlondon house Fisher has shared with her husband Barry for more than 40 years. All around are memorabilia of her career as a performer; posters for her numerous Wigmore Hall recitals and her many foreign tours. Fisher obviously remembers her concert-playing days with great affection. In fact, she never announced officially that she was stopping – afraid that it would damage her reputation – and, to this day, there are people who have no idea it was an illness that forced her off the stage.
“I recently published an account of that whole period,” she says. “And my two sons were amazed to read it. ‘Mum, we had no idea you went through all this!’ they said.”
Her sons, and the world in general, now have a chance to hear Fisher at her prime thanks to the release of some early recordings of music by Brahms and Alexander Scriabin that she made for the BBC.
Fisher is thrilled at the turn of events. “I owe so much to the BBC, they really helped to launch my career, so I’m so delighted that these recordings have appeared,” she says. “So much of my best work was done for them, both in the studio and live.”
Fisher’s trials and tribulations are a far cry from her adolescent years, which had that miraculous ease common to all child prodigies. The third child of Jewish immigrants from Russia and Poland, she was “obsessed” with the piano from the age of three and would take lessons from the formidable teacher Ilona Kabos.
After making her Proms debut in 1961, at the age of 21, she went on to build a huge reputation and only started to withdraw from performing in her late thirties when it became clear she was stuck with her focal dystonia for life.
“My specialist told me that there’s really very little one can do,” she says.
Does she ever feel a little pang, when she sees her own students performing on the stage where she once excelled?
“Actually no,” she says without a moment’s hesitation. “I absolutely adore the life I have now.
“People ask if I miss the playing, and the honest answer is that it’s such a privilege to work with my wonderful students. I just feel that they are playing for me. So on the contrary, I don’t feel a pang, I just feel huge elation and gratitude.”