Leon Fleisher, sublime pianist with one hand or two, dies at 92
Physical limitations forced him to think profoundly about music
Leon Fleisher, the brilliant American pianist who was in his 30s when fingers in his right hand suddenly stopped working — a fateful twist that cut short his playing career — and for three decades was one of the great enigmas of the classical-music world, died Aug. 2 at a hospice care center in Baltimore. He was 92.
The cause was cancer, said his son Julian Fleisher, a singer-songwriter and producer.
Fleisher’s mysterious hand malady — eventually diagnosed as a neurological disorder called focal dystonia — was a dramatic and harrowing turn of events for a onetime child prodigy who had spent his 20s on the post-World War II vanguard of young American pianists.
At 24, Fleisher became the first American to win the piano competition established by Queen Elisabeth of Belgium, one of the world’s premier musical contests. That victory launched a major new phase of his career. He performed in leading concert halls and became the preferred soloist of George Szell, the formidable conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra. His recordings with Szell remain benchmarks for their clarity, precision and sheer expressive musicality; Brahms’s first piano concerto was a touchstone.
At that pinnacle, Fleisher began noticing trouble that led to a cramping in the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand. Redoubling his practice efforts only worsened the problem. On the eve of a historic tour of the Soviet Union with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra in 1965, Fleisher realized that he wasn’t able to play at the required level. He canceled the tour and his other upcoming concerts.
The abrupt loss of movement sent him reeling, triggering depression and a desperate quest to identify and cure what ailed him. “I tried everything from acupuncture to Zen Buddhism,” he later said.
He only gradually surmounted his malaise through a career metamorphosis. He learned the surprisingly large repertory for left-hand piano — and he staged the first of his halting comebacks in 1982 after regaining some use of his right hand. He remained, in critical estimation, a pianist of sublime musical intelligence whether playing with one hand or two. But he also gained renown off the stage as a conductor and an influential teacher.
His work with the baton led him to explore musical pathways he never would have followed as a pianist. As co-founder in 1968 of the Theater Chamber Players in Washington, long the resident chamber ensemble at the Kennedy Center, he performed contemporary chamber music; as music director of the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra and then associate conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, he learned a wide range of orchestral classics.
His group master classes at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, coupled with a stint at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, produced several generations of leading pianists, including André Watts, Yefim Bronfman and Jonathan Biss. Fleisher said his physical limitations forced him to think more profoundly about music, to put into words the technique and nuance that before had been instinctive. “Prior to my problems,” he once said, “I would sit down and play to show my students what to do.”
In the classical-music world, he became regarded as a guru, known for his ability to untangle pianistic problems, for his inspiration and for a series of adages, including “Practice less, think more.”
“One of the problems with young musicians today,” he said in his 2010 memoir, “My Nine Lives,” “is that they come in with such a sense of high seriousness. The idea of how great this music is tends to fill them with awe. But so much of what we do is about these guys just having fun. That earthiness is a very important part of life.”
Leon Fleisher was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928, the second son of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.