Hand injury forced pianist to reimagine his career
Leon Fleisher, a leading American pianist in the 1950s and early ’60s who was forced by an injury to his right hand to channel his career into conducting, teaching and mastering the left-hand repertoire, died last Sunday in a hospice in Baltimore. He was 92.
His death was confirmed by his son Julian, who said he was still teaching and conducting master classes as recently as last week.
Fleisher came to believe that his career-altering malady, focal dystonia, was caused by overpractising — “seven or eight hours a day of pumping ivory,” as he told the New York Times in a 1996 interview — and for 30 years he tried virtually any cure that looked promising, including shots of lidocaine, rehabilitation therapy, psychotherapy, shock treatments, Rolfing and EST. At times, he later said, he was so despondent that he considered suicide.
But he also realized that the musicality and incisiveness that had been so widely admired in his early years could be mined in other ways. He had joined the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory, in
Baltimore, in 1959, and he devoted himself more fully to teaching, both at Peabody and at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he was artistic director from 1986 to 1997.
He also made his way through the estimable catalogue of works composed by Ravel, Prokofiev and many others for pianist Paul Wittgenstein (the brother of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein), who lost his right arm during the First World War, and commissioned new lefthand works from American composers. He helped start the Theater Chamber Players in Washington. And he began conducting.
Eventually, a combination of Rolfing — a deep massage technique — and Botox injections provided sufficient relief that he was able to resume his career as a two-handed pianist in 1995. He continued to play recitals and concertos, and to make recordings, until last year.
Fleisher often pointed out after his comeback that he was not, and never would be, fully cured. But he also acknowledged, late in life, that the incapacitation of his right hand in 1964 ultimately gave him a far more varied musical life than he might have had if he had been able to pursue a conventional career as a virtuoso pianist.
Even after he returned to recording two-hand works, on the albums “Two Hands” (2004) and “The Journey” (2006), he continued to revisit the lefthand works that had kept him going for three decades.
His album “All the Things You Are” (2014) included not only left-hand arrangements of Gershwin’s “The Man I Love” and the Jerome Kern song that gave the collection its name, but also pieces composed for Fleisher by George
Perle and Leon Kirchner, and a deeply thoughtful, spacious reconsideration of the Bach-Brahms Chaconne.
Toward the end of his life, Fleisher spoke about the level of despair he felt when he was unable to use his right hand. But, having regained that ability, he was also philosophical about the challenges life presents.
“There are forces out there,” he told the International Herald Tribune in 2007, “and if you keep yourself open to them, if you go along with them, there are wondrous surprises.”