A musician who was much more than just his malady.
A pianist needs only three essential components to play their instrument—a piano, their left hand, and their right hand. The difficulty of playing piano comes from pieces that have vastly different melodies and rhythms for each hand or stanzas where one hand has to cross over the other. However, Leon Fleisher, who died at age 92 on August 2nd, would disagree. The trickiest aspect of piano for him was that he could not use the third ingredient—his right hand.
When Fleisher emerged into the world on July 23rd, 1928 to his Jewish immigrant parents, he had two working hands. In fact, his hands were more than just functional—he was a child prodigy who could fully play by ear at the mere age of four years old. At age nine, the prominent pianist Artur Schnabel took him in, and in 1944 he made his Carnegie Hall debut with the New York Philharmonic at just 16 years old. The Brahms Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor that he played there became one of his signature pieces. He was praised for this performance by acclaimed musicians and journalists, but he was always motivated to do more, wanting to explore his opportunities outside of the United States. He moved to Europe and became the first American to win the Queen Elisabeth international music competition in 1952. At 23, he was on a path towards further fame and success. He was performing all around the world in renowned concert halls and creating recordings with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra. These included a huge repertoire of works by Brahms, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Grieg, Franck, and Rachmaninov. According to the New York Times, these recordings are “considered among the most vivid and moving accounts of those works.”
Anyone who heard Fleisher play immediately recognized his talent. He was a music descendant of Beethoven, as Schnabel’s teacher Theodor Leschetisky had studied with Carl Czerny, one of Beethoven’s students. Pierre Monteux, who was the conductor of his performance at Carnegie Hall described him as “the pianistic find of the century,” according to NPR. Everyone around him believed that he was set to do great things.
In this peak of his career, however, Fleisher faced possibly the worst obstacle for a pianist. At 36, he began to feel a sharp cramping in his right hand. It started with his ring and pinky fingers, and then eventually creeped to his entire hand. He told the New York Times in 1996 that this was due to overworking himself—“seven or eight hours a day of pumping ivory.” As his hand started to hurt more, he made up for it by practicing more. He soon could not play with his right hand at all. The night before he was supposed to tour with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, he had to cancel because he could not move both hands.
Many pianists in this situation may have given up. Even Fleisher found himself depressed by his unidentifiable injury. However, his pure love for music ultimately shone brighter than his injury or his need to play piano. He began teaching instead at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University as well as the Tanglewood Music Center, and also spent more time conducting. These classes forced him to think about music in different ways—since he could not just sit down and show his students how to play, he had to learn to explain with his own words and descriptive metaphors. He was even able to find some songs that he could play solely with his left hand. He played songs that were originally composed for Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist who had lost his right arm in World War I. Fleisher also drew on Brahm’s left-hand piano version of Bach’s chaconne as a mainstay of his recital programming. Fleisher’s new signature pieces became this and Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. He was infinitely grateful that it was his right hand that gave out instead of his left because at least there were some, albeit limited, pieces for his left hand to play.
Fleisher never ceased to look for a cure for his hand. For the next 30 years, he tried everything from Rolfing to shots of lidocaine to Zen Buddhism. With no promising results, he felt as though he had lost his one passion in life. He depended on his second wife, Riselle Rosenthal, but his condition ended up destroying that relationship as well, crawling into his family life. Growing out his hair and buying a Vespa motorcycle were the types of distractions he would create for himself to forget about his lost purpose in life. He considered suicide at this time.
His life began to turn around in 1991 because of an increasing number of doctors who were experimenting with Botox injections. These injections combined with Rolfing proved to keep his hand in good enough shape where he could play with both hands again. During the next few years, he built up his dexterity and skill again, and was back on the performance scene in 1995. He started small, and by 2005 he was playing at international concerts halls, and at Carnegie Hall where it all started. His fingers were never permanently fixed, and he often felt the same curling, rigid feeling when he played. However, the Botox injections helped keep the pain minimal.
It seemed that with his mental and musical success also came advances in Fleisher’s personal life. He married again, this time to pianist Katherine Jacobson. With this new relationship, he was not only able to play two-handed piano pieces, but also four-handed ones together with his wife. Ms. Jacobson survives Fleisher along with his children from his first two marriages, Deborah, Richard, Leah, Paula, and Julian, as well as his two grandchildren. His son Julian revealed that his father had passed from cancer.
In 2007, Fleisher received the Kennedy Center Honor. Although this award was given for his performing and musical talents, his personality and values are what truly came across. He wrote a letter to The Washington Post describing his deep moral disagreement with Bush’s policies regarding the Iraq War. He thought about the connections between art and politics, and was conflicted as to whether he should accept this award at the White House. When he did choose to attend, he said he was “wearing a peace symbol around my neck and a purple ribbon on my lapel, at once showing support for our young men and women in the armed services and calling for their earliest return home,” according to the Guardian. Beyond his music, Fleisher was a sincere person, and a role model for his pupils both in and outside of the classroom. As per the Washington Post, Fleisher believed that music was “a force capable of reconciling us to each other,” an idea that he got from Beethoven’s conceptualization of music.
In 2006 also came the release of the short documentary film “Two Hands: The Leon Fleisher Story” by Nathaniel Kahn. By this time, medical science had found a name for his neurological disease, focal dystonia. This film about his miraculous recovery is an emotional one, and the title is taken from the 2004 release of his album “Two Hands.” This was the first album in about 40 years that he had released in which he was able to play with both of his hands. He also wrote a memoir in 2010, “My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music” that took a more positive approach to his illness, detailing how it enabled him to have diverse musical opportunities that he would not have otherwise pursued.
Cornell University’s very own Bailey Hall welcomed Fleisher as well in 2011. He came to Cornell for a residency, in which he taught and performed all five of Beethoven’s concertos to Cornell and Ithaca college students. These concerts featured guest Cornell faculty Xak Bjerken and his wife, Miri Yampolsky, as soloists. Both of these music professors studied with Fleisher at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and they serve as remnants of the talent that Fleisher’s teaching produced and the effect that he had on the Cornell community. Shortly after Fleisher’s passing in August, a live stream by his students paid tribute to Fleisher— Professor Xak Bjerken closed off the video with one of Fleisher’s favorite pieces, Brahms’s Op.119 No.1.
Fleisher continued to create music up until the day that he passed. Ultimately, fans of classical music listened to Fleisher not because of the obstacles that he faced, but because he was Fleisher. No matter how many hands he had, his irrepressible talent came through in every piece from Beethoven’s symphonies to the Left Hand Concerto. The difficulties that came along with his life seemed to be a minor detail when it came to how people felt about his performances. Even when he was not playing, he had a profound effect on people. As his hand condition worsened, his love and dedication to music were only heightened. He adapted and found new ways to influence the world through his music. He is not just known as “the guy who played piano with one hand” because he did so much more. He shows young musicians that overworking themselves will only counteract their goals and that music can be found in many different avenues. Beethoven, one of Fleisher’s inspirations, once said that “to play without passion is inexcusable!” Beethoven would be proud of Fleisher, knowing that this pianist found a way to play with passion without even playing at times. The clarity and emotions in his sound combined with his perseverance and devotion to music created a passion for classical music unlike any other.