When concert pianist Leon Fleisher lost the use of his right hand, he refused to retire from music. Instead he turned his career in other directions and now he’s back playing – two handed – and on tour
AS CAREERS IN music go, his went like a dream. He gave his first recital aged eight; played with the New York Philharmonic at 16. He was hailed as the “pianistic find of the century” and made a series of highly-praised concerto recordings. But the dream took a nightmare turn when, at the age of 36, Leon Fleisher realised he had a major problem. “I noticed that the fifth and fourth fingers of my right hand were slowly and inexorably beginning to want to curl under,” he says.
“Over a period of about 10 months they did so totally, and reached the point where they were both sticking into my palm. It took a terrific effort to straighten them out – and once straightened they wouldn’t stay that way.” It was 1964. Fleisher had the musical world at his feet. He wasn’t about to give up. So, he reacted to his injury the way many musicians – or, for that matter, sports people – do. He practised even harder.
“Yeah – which, it turns out, was the worst thing to do.” Fleisher tried steroids, hypnosis, physiotherapy. He underwent carpal tunnel surgery. When conventional doctors pronounced themselves baffled, he had a go at biofeedback and acupuncture. “I like to say I went from aromatherapy to Zen Buddhism,” he declares. “The irony of it is that there was no physical pain. There was extraordinary emotional pain, of course. This was what I had done all my life. The only thing I knew how to do – and I loved to do. But no, there was no physical pain. It made it all the weirder.”
He was eventually diagnosed as suffering from focal dystonia – and after almost half a century of physical and neurological experimentation, an unlikely combination of treatments finally unlocked the mystery of Fleisher’s right hand.
“Through all the years of trying to find an answer my muscles had become quite contracted,” he says. “In fact, they became very hard – like petrified wood. So it took a modality called Rolfing, a kind of very deep tissue manipulation which stretches individual fibres of the body tissue, to help relax the muscles of my forearm. Plus a really strange application of poison, Botulism Toxin Type A, which is known today as Botox, and used for cosmetic reasons.”
An injection of Botox paralyses the troublesome muscles, which are actually working overtime, allowing the opposing muscles to function more effectively. “It helps keep the fingers extended, as it were,” he says. “So I can do some playing.” The latter turns out to be a bit of an understatement. At the age of 82, the irrepressible Fleisher is once again playing and recording two-handed. He has performed in Canada and Mexico and for his three-city tour of Ireland with the Irish Chamber Orchestra, he’ll be joined by his wife to play an all-Mozart programme.
The story of Leon Fleisher’s recovery and return to the international concert platform is truly extraordinary. “His comeback,” the New York Times wrote in 2007, “has catapulted him up next to Lance Armstrong as a symbol of the indomitable human spirit and an inspiration to a broader public.”
But it’s not just the comeback. It’s the fact that while he was “away”, he wasn’t away at all, but busily carving out what were effectively three whole new musical careers at the highest level.
“Music is truly the only thing that I feel connected to in my life,” he explains. “So I always devised other ways to continue that relationship. I did it in three ways. I began to investigate the left-hand repertoire – which is not inconsiderable.
I began to teach more effectively – simply because I couldn’t push the student off the stool and say, ‘This is the way I think you should go’. I had to learn the vocabulary to speak about these ephemeral and intangible qualities that comprise music, and put that all into words. And then I started to conduct.”
Fleisher worked as associate conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra as well as music director at the Annapolis Symphony and the Tanglewood Music Centre. He’s been teaching at the Peabody Conservatory since 1959, passing on his expertise to a whole new generation of pianists. And during his years as a one-handed pianist, he achieved more than many musicians of the two-handed variety. To take just one example, it was Fleisher who, in 2004, gave the US premiere of a long-lost piano concerto for the left hand by the German composer Paul Hindemith.
The piece had been commissioned in the 1920s by Paul Wittgenstein, brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, but had – to all intents and purposes – disappeared. “I think it was the year 2000,” says Fleisher, “when Mr Wittgenstein’s widow died. The children came in and shook the drapes, opened windows and unlocked closets and things like that – and lo and behold, there was the Hindemith concerto.
“Mr Wittgenstein was one of those people who believe very strongly that if you commission a work it belongs to you – including the manuscript. He didn’t like the piece, so he just had it locked up in his closet all those years.” When the publishers verified the manuscript, Fleisher was a natural choice to give the work its long-delayed premiere. “Which I did, with the Berlin Philharmonic and Sir Simon Rattle,” he says.
Fleisher is philosophical about the roller-coaster his life in music has turned out to be. He has even expressed a kind of gratitude to his injury, once observing that “Before, I was just a two-handed piano player. What happened to me has expanded my life, my awareness, my humanity”. Can he explain what he meant by that? “Well, you know, making music at the piano as a piano soloist is quite a solitary affair,” he says.
“You practice at your instrument and you strive to get better and better – but you’re all alone. When you conduct an orchestra, you’re working with any number of musicians from 50 to maybe 100. It’s a different dynamic.
“These are very accomplished musicians. They have their own points of view. You have to somehow convince them of the validity of your vision so that they will come along with you and support your vision and make it a reality. That’s a different kettle of fish totally.” His experience of focal dystonia has also made Fleisher acutely aware that many of his colleagues suffer from similarly debilitating injuries – and are keen to speak out about it. “There are 10,000 musicians around the world who suffer from this,” he says.
“And not just pianists. Guitarists, oboe players, French horn players, all kinds. Focal dystonia is what they call task-specific. It interferes with a specific thing that you do; and usually it’s something that’s very important to you. Something your livelihood might depend upon.”
For his own part he considers himself lucky. But he doesn’t consider himself cured. “They don’t know what causes it, and they don’t have a cure for it. Once a dystonic, always a dystonic.”
Leon Fleisher and Katherine Jacobson-Fleisher will perform Mozart's Concerto for Two Pianos, K242,with the Irish Chamber Orchestra at the City Hall, Cork on April 14; at University Concert Hall, Limerick on April 15; and at the RDS Concert Hall, Dublin on Saturday April 17. The programme also includes Mozart's symphonies No 1 in E flat major, and No 4, the Jupiter
The Fleisher File
BornSan Francisco, July 23rd, 1928.
Began to studypiano at the age of four.
His recordingsof Beethoven's five piano concertos, made in the 1950s with George Szell and the Cleveland Symphony Orchestra, were inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2008 to celebrate his 80th birthday.
Nathaniel Kahn's documentaryfilm Two Hands,which tells Fleisher's story, was nominated for an Academy Award in 2007.
At the age of 77Fleisher was signed up for a new record deal by Sony. The Observer's review of his Mozart two-piano concerto, K242, with his wife Katherine Jacobson-Fleisher, says it "bubbles like a glass of champagne".
