Watch Leon Fleisher play
Ravel – Left Hand Concerto (Cadenza) with one hand I Watch
him play Chopin – Mazurka in C sharp minor, op.50 no.3 with two hands
Watching Leon Fleisher in performance, it is hard to believe what an epic
journey of pain, contemplation and soul-searching lies behind this
80-year-old musician’s craggy features and consummate musicianship. I am in
the unprepossessing concert hall of Recklinghausen, a small greenbelt town
not far from Essen in Germany. This grizzled figure is playing Mozart’s
“little” A major Concerto, K414, a piece that, as a child prodigy, Fleisher
could have played in his sleep. But 40 years ago, when he suddenly lost the
use of his right hand, it would have been pure fantasy.
Slowly the musical world is now waking up to a small miracle: thanks to the
unlikely intervention of Botox, Leon Fleisher is back playing with two
hands. On Sunday he will play his first double-handed concert in the UK for
decades, in a solo recital in the Wigmore Hall in London. Tomorrow the
Curzon in Mayfair will be showing a documentary about Fleisher’s life, Mark
Kidel’s Lessons of a Master. And early next year he will play
Mozart’s Piano Concerto No 23 at the Festival Hall with the London
Philharmonic.
So did he ever think that he would remain on the international circuit at an
age when most pianists start thinking about retiring? “I never thought of
it,” he growls genially when we meet the following morning (it is early, and
he suddenly looks his age). “But I think maybe I had that time coming to me.”
Fleisher is now accustomed to telling the story of the missing years — “the
bump in the road” as he wryly calls it — but that doesn’t make it any
easier. He was, after all, the only child to have been taught by the
legendary Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel. At 16 he performed the
treacherous Brahms D minor Piano Concerto with the New York Philharmonic in
Carnegie Hall. At 24 he became the first American to win an international
competition, scooping the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition in Belgium.
Then, in 1964, just when he was preparing to tour Russia with George Szell
and the Cleveland Orchestra, disaster struck. He cradles his right hand with
his left as he remembers.
“I cut my thumb in such a way that it needed a couple of stitches. And by the
time I got it healed and started to practise again I noticed a strange
sensation in my right forearm. And as I continued working I began to notice
this tendency of my fifth and fourth fingers to curl under, into the palm.”
His first response was, unfortunately, the worst. “I thought: ‘Well I must
be getting old; work will certainly take care of this.’ And the more I
worked the worse it seemed to get. It took about ten months for the fingers
to curl under completely.”
Fleisher carried on looking for a miracle. “For the next 35 years I went from
great doctor to great doctor. I tried ‘alternative’, as they say, ‘Eastern
medicine’. And I tried Western medicine, northern medicine, southern
medicine. None of them had any help for me.
In the end, it took some 30 years for Fleisher to get the diagnosis he sought
— focal dystonia, a selective neurological disorder related to Parkinson’s
disease. And it’s more common than you might think: he reckons that there
are some 10,000 musicians around the world who suffer from the condition.
(Fleisher suspects, intriguingly, that the increasingly paranoid pianist
Glenn Gould was also afflicted.) “The worry — and I think this probably
attacks everybody with dystonia — is: ‘Is it my fault?’ Which was one of the
reasons why so many musicians I think until now have hidden the fact,
because if it gets out, they’re not going to get any jobs. I think I was
virtually the first to shout it: ‘I’ve got a problem’.”
It didn’t stop him from playing. “I decided that my connection to music was
more than just as a two-handed piano player,” Fleisher says. “I was very
lucky. It just so happens that the Ravel left-hand concerto is one of the
great masterpieces of the whole bloody literature, for one hand or for 15
hands.” He has now performed it, he reckons, more than 1,000 times.
Diagnosis, made in the late 1990s at the National Institutes of Health in
Washington, finally led to the breakthrough. “They don’t know the cause and
they don’t know the cure. But they discovered a method of alleviating the
symptoms and that method is, of all things, Botox.” Injected into his arm,
it allows the muscles that have contracted to relax. After just one course
of injections the small miracle he had waited so long for took place. “I
played the D minor Brahms, one of my favourite pieces, and it rolled
smoothly out of my hands. I didn’t need to practise — it was as though
nothing had happened.”
Any recital or orchestral concert is still a challenge: Fleisher is, after
all, 80, focal dystonia or not. “Every time I walk out on stage is what we
call a crap shoot — I really don’t know what is going to happen.” He admits
that he tends towards repertoire that is predominantly “chordal” — the
fingerwork needed for rapid scalework can elude him. “And I’m not cured.
Once a dystonic, for ever a dystonic. I need repeated injections, once every
four to five months.” Does he worry now that he might not be taken seriously
as a performer, that the background hoopla might overshadow the playing?
“That’s all external, exterior stuff. My responsibility is to communicate
music.”
Fleisher would be the first person to say that he knows more on that subject
as a result of his injury than he would have otherwise. He is a sought-after
teacher, whose pupils now include two top-flight pianists, Jonathan Biss and
Yefim Bronfman. He had already done some teaching before his hand gave out.
“But I became more serious, more precise, more specific. I had to learn how
to put into words things that are very ephemeral. And I started conducting,
which is a wondrous mystery.”
One of the first lessons he learnt was that most pianists work themselves too
hard. “We are athletes, but we’re athletes with small muscles. There is a
limit. Now you get kids today who can do things with such extraordinary
brilliance on the keyboard that they belong in the circus. But it ain’t got
nothing to do with music-making.” Practising anything more than five hours a
day, Fleisher argues, is not just pointless but actively harmful. “It
becomes mindless. And you imprint upon your brain something that is the
beginning of the confusions of dystonia.”
His biggest mistake, he felt, was abandoning the principle of his teacher,
Schnabel, by aiming for pure virtuosity over vision, tone quality and
structure. As Kide’s documentary reveals, a Fleisher lesson is now mostly
spent helping students by making them think about the fundamentals. “I call
a piece of music an adventure in antigravity: how it soars, how it
releases.” What I hear in Recklinghausen is almost spiritual: yes, the
fingerwork is iffy, but the Mozart still sings.
My time with classical music’s great survivor is almost up. On leaving, I
wonder whether he isn’t thankful for the “bump in the road” after all. “It
comes out sounding mealy-mouthed, but it’s really quite true. I’ve had such
extraordinary gratifications, satisfactions, from the orchestral experience,
from teaching, that, given all my problems, if I were to live my life again
I’m not sure that I would change it.”
Leon Fleisher plays at the Wigmore Hall, W1, on Sunday (020-7935 2141).
Lessons of a Master will be screened tomorrow at noon at the Curzon Mayfair,
W1, and is followed by a conversation with Fleisher (www.curzoncinemas.com)
It rests its head on your shoulders and whispers in your ear
A better understanding of the basis of piano technique, as via two finger exercising, has transformed the business of piano playing far beyond the best of 40 years ago and removed a lot of superfluous mystique. I presume Leon Fleisher is a beneficiary of this general advance. On the other hand this has accented the political, so that you still don t know what you are going to get in any particular performance.
Henry Percy, London, UK