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I never gave his the attention I now think it does
NYT: Leon Fleisher, 92, Dies; Spellbinding Pianist Using One Hand or Two
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/arts/music/leon-fleisher-dead.html?action=click&module=Well&pgtype=Homepage§ion=Obituaries
By Allan Kozinn
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 on Sunday in
Baltimore. He was 92.
His death, in a hospice, was confirmed by his son Julian,
who said that Mr. Fleisher had been teaching and
conducting master classes online as recently as last
week.
Mr. Fleisher came to believe that his career-altering
malady, focal dystonia, was caused by overpracticing--
"seven or eight hours a day of pumping ivory," as he told
The New York Times in 1996--and for 30 years he tried
virtually any cure that looked promising: shots of
lidocaine, rehabilitation therapy, psychotherapy, shock
treatments, Rolfing, EST. At times, he said, he was so
despondent that he considered suicide.
But he realized that the musicality and incisiveness that
had been so widely admired in his early years could be
mined in other ways. Joining the faculty of the Peabody
Conservatory, in Baltimore, in 1959, he devoted himself
more fully to teaching, both there and at the Tanglewood
Music Center, where he was artistic director from 1986 to
1997.
He made his way through the estimable left-hand catalog
of works composed by Ravel, Prokofiev and many others for
the pianist Paul Wittgenstein (the brother of the
philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein), who had lost his right
arm during World War I, and commissioned new left-hand
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.
Mr. Fleisher pointed out after his comeback that he was
not fully cured and never would be. But he acknowledged
late in life that the incapacitation of his right hand in
1964 had given 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.
That realization is implicit in the title of his
autobiography, "My Nine Lives: A Memoir of Many Careers
in Music" (2010), which he wrote with the music critic
Anne Midgette.
Early in his career as a pianist Mr. Fleisher produced a
warm, sharply etched and thoughtfully contoured sound
that was ideally suited to 19th-century Viennese classics
--Beethoven, Brahms and Schubert, most notably--but
that also yielded illuminating readings of Rachmaninoff,
Debussy and Liszt and of contemporary American composers
like Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland.
His recordings of the Brahms and Beethoven piano
concertos with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra,
made from 1958 to 1963, are considered among the most
vivid and moving accounts of those works.
In the 1990s, he recorded spellbinding performances of
the peaks of the left-hand repertoire, including
concertos by Ravel, Prokofiev and Britten, chamber music
by Korngold and Schmidt, and solo works by Saint-Saëns,
Godowsky and Bach (Brahms's left-hand arrangement of the
Chaconne from the Partita No. 2 for solo violin).
Even after he returned to recording two-hand works, on
the albums "Two Hands" (2004) and "The Journey" (2006),
he continued to revisit the left-hand 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 title, but also pieces composed for Mr. Fleisher by
George Perle and Leon Kirchner, and a spacious
reconsideration of the Bach-Brahms Chaconne.
At 4, Playing by Ear
Leon Fleisher was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928,
to Isidore and Bertha Fleisher. His parents, Jewish
immigrants--his father was from Odessa, then in Russia,
now in Ukraine; his mother was from Poland--each
managed one of the family's two hat shops.
Leon was drawn to the piano from an early age. Though he
showed little interest when an older brother, Raymond,
was given piano lessons, Leon would go to the piano when
Raymond went out to play after his lessons and repeat, by
ear, everything he had heard. He was 4 years old.
His mother soon decided that Leon, rather than Raymond,
should study piano. She made her intentions for her
younger son clear: He would be either the first Jewish
president of the United States or a concert pianist.
So devoted was his mother to Leon's musical training that
after two weeks of kindergarten, during which he objected
strenuously to nap time, she withdrew him from public
school and hired tutors so that he could devote his time
to practicing the piano. She also found ways of bringing
him to the attention of two San Francisco conductors,
Pierre Monteux and Alfred Hertz, who in turn persuaded
the pianist Artur Schnabel to take Leon on as a student
in 1938, when he was 9, despite Schnabel's policy of not
teaching children.
By then Leon had already played a few concerts, but
Schnabel's single condition for teaching him was that
there be no more concerts. Schnabel relaxed the rule in
1944 and allowed his teenage pupil to play the Brahms
Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor with Monteux and the San
Francisco Symphony and then with the New York
Philharmonic at Carnegie Hall, also with Monteux
conducting.
Noel Strauss, reviewing the Carnegie Hall performance for
The Times, wrote that Mr. Fleisher, making his New York
debut, had "established himself as one of the most
remarkably gifted of the younger generation of American
keyboard artists."
In 1945, at the Ravinia summer festival in Illinois, Mr.
Fleisher played the Brahms again--it became one of his
signature pieces--as well as the Liszt Concerto No. 2
in A, with Leonard Bernstein conducting the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra. The next summer at Ravinia, he
performed four concertos under the direction of William
Steinberg and Szell, who soon engaged Mr. Fleisher to
perform with the Cleveland Orchestra, which Szell took
over later that year.
By 1949, however, though he had played with many of the
major American orchestras and had given recitals across
the country, engagements began to dry up for Mr.
Fleisher. The next year he moved to Paris and remained in
Europe until 1958, relocating first to the Netherlands
and then to Italy.
As an expatriate, Mr. Fleisher became the first American
to win the gold medal at the Queen Elisabeth Competition
in Brussels, in 1952. The victory led to a long list of
engagements in Europe and revived interest in him among
American orchestras, managers and concert promoters.
When Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra were signed to a
new recording contract with the Epic label in 1954, he
invited Mr. Fleisher to be his main soloist for
recordings of the great piano concertos.
'Always More to Attain'
It was shortly after his return to the United States, in
the late 1950s, that Mr. Fleisher accepted an offer to
teach at the Peabody Conservatory, though he continued to
pursue a heavy performing and recording schedule.
"I was driven, if anything, even harder by all of my
successes," he wrote in his memoir. "There was always
more to attain, and more to achieve, and more musical
depths to plumb, and lurking behind it all, the
terrifying risk of failure."
Failure was not far away. During the winter of 1963, he
noticed what he described as laziness in his right index
finger, as well as "a creeping numbness" in his right
hand. By the summer, the fourth and fifth fingers of his
right hand had begun to curl toward his palm.
The timing was disastrous. He had planned to celebrate
the 20th anniversary of his New York debut with a busy
season that included 20 performances in New York alone
and a spring 1964 tour of the Soviet Union, in which he
was to be the soloist in Mozart's Concerto No. 25 in C
(K. 503) with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra.
Shortly before the tour, Mr. Fleisher performed the
Mozart in Cleveland. Szell noted the strain Mr. Fleisher
was under and told him that he did not feel he could
undertake the tour. The pianist Grant Johannesen traveled
with the orchestra instead.
"The initial problem was a very stupid kind of overwork,"
Mr. Fleisher said in 1996, cautioning young pianists
against following his path. "I see kids still falling
into this, and there are many reasons for it. The
perfection that they're bombarded with from recordings.
The kind of sound a [Vladimir] Horowitz produced, which
is wonderful, but people don't realize that he had his
technician work very hard on the piano, so the piano
itself helped. So when kids go to an acoustically dead
hall, and get a dead piano, and try to make these
Horowitz kinds of sounds, they end up brutalizing
themselves."
Mr. Fleisher resisted taking up the left-hand repertoire,
partly because he felt that to do so would be an
admission that he would never regain the use of his right
hand. But after two years without playing concerts, he
reconsidered, agreeing to play both Ravel's Concerto for
the Left Hand and Benjamin Britten's left-hand work
"Diversions" with Seiji Ozawa and the Toronto Symphony in
1967.
The next year, with the pianist and composer Dina Koston,
he started the Theater Chamber Players, a flexible
chamber group meant to present both contemporary music
and classics.
The ensemble--initially based at the Washington Theater
Club, later at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural
History and ultimately at the Kennedy Center in
Washington--provided an opportunity for Mr. Fleisher
both to play and to conduct. And an invitation to be
music director of the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra in
Maryland, a semiprofessional community group, gave him a
chance to work on the symphonic repertoire.
Soon he was guest-conducting around the country--his
debut at the head of a professional orchestra took place
at Lincoln Center's Mostly Mozart Festival in 1970--and
in 1973 he became associate conductor of the Baltimore
Symphony Orchestra.
Mr. Fleisher held that post for only five years, but he
maintained a close relationship with the orchestra
thereafter. When the ensemble was preparing to inaugurate
the new Joseph Meyerhoff Symphony Hall in 1982, its music
director, Sergiu Comissiona, invited him to be the
opening-night soloist.
A Two-Hand Return
Having recently had an operation to relieve carpal tunnel
syndrome, Mr. Fleisher began to regain the use of his
right hand, if only partly and inconsistently. But he
felt he could make the jump back to two-handed playing,
using the televised opening of Meyerhoff Hall as the
occasion for his comeback.
In a bold moment, he told the orchestra that he would
play Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto. But as the
occasion drew near, he decided to play Franck's Symphonic
Variations instead, a shorter and less pianistically
exposed work.
Most listeners thought the performance went well. But Mr.
Fleisher was not satisfied. In his view, the amount of
effort he had expended working to control his right hand
precluded the kind of interpretive depth he had hoped
for, and he dropped plans for a broader return to
two-handed playing.
Shortly after the Baltimore performance, Mr. Fleisher
married Katherine Jacobson, a pianist who had been a
student of his at Peabody. His two previous marriages--
to Dorothy Druzinsky and Rikki Rosenthal--ended in
divorce.
Ms. Jacobson survives him, as do his children from his
first marriage, Deborah, Richard and Leah Fleisher; his
children from his second marriage, Julian and Paula
Fleisher; and two grandchildren.
In 1991, Mr. Fleisher found a doctor who was
experimenting with Botox injections for injuries like
his. At first he found that the injections loosened up
his still-cramped fourth and fifth fingers, to the point
where he could play. But the injections wore off, and he
was still looking for a permanent cure.
Having tried Rolfing in the 1970s, he decided to try
again in 1994. This time he found that a regimen of
Rolfing and Botox injections was enough to keep him in
playing trim.
As an experiment, he played Mozart's Piano Concerto No.
12 (K. 414) with the Theater Chamber Players in April
1995, and with the Cleveland Orchestra and at Tanglewood
shortly thereafter.
"Nothing felt sweeter than the feeling of those notes
falling into place," he wrote in his memoir, "the right
hand singing, the left hand balancing it on the lower
part of the keyboard, and the piece growing into
something whole and complete, a dream become reality."
Mr. Fleisher cautiously reclaimed the repertoire he had
been unable to play for more than 30 years, building his
recital programs with both two-hand and left-hand works
and playing programs of piano four-hand works with his
wife.
Mr. Fleisher was made a commander of the Order of Arts
and Letters by the French government in 2006 and received
a Kennedy Center Honor the next year. A film about his
struggle with focal dystonia, "Two Hands," directed by
Nathaniel Kahn, was nominated for an Academy Award for
best short documentary in 2006.
Toward the end of his life, Mr. Fleisher spoke about the
level of despair he had felt when he was unable to use
his right hand. But having regained that ability he was
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."
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