Golden Moments at the Keyboard

For 50 years, ever since he accepted the endowed Andrew W. Mellon Chair in Piano in 1959, Leon Fleisher has been an essential force at Peabody. Famous since his mid-teens (Fleisher made his formal debut in 1944 at Carnegie Hall with the New York Philharmonic), he had long been recognized as one of the great pianists of his time. The young Fleisher had everything—a technique that knew no difficulties, a bejeweled tone, meticulous musical taste, and a sure intellectual and expressive grasp of whatever he played—and his early recordings (recently reissued) find him equally at home in Mozart, Schubert, Brahms, and the thorniest modern works. A long and glorious international career seemed assured.

And so it has turned out, but with some detours and difficulties along the way. In 1965, at the age of 37, damaged and miserable, Fleisher canceled all engagements and withdrew from performing. “Basically, my right hand turned to stone,” Fleisher recalls. “In the early 1960s I was practicing seven or eight hours a day, and when I noticed some weakness in my right arm, I only practiced harder. It was all wrong. I never allowed my muscles to decontract, and as a result I essentially ruined my arm.”

His condition would eventually be diagnosed as focal dystonia, a neurological movement disorder. But that explanation would come many years later; at the time, all that was clear to Fleisher was the fact that suddenly, mysteriously, he could no longer play. “We knew nothing about repetitive stress syndrome in those days. I saw doctors, I saw hypnotists, and nothing worked. There was no explanation, no answer at all. I was miserable.”

After a period of despondency, Fleisher realized that, as he put it, he loved music more than he loved the piano, and he found other ways to serve the art—making occasional appearances as a guest conductor and playing works for the left hand alone (of which there are a surprising number, due to some distinguished commissions from a wealthy pianist who lost an arm in World War I).

But his most profound connection remained the one with Peabody, where Fleisher became a legendary teacher—indeed, among his pianist colleagues, quite probably the single most respected teacher in the field. I was privileged to sit in on one of Fleisher’s master classes in 2004, and I have never forgotten the experience.

Fleisher worked with a gifted Peabody student on the Sonata in F Minor, Op. 5, by Johannes Brahms. First, he permitted the young man to play the first movement straight through without comment, to appreciative applause from the small but intensely focused audience.

After some perceptive compliments, Fleisher then launched into an explication of the sonata so acute and thoughtful that it called to mind what the literary biographer W. Jackson Bate said of the late letters of John Keats—that there was not a single idea about poetry in any of them that could not be tested and found true.

“When you get right down to it, there are three very simple choices that musicians have to make,” Fleisher said. “We have to decide how to attack the note, how to support the note, and how to stop the note. It’s tougher for pianists in some ways because we don’t have to support the note physically the way other instruments do. If you stop moving the bow on a violin or blowing into a wind instrument, the music stops right there. With the piano, the sound can be sustained by a pedal. But that doesn’t let us off the hook.

“This is piano music, but it has a profound sense of the orchestra,” Fleisher said. “Think about how you would orchestrate this—the bass line might be played by the strings or maybe by the brass—and then play it as if you were an orchestra, all by yourself.” The young pianist then began the piece again, and what had been powerful but somewhat one-dimensional suddenly blossomed into a full-fledged and deeply moving performance. “Yes!” Fleisher shouted. “That’s a statement.”

Over the past decade, a form of deep massage therapy (known as Rolfing) and regular injections of Botox have permitted Fleisher to begin playing with both hands again, and, in 2004, he made an extraordinary “comeback” album, entitled—appropriately—Two Hands, that was rapturously received by critics and public alike. Some 40 years after his enforced retirement from concertizing, Fleisher is enjoying a new career, in demand throughout the world.

It sounds like that great rarity in life—a “happy ending.” But Fleisher himself looks over the whole of his past with remarkable serenity. As he recently told The Times of London: “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.”