Obituary, Leon Fleisher (1928-2020)

The American pianist, who spent much of his career unable to use his right hand due to focal dystonia, has died aged 92.

The son of Eastern European hat-makers who had settled in the US, Fleisher was born in San Francisco in 1928 and began playing the piano aged four; five years later he was studying with Artur Schnabel in Europe, and at sixteen he made his Carnegie Hall debut with the New York Philharmonic in Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1, a work with which he would become closely associated. In 1952, Fleisher took first prize at the Queen Elisabeth Music Competition, and he went on to record with conductors including André Cluytens, Hans Rosbaud, Otto Klemperer, Eugene Ormandy, Pierre Monteux (who had conducted his New York Philharmonic debut) and most notably George Szell, with whom he worked regularly throughout the late 1950s and early 60s.

In his mid-thirties Fleisher started to experience problems with his right hand whilst preparing for a Russian tour with Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, and was forced to withdraw from all performing engagements; the lack of mobility and control proved resistant to both surgery and alternative therapies, and it was several decades before he was correctly diagnosed with the neurological condition focal dystonia. After a bleak two-year hiatus, Fleisher began exploring other ways of making music, expanding his teaching work at the Peabody Conservatory and Tanglewood Music Center, training as a conductor, and immersing himself in piano repertoire for the left hand – including the works with orchestra which Ravel, Prokofiev and Britten composed for Paul Wittgenstein, which Fleisher went on to record with Seiji Ozawa and the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

He also recorded numerous recital-discs of solo repertoire for left hand, including music by Brahms, Saint-Saëns, Scriabin, Godowsky and Blumenfeld, as well as Korngold’s Suite Op. 23 and Franz Schmidt’s Quintet for piano left hand, string trio and clarinet (both also Wittgenstein commissions). Fleisher’s artistry and tenacity played a significant role in expanding the repertoire for left hand only: works premiered by or dedicated to him include Robert Saxton’s Chacony (1988), Gunther Schuller’s Concerto for Three Hands (written for Fleisher and Gary Graffman and premiered in 1990), Lukas Foss’s Concerto for Left Hand (1994), Leon Kirchner’s L.H. for Leon Fleisher (1995), and William Bolcom’s Gaea (1996). In 2004 he premiered Hindemith’s Klaviermusik mit Orchester, which Wittgenstein had commissioned in 1922 but never performed; in 2008 Fleisher made the first commercial recording of the work with Christoph Eschenbach and the Curtis Symphony Orchestra on Ondine.

In the early 1990s Fleisher began to regain the use of his right hand thanks to pioneering Botox injections supplemented with Rolfing (a soft-tissue manipulation therapy increasingly used by musicians and sportspeople), and in 1995 he returning to performing with both hands; he recorded several albums of standard repertoire for Sony and in 2007 a documentary about his career, Two Hands: The Leon Fleisher Story, was nominated for an Oscar.

Fleisher continued to perform into his tenth decade, making acclaimed appearances at the Ravinia and Tanglewood Festivals in 2018 and giving a 90th birthday recital of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart and Leon Kirchner at Carnegie Hall early the following year. He died of cancer in Baltimore on 2nd August, and is survived by his third wife Katherine (his former student, with whom he performed and recorded numerous works for three and four hands) and five children.

Leon Fleisher - a selected discography