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Leon Fleisher: A Phoenix Rises
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10071 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
4 / 1993 |
1,680 Words |
| Author
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Tom Pniewski
Tom Pniewski is a musicologist at Hunter College in New York. |
As a long-limbed fifteen year old, Leon Fleisher was dubbed the "pianistic find of the century" by conductor Paul Monteux. And no wonder: Having given his first public recital at the age of six, Fleisher was taken on by the legendary Arthur Schnabel four years later (Schnabel never taught children but made a singular exception in this case). Fleisher remained with Schnabel for ten years; in the meantime, at fourteen, he was playing Liszt and Brahms concertos with the San Francisco Symphony, under Monteux's direction. The grand old French maestro had many reasons for his high praise.
Fleisher went on to justify this early promise. An appearance with the New York Philharmonic in 1944 "at once established him as one of the most remarkably gifted of the younger generation of American keyboard artists" (New York Times). A few years later, he became the first American to win a major European Competition (the Queen Elisabeth Competition, Brussels, 1952). The 1960s brought a long and historic collaboration with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, culminating in recordings of Mozart and Beethoven concertos that are still considered definitive. He was thirty-five, at the height of his powers.
Then tragedy struck. As early as 1964, a year during which he played twenty-nine times in New York City alone, Fleisher began to notice odd sensations in his right forearm, though the muscle strands were untwisting, losing their control. His hand might suddenly go limp, or his fingers curl up. He sought professional help, varied therapies, and eventual neurosurgery, but there were no answers. He was forced to give up playing.
"It was devastating," he told me in a recent interview. "It wasn't until several years later that general medical interest in such problems arose, and I began to find out what happened."
Fleisher was suffering from what is now called carpal tunnel syndrome, and for most of the time since the mid-1960s he has not been able to perform with both hands. Carpal tunnel syndrome comes from repeated finger action and stressful wrist postures that cause inflammation of the tissue surrounding the bones at the bones at base of the wrist. The median nerve running through the carpal tunnel there is compressed, resulting in reduced or lost nervous function in the hand. "It's just amazing," Fleisher remarks, "that piano teaching down through the ages has not had much real anatomical understanding of how the hand works. That's part of the reason why so many problems turn up among musicians, as well as among any people who do very
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