When in his late 30s the American pianist Leon Fleisher, who has died aged 92, was struck by a mystery illness that immobilised his right hand, it looked as though his glittering career was at an end. He was able to reconfigure that career, however, in repertoire for the left hand only, becoming also a sought-after teacher and accomplished conductor. Some 30 years later, the illness was diagnosed and treated, and Fleisher was able to make an emotional return to the concert platform as a two-handed soloist.
Before disaster struck, he had been a concert artist of international renown, his exclusive contract with Columbia Masterworks leading to a series of acclaimed recordings with the Cleveland Orchestra under George Szell. It was in 1964, while Fleisher was preparing for a tour of the Soviet Union with that orchestra, that the first symptoms of the illness were noticed. A minor thumb injury having resulted in stitches, he found, when he resumed practice, that the fourth and fifth fingers curled under, eventually cleaving to the palm of his hand.
Creeping numbness in his fingers made it impossible to play. His doctors were baffled: concerts were cancelled, recording projects shelved. “My life fell apart,” he later said: “I grew a beard, wore my hair long and in a ponytail, and I got a Vespa scooter.” More seriously, his second marriage suffered a breakdown and he contemplated suicide.
After a couple of years of inactivity, he launched a new tripartite career: exploring and expanding the repertory for left hand, conducting and teaching. In the mid-1990s the problem was finally diagnosed as focal dystonia, a neurological disorder associated with repetitive tasks. Fleisher came to believe it had been caused by overpractising – “seven or eight hours a day of pumping ivory”, as he put it. Having run the gamut of remedies “from aromatherapy to Zen Buddhism” he found the answer in small-dose Botox injections.
It was not a complete cure, but it enabled him to resume some semblance of a normal two-handed platform career. Perhaps encouraged by his initiation into Zen principles, he found himself drawn increasingly to unaffected pieces of deceptive simplicity, such as Bach’s Sheep May Safely Graze, in Egon Petri’s transcription, Debussy’s Clair de Lune or Beethoven’s Für Elise. The process “restores balance,” he said: “It’s like deep breathing or yoga.”
His own performances had always been characterised by heart-stopping moments when time seemed to stand still. With technical security no longer guaranteed, he was content to seek sublimity and profundity rather than superficial brilliance and ostentatious display. In these years too he exploited the potency of silence mid-flow, encouraging his students to relish the pregnant pause on or before a note or chord. Play “as late as possible,” he would say, “without being late”.
Fleisher was born into what he described as “a poor Jewish family”. His father, Isidor, a milliner, was born in Odessa; his mother, Bertha, came from Poland. Together they managed two hat shops in San Francisco. Neither parent was a musician, but he astonished them by recapitulating the piano lessons given his elder brother, Raymond, note for note.
Leon himself began to learn the piano at the age of four and within five years had been accepted as a student of Artur Schnabel, first at Lake Como, then in New York. He remained with Schnabel for 10 years, later attributing much of his technique and musical philosophy to him, particularly striving to emulate Schnabel’s ability to play a single note and let it “just float, float, float endlessly in the air”.
In 1942, at the age of 14, he played Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra under Pierre Monteux, following it the next year with the Brahms First. In 1944 he played the Brahms again under Monteux, this time with the New York Philharmonic. Monteux also taught him conducting.
In 1952 he became the first American to win the Queen Elisabeth international music competition, Brussels, which effectively launched his international career, initially in Europe, where he lived from 1950 to 1958. The historic recordings he made with Szell and the Clevelanders included the two Brahms concertos – both muscular readings but with flashes of poetic inspiration and some magical textural effects – as well as the five Beethoven concertos and the Schumann coupled with the Grieg, Franck’s Symphonic Variations and Rachmaninov’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.
On turning to the left-hand repertory, he delivered many dazzling performances of the Ravel D major concerto, with spectacular cascades of notes exploding at climactic moments. The Allegro would be articulated with military crispness, while elsewhere, the thumb would limn a melodic line with perfect weighting and Fleisher’s trademark expressive lingering. His recording of the Ravel with the Boston Symphony and Ozawa presented two other works for the same forces: Britten’s Diversions and Prokofiev’s Fourth Piano Concerto. He also expanded the repertory for left hand by commissioning works from Lukas Foss, Gunther Schuller, Leon Kirchner, Curtis Smith and William Bolcom.
Redoubling his energies as a teacher during these decades of physical impairment – he had joined the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1959, later holding a professorship in piano – he maintained that his inability to demonstrate to his students forced him to verbalise his thoughts in a more explicit manner than before. “Play it like a Bavarian milkmaid, not like Britney Spears. Fingers shouldn’t be hammers, they should be dolphin flippers,” were among the many colourful metaphors he deployed. He believed also that the orchestral guest conducting engagements he undertook made him a better pianist. His memoir, My Nine Lives (2010), was co-written with the Washington Post music critic Anne Midgette.
In the final stage of his career, he formed the Fleisher–Jacobson Duo with his third wife, the pianist Katherine Jacobson, who survives him. His two previous marriages – to Dorothy Druzinsky and Rikki Rosenthal – ended in divorce. The children from his first marriage, Deborah, Richard and Leah, survive him, as do the children from his second marriage, Julian and Paula, and two grandchildren.
• Leon Fleisher, pianist, born 23 July 1928; died 2 August 2020
