‘The Keyboard of the Imagination’ – Piano Music for the Left Hand

This week Mahlerman shows that losing an arm need not mean the end of a pianist’s career…

When Paul Wittgenstein woke up in a Russian field hospital in 1914 he was missing his right arm and was effectively a prisoner of war. A shock for anybody, it was particularly so for a promising concert pianist who just happened to be a member of one of the most prominent families in Europe, as well as one of the richest. Paul’s musical talent was more than matched by his younger brother Ludwig, who became one of the 20th Century’s greatest philosophers. The remaining seven siblings fared less well, three dying by their own hand, another in infancy. It is not clear whether the talent that Paul possessed was absolutely genuine; what is beyond question is the determination he demonstrated in continuing a career as a concert pianist when all reasonable logic suggested that success would be a forlorn hope. Eccentricity and vast wealth must have helped, and perhaps the memory of Brahms, Strauss and Gustav Mahler playing in the music room of the palace in Vienna that he called home.

Based upon the recorded evidence, admittedly from later in his life, he was nothing special at the keyboard; his legacy, his ‘keyboard of the imagination’ (a phrase conjured by Ludwig) is that he made it his business to contact dozens of composers to request, for huge fees, compositions that recognized his unique loss. There followed an impressive list of good and great music from Paul Hindemith and Richard Strauss, Prokofiev in Russia, and our own Benjamin Britten. But the unquestioned masterpiece emerged from the fastidious and refined pen of Maurice Ravel, a full concerto for left-hand. Unfortunately Wittgenstein, a prickly and unworldly man, decided to tinker with the score, and there was a falling-out, never to be resolved, and this set a pattern for other collaborations that began well, and later fell apart in acrimony. I urge dabblers to seek out the whole of this wonderful single-movement piece; here, the magical Cadenza played with complete authority by Ivan Ilic.

Born on Christmas Day 1871, Alexander Scriabin considered himself to be a messianic figure, and 100 years ago the vogue for this maniacally conceited Russian had reached its apogee. The highly perfumed sound world he created was layered by a multitude of eccentric beliefs, including a synesthesic linking of colour and sound. A brilliant pianist, an over-enthusiastic practice session ended a promising career by damaging his right hand more or less permanently, steering him toward composing exclusively. Here, the Dane Mogens Dalsgaard plays the early left-hand Nocturne.

The name of Simon Barere is today unknown outside of a small group of piano nuts, but this magician of the keyboard was spoken of in awe by the likes of Horowitz and Rubinstein. Born in Odessa, as were so many great Russian instrumentalists, he was the eleventh of thirteen children born into a modest, unmusical family. He studied with Annette Essipova and later, along with Horowitz, with Felix Blumenfeld, whose marvellous left-hand Etude he plays here. Not note-perfect as you will hear, but for string-of-pearls beauty of articulation, I doubt you will hear his equal this side of heaven.

Whilst you are this side of heaven, try and catch the French-Canadian composer and pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin, aged just 50, he already has a legendary status in the musical firmament. In a world of super-virtuosi he seemingly has a technique that frees him to become the great musician that he is today. It is hard to imagine that piano playing can get any better than this – and the touchstone, as so often, is not the dazzling finger-work, which can be taken for granted, but the almost unbelievable range of colour and tone that he can coax out of a Steinway. Here, after Tchaikovsky, the quite beautiful left-hand Etude No 7 ‘Lullaby’ by the pianist.

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About Author Profile: Mahlerman

Mahlerman's life was shaped by his single mother, who never let complete ignorance of a subject get in the way of having strong opinions about it. Facing retirement after a life in what used to be called 'trade', and having a character that consists mainly of defects, he spends his moments of idleness trying to correct them, one by one.

12 thoughts on “‘The Keyboard of the Imagination’ – Piano Music for the Left Hand

  1. Wormstir@gmail.com'
    Worm
    March 4, 2012 at 09:38

    Ahh Ravel’s concerto for the left hand is one of my all time favourites. I had no idea that there were other sinister works of equal loveliness, great stuff MM

  2. Brit
    March 4, 2012 at 16:17

    An inspired choice of topic – fascinating stuff.

  3. walter_aske@yahoo.co.uk'
    elberry
    March 4, 2012 at 16:59

    Paul W had very good technical skills, but these seem to have lapsed in his later years, as he continued to doggedly play as if to test himself. When he was younger, before the war, his playing tended to be heavy-handed and struck some as cold & soulless. People sometimes had the feeling that he didn’t actually like music much, that it was simply something he had taken up.

  4. Gaw
    March 4, 2012 at 18:46

    For more on Paul Wittgenstein and his family I recommend Alexander Waugh’s House of Wittgenstein – a very enjoyable read.

  5. law@mhbref.com'
    jonathan law
    March 5, 2012 at 09:41

    After Wittgenstein, the most celebrated left-hand-only pianist must be Tomas Tranströmer, the veteran Swedish poet who was awarded the Nobel Prize last year. A keen amateur pianist for most of his life, Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 that deprived him of the power of speech and left the right–hand side of his body entirely paralysed. Apparently, his wife (a nurse) responded by driving into Stockholm and buying the entire corpus of piano music for the left hand — some 500 pieces. This she presented to him with the instruction, “Tomas, get to work.”

    Tranströmer described the sense of peace and freedom he found in music in this short poem, ‘Allegro’:

    After a black day, I play Haydn
    and feel a little warmth in my hands.
    The keys are ready. Kind hammers fall.
    The sound is spirited, green, and full of silence.

    The sound says that freedom exists
    and someone pays no tax to Caesar.
    I shove my hands in my haydnpockets
    and act like a man who is calm about it all.

    I raise my haydnflag. The signal is:
    “We do not surrender. But want peace.”
    The music is a house of glass standing on a slope;
    rocks are flying, rocks are rolling.

    The rocks roll straight through the house
    but every pane of glass is still whole.

    “Losing speech means you can’t hide behind it anymore,” Tranströmer’s wife told an interviewer, “You’re forced open. And maybe you could say that Tomas has gained music. When nothing obeys him any more, it’s a feeling of great freedom to find his left hand and eye and brain still working.”

    Klangen sager att friheten finns — “The sound says that freedom exists” — is the title of a CD of left-handed piano pieces recorded by Tranströmer, which also features readings of ‘Allegro’ and other poems. You can hear audio tracks at Tranströmer’s official website:

    http://tomastranstromer.net/music/audio/

  6. finalcurtain@gmail.com'
    mahlerman
    March 5, 2012 at 10:11

    I had an idea that the main subject of this piece would draw Elberry out of his fastness, and he did not disappoint, usefully adding his own comments – and I came across Transtromer when I began rooting around in the uni-arm world and discovered how little I knew – thank you JL for the update, and the sketch of the obviously formidable Mrs T. Yes, the subject is interesting and vast – the two modern American virtuosi I knew about, Gary Graffman and Leon Fleisher (both still with us), both suffered with focal dystonia in various forms, in Fleisher’s case partially relieved by therapy and, er…botox.

  7. Worm
    March 5, 2012 at 10:54

    top commenting as ever JL –

    I suppose the question now is, are there a lot more pieces for the left hand than the right, and if so, why>? Surely people must lose their hands on either side in roughly equal amounts?

  8. finalcurtain@gmail.com'
    mahlerman
    March 5, 2012 at 11:57

    This question surfaced as I was writing – and yes, it is almost always the right arm or hand that is either lost, or loses its function. Why? I guess in the case of loss, by accident or conflict, it is more likely to be the right-hand as we know that between 70 – 90% of the population are handed on this side. Wittgenstein was probably holding a rifle in his right hand when the sniper’s bullet shattered his elbow; and it’s odds-on that if I were ever to be pulled into a circular saw, it would be right-side first, no?

  9. law@mhbref.com'
    jonathan law
    March 5, 2012 at 12:05

    One of the pieces I read about Transtromer stated that about 10 times as much music has been written for left-hand only as for right-hand only. So
    to that extent he was “lucky”.

  10. walter_aske@yahoo.co.uk'
    elberry
    March 5, 2012 at 19:40

    “fastness” evokes a gloomy castle in the middle of nowhere. In reality i spend all day talking to people like a smooth operator, for my job, and lack the will or energy to comment when i come home. Paul W’s psychology & career could in part be understood in reference to the myth of Fenris and the god Tyr. In the Old Norse rune poem, it stands:

    “Tyr is the one-handed among the gods
    Often has the smith to blow”

    – and this expresses something of Paul W’s character, though as far as i’m aware he knew nothing then about runes or the old Germanic gods (i could be wrong). Tyr was a god of war, and yet according to the myth he placed a hand in the wolf’s mouth, knowing he would lose it. Warriors would etch the Tiwaz rune on weaponry (you see this even on an armoured vehicle in Iron Man). This is Northern and though Vienna is on the edge of Europe he was a Northern man, a fighter.

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