My first encounter with Leon Fleisher was as a Hesse Student at the Aldeburgh Festival in 1988. I’m not sure any of the other students had even heard of him, but to me he was a living legend. I had learnt so much of the piano repertoire from the recordings George Szell made in Cleveland from the late 1950s to 1970 – and Fleisher had starred on several of those records. As I packed my bags for my East Anglian sojourn, in went cherished LP covers, which the great man seemed flattered to be asked to sign. I was able to discuss the Szell years with him and also the still-undiagnosed condition that had robbed him of the career he seemed destined to have, when the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand began to rebel, refusing to comply with the formidable demands of a career on the concert platform.

He gave a masterclass at Jubilee Hall in Aldeburgh, and at Snape Maltings he played two staples of the left-handed repertoire that was initially promulgated by Paul Wittgenstein after he lost his right arm in the First World War: Britten’s Diversions and a Franz Schmidt piano quintet. I remember how, during one very impassioned passage in the Britten, his right hand came crashing down suddenly in a grand gesture, seemingly towards the keyboard, then plunged instead into a tight grip of the structure of the piano. He simply couldn’t help himself: the muscular memories of happier days were still there, not far below the surface. In the masterclass, he played the gentle opening of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, a staple of his repertoire during his blossoming career in the 1940s and 1950s. All the magic was still there, but after just a few bars he had to stop. The right hand just would not cooperate. For a few moments, though, I had heard, in the flesh, that extraordinary technique that I had cherished for so long on vinyl. He still had it. He proved to be a delightful companion for my nine days at the festival, and I cherish memories of us watching a Marx Brothers film as he roared with laughter at Groucho’s cod pianism.

Fleisher was born in San Francisco on July 23, 1928, the son of working-class Jewish immigrants. Although there was no known musical history in the family, he was a true wunderkind. He took up the piano at four years old and played his first public recital on April 9, 1936, three months before his eighth birthday. When he was just nine, he was introduced to Artur Schnabel, who agreed to take him on as a pupil, so long as he gave up performing in public. At the age of ten, he was studying with Schnabel in Cadenabbia, with the likes of Noel Mewton-Wood. For his 12th birthday, he received 78s of the Brahms D minor Piano Concerto, with Schnabel as soloist. He wore them out, and the piece became a lifelong favourite and, in the good years, a calling card. ‘The whole work is to me a single, unified piece of heaven – or a cosmos of its own,’ he wrote in his autobiography. The conductor on that recording was Szell.

Fleisher played the Brahms for his East Coast debut in 1944 with the New York Philharmonic, and a year later, he performed it again with Leonard Bernstein and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra at Ravinia. In 1946 he worked with Szell for the first time, at Ravinia and then with the Cleveland Orchestra, as well as giving his first solo recital at Carnegie Hall at the beginning of the year.

In May 1952, not yet 24 years old, he won the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels. Two years later he worked with Szell again, not in Cleveland but with the New York Philharmonic, and this would inaugurate a remarkably fruitful decade-long collaboration.

By now, Fleisher was living mostly in Europe and his recording career had begun, with discs of his beloved Schubert Piano Sonata in B flat, D960, and Hindemith’s Four Temperaments released in 1956. Already committed to recording with Bernstein in New York and Eugene Ormandy in Philadelphia, Columbia Records acquired the Epic label, principally to capture the extraordinary things that Szell was achieving in Cleveland. Although Fleisher’s friend and contemporary Gary Graffman (who later also suffered from disability of the fingers of his right hand) recorded Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto with Szell, it was Fleisher who became the conductor’s ‘house pianist’. His fabulous 1959 recording of Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto became the unintended beginning of a full and precious cycle, but the first recording together, made in October 1956, was of repertoire less close to his heart – Franck’s Symphonic Variations, which Fleisher didn’t much like, and the Paganini Rhapsody by Rachmaninov. Fleisher had encountered Rachmaninov as a child when his mother took him to a recital and swept him up into the wings to get a close look at the living legend. ‘You pianist?’ asked Rachmaninov. The young Leon nodded. ‘Ah. Bad business, bad business.’ Between that recording and their final studio collaboration in 1962, the Fleisher-Szell team became a mainstay of recorded music. Then, as the phrase goes, disaster struck.

In the summer of 1964, Fleisher cut his right hand during a domestic row. Although this was apparently treated and healed successfully, as he prepared for a major tour of the USSR with Szell and the Clevelanders, he began to notice problems with the hand. After a concert together in advance of the tour, Szell, not unkindly, stood him down. Very quickly Fleisher cancelled all engagements, then reinvented himself as a teacher and conductor. He soon embraced the left-hand repertoire, performing Ravel’s Concerto (a lot) and Britten’s Diversions, and began to sport a ponytail and a beard. For a time in the mid-1970s he was associate conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. He tried various treatments on the hand, including hypnosis, but the problem would not be resolved.

In 1982 Fleisher attempted a comeback, initially (and ambitiously) planning to play the Beethoven G major Concerto, ultimately substituting it with the Franck Symphonic Variations; but all he could think about that night in Baltimore was his right hand and the terrible, locked tension that had spread into his lower arm. His comeback was aborted, and by 1990 he was playing solo recitals of the left-hand repertoire.

It wasn’t until the mid-1990s that he had a diagnosis: he was suffering from focal dystonia, a neurological condition related to ‘writer’s cramp’. The new science of Botox came to the rescue in parallel with a revolutionary form of deep massage (Rolfing), and by 1995 he felt ready to play Mozart’s A major Concerto, K414, back in Cleveland (and elsewhere), and in 1996 his beloved Brahms D minor in the city of his birth, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. He also persisted with the left-hand repertoire that he had mastered: in 2004 he gave the premiere of Hindemith’s recently rediscovered Klaviermusik mit Orchester (BPO and Sir Simon Rattle). In 2007 he accepted the Kennedy Center Honors from the then president George W Bush, whom he, as a lifelong liberal, greatly disliked. After all the heartache and frustration, the precocious talent of the 1930s and 1940s had come full circle: he was, officially, an all-American icon.

Essential recording

Beethoven Piano Concerto No 4, Op 58 Mozart Piano Concerto No 25, K503

Leon Fleisher pf Cleveland Orchestra / George Szell

Sony (10/59)

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in G major was a signature piece for Fleisher, but, as he wrote in My Nine Lives (2010), it was Mozart’s joyous K503 that inspired his ‘greatest moment in Carnegie Hall’ (‘it still gives me goose bumps’) as he duetted with Cleveland’s first oboe Marc Lifschey in the finale. The same magic can be heard here.

This article originally appeared in the May 2024 issue of Gramophone magazine. Never miss an issue – subscribe today