Leon Fleisher, 92, Dies; Spellbinding Pianist Using One Hand or Two. [View all]

'Unable to use his right hand, he performed pieces written for left hand only, conducted and taught. Years later, he made a triumphant two-handed comeback.

Leon Fleisher, a leading American pianist in the 1950s and early ’60s who was forced by an injury to his right hand to channel his career into conducting, teaching and mastering the left-hand repertoire, died on Sunday in Baltimore. He was 92.

His death, in a hospice, was confirmed by his son Julian, who said that Mr. Fleisher had been teaching and conducting master classes online as recently as last week.

Mr. Fleisher came to believe that his career-altering malady, focal dystonia, was caused by overpracticing — “seven or eight hours a day of pumping ivory,” as he told The New York Times in 1996 — and for 30 years he tried virtually any cure that looked promising: shots of lidocaine, rehabilitation therapy, psychotherapy, shock treatments, Rolfing, EST. At times, he said, he was so despondent that he considered suicide.

But he realized that the musicality and incisiveness that had been so widely admired in his early years could be mined in other ways. Joining the faculty of the Peabody Conservatory, in Baltimore, in 1959, he devoted himself more fully to teaching, both there and at the Tanglewood Music Center, where he was artistic director from 1986 to 1997.'>>>

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/02/arts/music/leon-fleisher-dead.html?