Music: The Sound of Two Hands Playing

Crippled for 17 years, Leon Fleisher makes a stirring comeback

A friend suggested that he shave off his beard and call himself Noel Rehsielf, which is his name spelled backward. But Leon Fleisher said he would go on, which is no spelled backward. To demonstrate to the world that, after 17 years, he could once again range up and down a piano keyboard with both hands, he chose the most visible occasion he could find: the inauguration last week of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra’s $23 million Joseph Meyerhoff Hall.

He had originally planned to play Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto. Several weeks ago, however, he decided that that titanic work might be too ambitious for his right hand, still experiencing what he calls “a certain muscular disquietude” from the ailment that crippled it in 1965. His choice instead was César Franck’s lovely but less demanding Symphonic Variations for Piano and Orchestra.

Still, the unspoken question was palpable in the opening-night audience: Could he do it? The answer resounded through the new hall like a message from Olympus. After nearly two decades, Fleisher, once acclaimed the most talented pianist of his generation, had returned to the ranks. If at times he seemed a bit too rushed, eager to get through what must have been an ordeal as well as a triumph, the clarity and intelligence of his pianism were unmistakable.

After an emotional standing ovation and a warm embrace by Sergiu Comissiona, the symphony’s music director, he returned for an encore and showed a different, more muted skill in Chopin’s introspective D-Flat Nocturne, Opus 27, No. 2. In its own quiet, understated way the piece, more than the Franck, seemed to speak for the performer, telling, more clearly than words, what he had been through since he had last used that troubled hand in public. “It was evident that I am not back to where I would like to be,” he said later. “But I am on the road. I was very pleased that I could walk off the stage alive.”

The problem first appeared in 1964 when Fleisher noticed a peculiar sensation hi his forearm. By 1965 he found himself incapable of playing at all; he had lost control of his right fingers. During the years that followed he tried almost every known treatment, consulting doctors, hypnotists and psychotherapists. A child prodigy, Fleisher had been pushed hard by his parents. Some part of his psyche, went one theory, was rebelling against the emotional pressure.

There were periods of extreme depression, but Fleisher slowly built a new life without the right hand. He still made occasional appearances onstage, playing the few pieces written for the left hand. He learned the joys of conducting, and he greatly increased his teaching schedule. He is a professor at Baltimore’s Peabody Conservatory of Music. Still, he says, “I never totally counted myself out. The feeling that I would some day be able to use both hands again kept me going.”

In 1980 his patience was rewarded. His friend and fellow pianist Gary Graffman was suffering from a similar problem and had found sympathetic and helpful doctors at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. The doctors, Fred Hochberg, a neurologist, and Robert Leffert, an orthopedic surgeon, examined Fleisher and determined that he was suffering from carpal tunnel syndrome, a condition that occurs when swollen tissue presses against a major nerve that transmits feeling to the hand. Fleisher was operated on in January 1981 to relieve the nerve. A few months later he began follow-up treatment, a powerful and sometimes painful application of pressure to damaged muscles called myotherapy.

The hand does not yet have the stamina and control it once had, but the pianist is convinced that he will soon be performing Beethoven. Delighted to be playing with ten fingers again, he is not altogether unhappy that he had only five for so long. “There is no doubt that what seemed like the end of the world to me in my little life turned into an opportunity for growth, for expansion and a widening of horizons,” he says. “It’s been enough to make one believe in the justice of fate and destiny.” —By Gerald Clarke