The piano virtuoso who couldn’t play

Leon Fleisher has lived through every musician’s worst nightmare, said Lynne Walker in the London Independent. Hailed as “the pianistic find of the century” after his professional debut in 1944, Fleisher spent two decades dazzling audiences before suffering an accident to his right hand. “I was preparing for the most important tour of my life when I cut myself on a piece of garden furniture,” he says. While healing from the wound, Fleisher found himself unable to move his fourth and fifth fingers, which involuntarily curled into his palm. “No way could I play the piano,” he says.

Doctors puzzled over Fleisher’s condition, which persisted for 40 years. “I was desolate. I felt I’d lost my purpose.” After trying everything from acupuncture to hypnosis, he was eventually diagnosed with focal dystonia, a neurological disorder that causes involuntary muscle contraction. In 1995, doctors gave him a Botox injection to relax the hand muscles—and it worked. “It was as if nothing happened,” Fleisher says. Now 81, he’s again able to play with two hands. The ordeal, he now says, may have been karmic, teaching him to value life without benefit of his extraordinary talent. “I think maybe I had that time coming to me.”

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