For Leon Fleisher (1928-2020)

(play it quietly...)

I must have been about fifteen when I heard Leon Fleisher give a recital at Shriver Hall, which means he was about seventy. He started with Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring, I think it was the only piece for two hands he played. To this day I can't describe exactly what I heard - the way each voice in the chord came together sounded like a spiritual force of pure light. A little later in the program he played a left-handed piano transcription of Bach's Chaconne by Brahms, and during the major key section, you literally heard multiple audience members weeping. I have never heard a musician play as though he understood the spiritual, healing power of music so well.

We took it for granted that Leon Fleisher was here in Baltimore for sixty years after he lost use of two fingers and ended what might otherwise have been the greatest concert piano career of the twentieth century. But whatever he was before his injury, his injury made him so much more valuable. It's hard to explain to people who never heard his playing or sat in on his master classes. He was like a musical oracle who simply understood that music meant everything, and transmitted it more easily than anyone any of us had ever encountered.

I always took it for granted that one day over all these years we'd run into each other at a concert or at the Giant or at a coffeeshop and I could try to bore his ears off with a conversation, but in all these years, not once did I ever see him in all those places he was said to frequent. The only time I ever did was spotting him at a Peabody Symphony concert, where he was in the middle of the audience, eating a bag of sunflower seeds while the orchestra played - who was going to stop him?

He was never part of my life, and yet he was there, every day, as much a part of Baltimore as the Zappa statue and the Poe house. Every person involved in classical music in Baltimore felt like we knew him intimately, even if we never met him, and now, for very little reason at all, it feels like a close and valued friend has passed.