Unless there is no second act, you can't judge an artist by who they were at thirty any more than you can judge a human being. However promising, however accomplished, they haven't yet lived a life, their story has yet to be written. Some thirty year olds have already experienced the heartbreaking setbacks of how excruciatingly complicated life can get, but most who have by that age are not superachievers at the top of their fields.
When Leon Fleisher was thirty, he was one of a long series of (North) American pianists who looked to be the new Horowitz, the new Rubinstein, the new Rachmaninov.... Kapell, Katchen, Cliburn, Kuerti, Gould, Graffman, Janis, Istomin,... and after Kapell died in a plane crash, Fleisher was the most likely of them all to become the unquestioned king of the music world.
When you listen to those famous recordings from roughly 1960, you hear a young genius, but you don't yet hear a true artist. The infinite intelligence, technique, and fire was just about perfect for a piece like Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. Beethoven piano concertos are of course magnificent, but as great as Beethoven's piano concertos are, they're not quite his best pieces (except 4, which God dictated to Beethoven over zoom). The Beethoven piano concertos are at their worst, glorious showpieces, at their best, lion's roars from the keyboard, full of fire and warmth, always young man's music. But except in the 4th concerto, where Beethoven's emotional ambiguity brings out the young Fleisher's weaknesses, there's not much in the Beethoven concertos that demand the emotional and artistic maturity of Beethoven's late sonatas, late quartets, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis, even the Pastoral and the Eroica. Fleisher puts every note and dynamic in its right place as though etched in copper and zinc. There were a few truly magic moments in the quieter passages that foretasted the musician he would later become, but mostly, he still sounds as though playing to please older mentors, and they must have been overjoyed. Yuja Wang has that same quality today: she's a genius, but she still plays like the perfect piano student. It's hard to believe she won't have some similarly fraught path to find herself along her journey.
On the other hand, while famous recordings of the Brahms concertos are rightfully legendary, they're sort of legendary for the wrong reasons. I would venture a sizable amount of money that note-for-note, the Brahms piano concertos are the two hardest pieces to play in the standard piano repertoire. There are other pieces that demand more intellectually, more emotionally, and more physical dexterity and stamina, but no two pieces demand so much of them all. They are with an eye toward draining the player, and the pianist playing through his exhaustion is as much part of the music's journey as the exhaustion of a Wagnerian heldentenor in Act III.
The intelligence and technique of this playing is practically infinite. Fleisher made these recordings roughly contemporaneously to as august a pianistic personage as Rudolf Serkin, and with the same orchestra and same conductor. But when you compare the two, there's no comparison. Serkin may have grown up in the recently deceased Brahms's Vienna, but Serkin did not understand Brahms. He approached this music with such rigor and severity that it sounded no different from Beethoven. But Fleisher intuitively understood all those weird Brahmsian harmonic contours. Serkin's notes stand as firm as a piece of Bauhaus architecture, Fleisher ebbs and flows like the Danube. So it wasn't just technique and intelligence, it was emotional maturity so far beyond his years.
And yet this is still a 30 year old, there's no way Fleisher was any more exhausted by the end of these pieces as he was at the beginning. And however intelligent, you can still hear the un-Brahmsian steel in the fingers. One can almost hear how this player practiced his fingers into an early grave. When you hear the mature Brahmsians of that time play these pieces: Rubinstein, Backhaus, Schnabel, the technique is nowhere near so infallible, but you hear musicians whose brains and fingers and hearts have lived a lifetime with this music. Fleisher understood this music from the outside in, but he still did not illuminate it from the inside out. To me, Brahms is is the most emotionally complicated, 'adult' composer there is (Mozart and Schubert come close), and every few bars there's a new shift in perspective, a new emotional ambiguity. These masters who get Brahms from the inside out find a different color and approach every shift in mood. That is what true musicmaking sounds like, while at that age, Fleisher still sounds, as perhaps he must, like a brilliant imitation of them. And yet when you hear his contemporary, Julius Katchen, do the same pieces, there's something different about it - fallible, vulnerable, a human being making music rather than a god. Katchen was only five years older than Fleisher, but in less than a decade he would be dead from cancer - and in his playing there is already something of that magic vulnerability which sounds as though he already knows how complicated life can get in a way Fleisher doesn't yet. When I was roughly twenty, I heard Fleisher attempt the Brahms First Piano Concerto again for the first time in well over thirty years, it was a little sad. The steel was of course gone, and even in his early-to-mid seventies Fleisher simply did not have that adult mixture of sincerity and guile a great Brahmsian requires. Pianists attest to the fact that however easy Brahms sometimes sounds, he might be the hardest of the major piano composers to play, and a great Brahms pianist is one of the rarest of all musical things, and whatever Fleisher's greatness, he was not quite that.
At this point, I have to make an obvious admission: this is not a biographical appreciation, this is a musical one - a not particularly accomplished musician's attempt to understand one of the most accomplished of his era. So regardless of the details of how he came back to music, the one biographical concession I will make is that the Fleisher, who must have been the world's greatest piano student, became the world's greatest piano teacher. When he started making records again, he was almost an exact opposite sort of musician. The bullet-etched precision had of course vanished, but in its place was a completely different sort of precision. The recorded output was of course tiny, but there were so many notes so perfectly placed not within the barline but within the listener's inside, each of them paced and shaded so perfectly within the listener's internals that for one of the few times in my concertgoing life, I literally heard multiple listeners weep openly.
The real Fleisher was a very different sort of artist, even from his teachers. If he continued on his trajectory as. a young man, he might have become a pianist like Robert Casadesus or Maurizio Pollini - brilliant, eclectic in his tastes, with technique so secure that every note sounds permanently etched in a musical firmament, perfectly capable of fire but expressively on the cool side. But Fleisher clearly suffered too much for that to become his musical personality.
Fleisher's great teacher, Artur Schnabel, gave performances just as musically meaningful, but Schnabel was restless. When you hear Schnabel's playing, you hear his unfathomable intelligence working out ever new harmonic implications. Each performance of a piece he'd played a hundred thousand times sounded like a new experiment with ever new findings. Among today's piano gods, perhaps Daniel Barenboim is much closer to that spirit, or Mitsuko Uchida. But as a mature artist, Fleisher was perfectly serene, he sounded as though he'd already lived through all within music there was to live through, and he simply was there to share his wisdom with us. Wilhelm Kempff sounded very much like that, perhaps so did Alfred Brendel, and among today's mature artists of the keyboard, Andras Schiff does too. There's a spiritual centeredness to it, and while the notes stand firm, the lack of further search could never be mistaken for inhibition or autopilot. As though the musician has already experienced so much that there's a complete lack of need to strive for any more knowledge than they already have.
Fleisher did more in those last thirty years with the little he had than most pianists able to give ten times the concert load. Had he gotten full use of his two hands back, it would of course have possibly been the experience of a lifetime to hear him do multiple Schubert sonatas, Mozart piano concertos (and I heard him do one of the early ones just last year, it wasn't all that great...), some of the more lyrical Schumann, maybe even Bartok's Third Piano Concerto. But then he wouldn't have been Fleisher.
I used to believe that the scarcity of certain artists' availability put an aura around them which they did not deserve. There are just. toomany of these artists for them all to deserve it: Carlos Kleiber, Glenn Gould, Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Guido Cantelli, Sergio Fiorentino, Klaus Tennstedt, Ginette Neveu, Marta Argerich, Dinu Lipatti, Istvan Kertesz, John Ogdon, Radu Lupu, Grigory Sokolov, Sergiu Celibidache, Josef Hassid, Maxim Vengerov, Emanuel Feuermann, Krzystian Zimmermann, William Kapell, Nigel Kennedy, Sviatoslav Richter, maybe even Pablo Casals... even composers like Borodin, Boulanger, Dukas, Duparc, Dutilleux, Corelli, Varese, Ruggles, Webern, Warlock, Griffes, Lord Berners, even some of the big ones... Mahler, Mussorgsky, Bizet, Bellini, Ravel, maybe even Chopin and Brahms.... and there are just as many examples of this in theater, movies, art, and literature, to say nothing of other types of music.... Pianists seem to be particularly prone to this sort of paucity of appearance. And no doubt, some of it is hype, and some of it couldn't be helped because of early death, and not even from natural causes. but if, for whatever reason, artists find it difficult to conform to the strict channels of performance as its generally practiced, there's often a reason, and sometimes that reason is because they are so unique that they the normal ways that art is made chews them up and spits them out. So therefore, whatever they have to offer is particularly unique: often, though not always. Perhaps it's cheating - an artist who seldom appears has much more time to prepare and therefore perhaps have a much higher, even artificially high, rate of success.
And in the case of Leon Fleisher, I think we have the perfect example of an artist who seemed as though he would thrive in the impossible demands of classical music as we still currently practice it, and as could and should have been predicted, those impossible demands nearly killed him. He then became the latter kind of artist, and perhaps consequently, possibly far more valuable.
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