January 5, 1932—In Vienna, Paul Wittgenstein (pictured), a piano virtuoso who lost his right arm because of wounds incurred during World War I service, performed in the world premiere of Piano Concerto for Left Hand, a composition he had commissioned.My headline states that Wittgenstein "aced" this work, and for most people in addition to me, the idea of a person with only one arm performing anything as technical as a classical composition is itself extraordinary. But one person--really, the one, besides Wittgenstein, most concerned with this work--woulud have begged to differ.
Composer Maurice Ravel—best known to modern audiences for Bolero, the Spanish-flavored orchestral composition that, in the Bo Derek film 10, became inextricably associated with sensuality—did not attend the performance, as he was only nine days from the Paris premiere of another one of his compositions, Concerto en sol. He did not, then, see the audience’s reaction to Wittgenstein, but it is unlikely that this would have changed his opinion of the interpretation.
Wittgenstein’s initial tepid reaction, upon first listening to the music, had disheartened Ravel. In turn, when Ravel finally heard what Wittgenstein had done with his composition, he demanded that the Austrian leave it alone. That insistence meant that it would be another year before the composer would witness, in Paris, a performance of the work that satisfied him.
The premiere marked the collaboration of two intelligent, brave--and, perhaps underlying the latter quality, stubborn--musicians whose experiences in the Great War seared them for the rest of their lives. Ravel, acclaimed as the greatest postwar French classical music composer, had volunteered for service. Only five feet two inches tall, the 39-year-old composer (exempted from military service nearly 20 years before because of a hernia and general weakness), enlisted as a truck driver--a particularly hazardous duty in 1916, when he had to drive behind the front lines at Verdun, with shells exploding to the left and right of him, according to New Yorker critic Alex Ross’ account in The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century. Arbie Orenstein’s Ravel: Man and Musician includes a revealing postcard the composer wrote at this time, telling a friend about “the center of this city which rests in a sinister sleep.”
For all his physical fearlessness, Ravel also demonstrated significant moral courage. Despite the presence of 80 signatures of French musicians, he refused to back a proposed ban by the National League for the Defense of French Music on music by German and Austrian composers, arguing that without exposure to foreign colleagues, the nation’s musical art “would soon degenerate, becoming isolated by its academic formulas.”
During the conflict, Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin would pay tribute, in each of the piano suite’s six pieces, to the memory of a different comrade struck down in the fighting.
On the opposite side of the war, Wittgenstein just barely escaped being one of these casualties. Three days after arriving on the Russian Front with Austrian forces, he was shot in the right elbow. It was bad enough that doctors performed a clumsy amputation operation in a field hospital, but he then was confined for months in a freezing Russian prisoner-of-war camp.
Yet Wittgenstein refused to abandon the desire to perform again. After drawing a picture of a piano keyboard on an empty crate in the camp, he took, according to Alexander Waugh’s The House of Wittgenstein: A Family at War, to “tapping his freezing fingers on the wooden box, listening intently to the imagined music sounding in his head and creating, in the corner of a crowded festering invalids’ ward, a tragicomic spectacle that aroused the sympathy and curiosity of his fellow prisoners and all the hospital staff."
Once demobilized, Wittgenstein pursued with a will his dream of performing as a one-armed pianist. He possessed several advantages in his attempt:
* Even before the war, his skill with his left hand had been remarked upon;
* Plugged into an extensive network of fellow musicians, he knew about the work of Leopold Godowsky, director of piano studies at Vienna’s Imperial Academy of Music, who had created a small but significant set of works specifically for the left hand; and
* The wealth of his prominent family (younger brother Ludwig became a famous philosopher) enabled him to commission new pieces for the left hand.
The latter proved especially helpful, as, over the next couple of decades, Wittgenstein played pieces written especially for him by Richard Strauss, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten, Erich Maria Korngold, and Sergei Prokofiev.
This was the background when Ravel began writing his concerto with Wittgenstein in mind. Some have suggested that the composer was already aware of the difficult relationships his client had developed with prior composers. Wittgenstein’s preference for 19th century music instead of the more avant-garde variety being created in the postwar, his desire to highlight his own playing, and his lack of diplomacy frequently annoyed collaborators. Prokokiev, for example, complained that without his disability, Wittgenstein “would not have stood out from a crowd of mediocre pianists." Moreover, because of the musician’s insistence on exclusive performing rights, he could effectively kill a piece that didn’t meet his demands--which is what happened to Paul Hindemith’s composition, which remained undiscovered in a drawer until 2003, four decades after the composer’s death.
After nine months of concentrated effort in which he put aside work on the two-handed Concerto en sol , Ravel played for his client his composition for the left hand. Characteristically, Wittgenstein made no effort to hide his feelings: “He [Ravel] was not an outstanding pianist," he recalled later, "and I wasn't overwhelmed by the composition. It always takes me a while to grow into a difficult work. I suppose Ravel was disappointed, and I was sorry, but I had never learned to pretend. Only much later, after I'd studied the concerto for months, did I become fascinated by it and realise what a great work it was.”
After the 1932 Vienna performance, an epistolary battle ensued between Ravel and Wittgenstein centering on the former’s insistence that the piece not be tinkered with. After considerable rancor, Wittgenstein finally was able to placate Ravel enough so that the composer agreed to lead the pianist and the Orchestra Symphonique de Paris in a performance of the piece, a little more than a year later. It couldn’t have come at a better time for Ravel, who had been involved in a taxi collision in the city only three months before--an incident that began an inexorable downward spiral in his health.
Critics raved about the concerto, marveling at its “sumptuous richness” and “astonishing variety.” Indeed, perhaps by this time it had finally penetrated even the prickly personality of Wittgenstein that the piece really allowed an interpreter such as himself to shine, providing at times more work than even two hands could normally handle.
Wittgenstein's ego was formidable even by the standards of creative artists, but that should not blind us to the magnitude of his achievement in this case. Far too many people, faced with staggering odds against ever appearing again on the concert stage, would have simply given up. Wittgenstein refused to accept the limits of despair, and by so doing he opened up the world of music in ways that the physically challenged can only appreciate now.
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