PIANO MUSIC for the LEFT HAND ALONE
Necessity is the Mother of Invention

One can't help wondering why it is that so much music has been written for the left hand alone and virtually none of any significance for the right hand. The answer is that almost all of the great music written for the left hand alone is the result of a determinedly heroic concert pianist having lost his right arm during World War I. Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961), an Austrian pianist and, interestingly, brother of the celebrated philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, refused to allow his career as a concert pianist to be ended almost before it had begun in earnest by the loss of his arm. Fortunately for us all, his was by no means an insignificant family in the world of music. As a young man he had played duets with Richard Strauss, and Strauss, Brahms, Joseph Joachim, and Gustav Mahler we family friends. And as a student of Theodor Leschetizky, he had an excellent pedigree as a pianist.

Wittgenstein was in a position to ask many of the most important composers of the day to compose music for for him to play. Among these were Richard Strauss, Sergei Prokofiev, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Franz Schmidt, Paul Hindemith, Alexander Scriabin, Benjamin Britten, Josef Labor, Sergei Bortkiewicz and Maurice Ravel. The Ravel Piano Concerto for the Left Hand is a magnificent work and is a staple of the repertoire today.

The left hand alone repertoire resulting from Wittgenstein's efforts has been veritable lifeline for other pianists as well who for one reason or another lost the use of their right arms. Brilliant concert pianists such as Leon Fleisher, João Carlos Martins, and Cor de Groot would not have been able to continue their careers successfully without it.

Prior to Wittgenstein's injury, a number of composers had composed or transcribed such piano music. Among these works are the Reinecke Sonata, the Reger Studies, and Johannes Brahms' Transcription of the Bach Chaconne in D minor from the 2nd Partita for solo violin BWV 1004. The Reinecke and Reger are curiosities, not particlarly brilliant pieces.

There was an earlier pianist who lost his right arm, the Hungarian Count Geza Zichy, a student of Liszt and the first to have a very successful career as a one-armed pianist. He was a sensation, but the piano music for the left hand that he composed or arranged for his own use was considered mediocre by Wittgenstein and seems to have died with him.

The Brahms work is sheer genius. It was transcribed for the left hand alone for Clara Schumann when she suffered an injury to her right hand. The Brahms transcription is much more faithful to the original than the more famous and more popular Busoni two-hand transcription which it predates by 16 years. Four performances of the Bach/Brahms Chaconne are offered below. Of the four, I quite like the way Sokolov and Béroff play it. Also to be found below are excellent pieces by Blumenfeld, Moszkowski, and Scriabin . We end with a tour de force by a young Brazilian pianist playing his own transcription of the Ride of the Valkyries from Wagner's Die Walküre that will leave you out of breath if not necessarily breathless.

The Etude by Blumenfeld is performed by two pianists. I find the Barere much more to my liking. The slower performance recalls to mind the comment of the emperor in the movie Amadeus, "Too many notes."

Leopold Godowsky's transcriptions of some of the Chopin Etudes for the left hand alone are simply beyond belief. You can hear a few of these as well as transcriptions by music of other composers and several original on the Godowsky Left Hand page. And perhaps the most interesting of all, from a historical perspective, are the recordings made by Wittgenstein of transcriptions by him and others for the left hand of such works as the Sextet from Lucia and the Liebestod from Tristan, including the Brahms transcription of the Bach Chaconne.

Bach-Brahms  Chaconne in D minor, BWV 1004 for the left hand

Anatol Ugorski, Russian pianist  (b 1942)

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