Nine Lives

In My Nine Lives, the pianist Leon Fleisher describes the despair he faced when the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand curled up and stopped working. He was in his prime, playing with the world’s great orchestras, when the mysterious ailment derailed his career. Fleisher had been playing since he was four — for as long as he could remember — and by age 9 was studying with the great Artur Schnabel. Music was Fleisher’s life.

Fleisher admits that he thought about suicide. But he loved life and he loved music, so he turned to teaching and conducting. He mastered repertoire for the left hand and gave recitals. He never stopped looking for a cure for his right hand, either, and more than 30 years later, he found one: botox injections for what was finally diagnosed as focal dystonia, a neurological condition that makes muscles contract.

The life he lived was not the one he planned; it was a richer one. “Time and again, I would look at my life and marvel that so many wonderful things had happened that never would have happened if my hand had not been struck down. I couldn’t imagine my life without conducting. I couldn’t imagine life without teaching so intensely. I couldn’t imagine my life without [my wife] Kathy.”

This is the door-closing-window-opening philosophy writ large. As I write these words I listen to Fleisher play the Schubert Piano Sonata in B-flat Major, Opus 960. It’s a piece that Fleisher (with co-author Anne Midgette) describes as “sublime,” “aching,” “like a memory from far away.” The music Fleisher makes now is transcendent. The desert years carved out a place in him, and the music that gurgles up from that place is both delicate and unflinching. His playing has a depth that comes from struggle.