Only the most musically adept among you will be able to define what is sinister about this music.
The piece is by Maurice Ravel, which probably doesn't help much. It's played by Paul Wittgenstein, which might help.
Listen for a couple minutes before seeing the answer below the fold.
Wittgenstein is playing only with his left hand.
He studied with Malvine Brée and later with a much better known figure, the Polish virtuoso Theodor Leschetizky. He made his public debut in 1913 and favourable reviews were written about him. The following year, however, World War I broke out, and he was called up for military service. He was shot in the elbow and captured by the Russians during an assault on Poland, and his right arm had to be amputated.He commissioned this and other works:
Following the end of the war, Wittgenstein studied intensely, arranging pieces for the left hand alone and learning the new composition written for him by Labor. Once again he began to give concerts, and became well known and loved. He then approached more famous composers, asking them to write material for him to perform. Benjamin Britten, Paul Hindemith, Alexandre Tansman, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Sergei Prokofiev, Franz Schmidt, Sergei Bortkiewicz, and Richard Strauss all produced pieces for him. Maurice Ravel wrote his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, which became more famous than any of the other compositions that Wittgenstein inspired. But when Wittgenstein made changes to the score for the premiere, Ravel became incensed and the two never reconciled.Wikipedia has a page listing works for the piano left hand and orchestra. There are over 40 of them, but - surprisingly (to me) - only four composed for the right hand only. Why the discrepancy ??
Wasn't he a left-hand-only player?
ReplyDeleteConcert pianists can get overuse injuries on right hand, especially related to playing trills with 4th/5th fingers. These injuries can be incapacitating in terms of continued performance. Therefore the piano repertoire for the left hand is also used by these pianists who still have right hands but have lost functional use on the right.
ReplyDeletevery interesting. Thank you, ozzie. You learn something every day.
ReplyDeleteThere was an episode of MASH where Maj. Winchester consoles a solider-pianist who lost his right hand by obtaining a copy of a left-hand concerto.
ReplyDeleteI had to look up sinister to see why you would choose that word. (I vaguely remember reading that definition before.) I suppose you could say he was very dexterous with his left hand.
ReplyDeleteThat was a new one to me too. Another interesting word for a left-handed person that I've come across is a mollydooker.
DeleteI was unaware of that definition for sinister. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteAs a southpaw myself, I am all too aware of "that" use of sinister. Boy, talk about give a dog a bad name and hang it. I wonder which was the first meaning of sinister - ie. lefthandedness, or the connotation of malevolence.
ReplyDeleteAt any rate, the double meaning led to a lot of foolishness from pious-minded simpletons over the years, including beating left-handed children simply for being "sinister" and using a cruel halter to immobilize the offending hand behind their back. I'm not THAT old (48 in May) and even I remember being looked upon askance by some of my more aged teachers.
har har har - the only other usage of 'sinister' or 'sinistra' I've come across was in organic chemistry, back in the day... R/S configurations of chiral (i.e. mirror images of organic chemical compounds centred around a carbon atom)
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chirality_(chemistry)#Naming_conventions
good pun, given the proximity to the horrors of WWI.
Paul (brother of Ludwig) lost his right hand in the First World War. The Wittgenstein's were a priveleged bunch - Paul's father was the second richest man in Austria, so they tended to know a lot of composers, so Ravel, who was a big fan of Paul's wrote him The Left hand Piano Concerto as Wiki puts it:
ReplyDelete"The Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D major was composed by Maurice Ravel between 1929 and 1930, concurrently with his Piano Concerto in G. It was commissioned by the Austrian pianist, Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm during World War I.
Wittgenstein gave the premiere with Robert Heger and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra on 5 January 1932. Before writing the concerto, Ravel enthusiastically studied the left-hand études of Camille Saint-Saëns. The first French pianist to perform the work was Jacques Février, chosen by the composer himself."
In addition to the RSI issue mentioned above (which makes sense given that trills are much more common in the right hand), I'd expect most other injuries and accidents to be more likely to affect the dominant hand (the right hand for the vast majority of the population).
ReplyDeleteIf memory serves, there's an old monster movie about a one-armed concert pianist, whose missing hand crept around strangling people. I think his signature piece was the left-hand transcription (by Brahms?) of Bach's famous Chaconne from the D minor solo violin partita.
You're remembering "The Beast with Five Fingers" -
Delete"Peter Lorre stars in the film, his last with Warner Brothers. Siodmak had originally written the film for Paul Henreid who turned it down.[1] The piece much played throughout the film is Brahms' transcription for left hand of the chaconne from Johann Sebastian Bach's Violin Partita in D minor, performed by Warner Bros. pianist Victor Aller."