For the Left Hand

The premiere was 25 years late. In West Berlin's ultramodern Conservatory Concert Hall one night last week, a large crowd gathered for the first performance of Piano Concerto No. 4, written by Russia's late great Sergei Prokofiev in 1931. At the keyboard was East Berlin's Pianist Siegfried Rapp, impeccable in white tie and tails. There was only one odd thing about the soloist: his right sleeve was empty and pinned to his coat.

Rapp is the latest of a grim little line of musical specialists: the one-armed pianists. Pieces for one hand used to be merely pleasant musical oddities, but forsome pianists they became necessities. In World War I a Viennese pianist named Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm, but stubbornly refused to abandon his virtuoso career. He commissioned and performed Ravel's Concerto for Left Hand, two works by Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten's Diversions on a Theme. Wittgenstein (now 68 and a teacher in Manhattan) also commissioned--but never understood or played--the Prokofiev concerto that was premiered last week by Siegfried Rapp, a musician with a story similar to his own.

Having lost his right arm to shrapnel on the Russian front in World War II, Rapp heard of Wittgenstein's example,* decided to go on playing too. "With me the yearning was so great I felt I never wanted to give up." He began to study the limited repertory, began to get ahead using the Ravel concerto as a staple.

Always on the alert for some way to widen his scope, Rapp spotted Prokofiev's left-hand concerto on a list, wrote to his widow in Moscow to ask her for the score. As the music was heard in Berlin last week (with the Metropolitan Opera's Martin Rich conducting), it no longer seemed aggressively modern, as it had to Wittgenstein, but more like an old friend. The whole piece is sprayed with crotchety harmonies, but it always makes the kind of leeway towards a safe harmonic port that is part of Prokofiev's charm. The solo part is no virtuoso standout, contains no smashing chords; it is a kind of foreground commentary on the music as it unreels. But Pianist Rapp played it lovingly and expertly. "Right after the war, with so many disabled veterans around, I found genuine sympathy among audiences," he says. "Today it has become much more difficult for me. Today's audiences are spoiled by technical perfection, and they look for force of expression in addition. The two together are hard enough for a man with two arms."

*There were others, e.g., Hungary's famed Count Geza Zichy (1849-1924), who wrote his own left-hand works; the modern Czechoslovakian Otakar Hollman, who commissioned Janacek's Capriccio in 1926.

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