The pianists who achieved their success single-handed

ClassicTalk with George Hamilton: How necessity became the mother of musical invention

Piano man: Cor de Groot developed repetitive strain injury in his right hand

George Hamilton

April 24 2021 05:00 AM

On Sunday Miscellany the other week, I heard the distinguished broadcaster and journalist Olivia O’Leary musing on how her love of music developed after her mother bought a rather elegant record player for the family.

Olivia and her siblings were captivated by Chopin, whom they got to know courtesy of an album by a famous Dutch pianist Cor de Groot.

Born in 1914, he was a special talent. For his final exam at music school he performed a concerto he’d written himself. He graduated with top marks.

At the Vienna Piano Competition in 1936, de Groot reached the final. One of the jurors was Emil von Sauer, a German composer, who declared after experiencing the young Dutchman’s performance: “Now that I have heard Cor de Groot, I can die in peace.”

Maurice Ravel’s impressionistic Jeux d’eau had featured on de Groot’s programme, and he went on to specialise in the French composer’s music. The archives contain a particularly highly regarded live recording of Ravel’s Concerto in G.

Cor de Groot’s breakthrough came at a concert in Germany in 1943. Wilhelm Backhaus, a huge name as he had been one of the pioneers of piano recording in the early years, had to pull out of a performance of Beethoven’s C minor concerto. De Groot stepped in, and the audience, and the critics, sat up and took notice.

He built a tremendously successful international career, which came to a shuddering stop in his mid-40s. De Groot was a renowned perfectionist, and his rigorous attention to detail had brought on repetitive strain injury in his right hand.

Problems like this are common among pianists. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin developed RSI, just like de Groot. His Opus 9, a Prelude and Nocturne, took account of this.

The American Leon Fleisher, who died only last year, developed what golfers would know as the yips — involuntary spasms — in his right hand. The Chinese pianist Lang Lang, one of the top virtuosi around, was out of action for two years because of tendinitis, a condition he put down to overwork.

De Groot carried on, making arrangements of two-handed music, and delving into the catalogue of works written for the left hand alone. There are more of these than you might think. Friedrich Kuhlau is credited with the first work of this kind, the second movement of one of his sonatas, written in 1812.

Géza Zichy, a Hungarian count who lost his right hand in a hunting accident when he was a teenager, had piano lessons from Franz Liszt, composed music that he could play, and subsequently became the world’s first professional one-handed pianist.

Then there is Adolfo Fumagalli, an Italian composer nicknamed the Paganini of the piano. He built a sizable part of his reputation with dazzling pieces that deployed only the left hand. His Wikipedia entry features a cartoon of him playing with one hand with a cigar in the other.

Maurice Ravel wrote a concerto for the left hand — not the one de Groot recorded to such acclaim — for the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost an arm in World War I.

George Hamilton presents The Hamilton Scores on RTÉ lyric fm from 10am each Saturday and Sunday

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