A Great Pianist and Teacher, Locating the Keys to Perseverance

But in 2001, there was a major breakthrough, when Fleisher underwent treatment with botulinum toxin, or Botox, at the National Institutes of Health. This radical therapy, in tandem with the Rolfing, finally allowed the tension in his muscles to relax and permitted his fingers, long crabbed, to stretch out to their full length again.

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Since then, he has made some beautiful recordings, the first of which was called, appropriately, "Two Hands." In the future is a Mozart concerto and an album of what Fleisher refers to as "guilty pleasures -- encore pieces by Albeniz, Granados and other composers."

In the meantime, Fleisher continues to teach at Peabody. "It is a fabulous way to learn," he said. "One teaches almost for selfish reasons, to clarify things in your own mind and verbalize them for the students."

This Fleisher does brilliantly. At a Peabody master class in April 2004, he led a gifted student through a performance of the Sonata in F Minor, Op. 5, by Johannes Brahms. First, he permitted the young man to play the first movement straight through without comment, to appreciative applause from the small but intensely focused audience.

"Beautiful," Fleisher said, after a moment of silence. "How do you feel about your interpretation at this point? Are there still things that leave you dissatisfied?"

Fleisher then launched into an explication of the sonata so acute and thoughtful that it called to mind what the literary biographer W. Jackson Bate said of the late letters of John Keats -- that there was not a single idea about poetry in any of them that could not be tested and found true.

"When you get right down to it, there are three very simple choices that musicians have to make," Fleisher said. "We have to decide how to attack the note, how to support the note and how to stop the note. It's tougher for pianists in some ways because we don't have to support the note physically the way other instruments do. If you stop moving the bow on a violin or blowing into a wind instrument, the music stops right there. With the piano, the sound can be sustained by a pedal. But that doesn't let us off the hook.

"This is piano music, but it has a profound sense of the orchestra," Fleisher said. "Think about how you would orchestrate this -- the bass line might be played by the strings or maybe by the brass -- and then play it as if you were an orchestra, all by yourself."

The pianist then began the piece again, and what had been powerful but somewhat one-dimensional suddenly blossomed into a full-fledged and deeply moving performance. "Yes!" Fleisher shouted. "That's a statement."

Fleisher believes that today's pianists are more proficient than ever, even without "pumping ivory." "The technical capacities we expect from musicians as a matter of course is more and more amazing. It's a little like the four-minute mile was for runners in my day -- an impossible goal. But now there are four-minute miles being run all the time. We've transcended that limit.

"The same thing is true of pianism. There are a lot of 'four-minute mile' pianists out there now. But the real artists are as rare as they ever were."

Fleisher should know. He's one of them.