In an article for The Guardian, Nicholas McCarthy, a pianist who was born without a right hand, explores music for piano left-hand, “often seen as a mysterious niche” of the classical repertory.
Some of the best-known works in this genre were written for the Viennese pianist Paul Wittgenstein, brother of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. After losing his right arm in World War I, the pianist commissioned some of the leading composers of his time to write concertos and other works for the left hand, most famously Maurice Ravel, but also Sergei Prokofiev, Richard Strauss, Paul Hindemith, Benjamin Britten, Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Bohuslav Martinů.
Left-hand piano music, however, has a longer history, McCarthy notes. Franz Liszt and other virtuosos of the 19th century offered “dazzling feats of pyrotechnics using only their left hand. Using the so-called ‘weaker’ hand to deliver a bravura display was irresistible to concertgoers, and the spectacle would leave them in awe.”
More seriously, Johannes Brahms produced a piano left-hand arrangement of the Chaconne that concludes Johann Sebastian Bach’s Partita No. 2 in D minor, BWV 1016, for solo violin. Brahms’ arrangement predates Feruccio Busoni’s better-known two-hand transcription by two decades.
“Though the left hand tends to be weaker, its physiology gives it an advantage,” writes McCarthy, who played the Ravel concerto in a BBC Proms concert on July 20. “In standard two-handed piano repertoire the melody line is mostly projected in the right hand by the little finger, the weakest of the fingers. But in left-hand repertoire the melody line is projected by the thumb, the strongest digit, giving it greater clarity.”
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