How Paul Wittgenstein mastered the piano with the use of just one hand

Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961) overcame a wartime tragedy to excel in his chosen field.

On Dec. 1, 1913, to much critical acclaim and press attention, Wittgenstein made his debut as a concert pianist in the Golden Hall of the Vienna Musikverein. Just nine months later, World War I erupts. The pianist enters military service and shows great bravery at the eastern front as an Austrian officer.

After a bullet shatters his right elbow, Wittgenstein has his arm amputated in a Russian field hospital. Sent to a prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia, he ponders his fate, wondering: How can I save my concert career if I have with only one hand? How can a single hand play both melody and accompaniment? 

After sketching a keyboard on a wooden box, he begins to develop fingerings that would compensate for his one-handed state. Using a combined pedaling and hand-movement technique, he learns allows to make chords sound in a way that even a 10-fingered pianist would find hard to achieve.

Returning to Vienna after a prisoner-of-war exchange, Wittgenstein holes up in the family manor and practices seven hours a day while perfecting his left-hand techniques. With the pieces written for him by his piano teacher Josef Labor and his own arrangements of highlights from the virtuoso piano literature, he revives his concert career.

Aided by the Wittgenstein family fortune, he commissions piano concertos for the left hand from the leading composers of the day, including Ravel’s Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and a concerto by Prokofiev that was never performed. The pianist’s dealings with the composers proves to be tempestuous. He rejects Hindemith’s composition as unplayable and writes to Prokofiev, “Thank you for your concerto, but I do not understand a single note and I shall not play it.” He accuses Benjamin Britten and Richard Strauss of over-orchestrating their works: “How can I with my one poor hand hope to compete with a quadruple orchestra?”  He alienates the usually amiable Maurice Ravel by altering the composer’s Concerto for the Left Hand to suit his own taste.

In 1938, the Wittgensteins, though raised as Catholics, discovered that they are regarded as Jews under the Nuremberg laws, due to their Jewish grandparents. Paul leaves Austria just after the Anschluss and lands in New York. His three sisters remain in Vienna. The only thing standing between them and the camps is the hoard of gold the Wittgenstein family has stashed away in Switzerland, which the Nazis are eager to get their hands on.

The legal wrangling over the fortune among Paul, his sisters and the Nazi regime  lawyers, and the arrest and imprisonment of the sisters for passport fraud, finally ends when Hitler himself grants a life-sparing change in family status from Volljuden (“full Jews”) to Mischling (“half-breeds”).

Paul Wittgenstein spends the rest of his life in the United States, with his wife Hilde Schania and their three children. During his life he kept the pieces he commissioned for himself. After his death in 1961 Hilde continues to guard his heritage. Only after her death in 2001, Wittgenstein’s library is auctioned for musicological research, unveiling a last collection of manuscripts and concert scores. Along with the piano concertos written for him, there is a hidden treasure of chamber music; many scores had never been played again after their premiere by Wittgenstein himself.