Elegy for Left Hand
Nov 21st, 2008 by oldfogey
This is a piece that Leopold Godowski wrote for Paul Wittgenstein, the one armed pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War. Godowski was a master pianist, and a wild virtuoso, who rewrote and ‘improved’ many of Chopin’s works, and in the process made them impossible to play for everyone but those who had his own level of virtuosity. Even Artur Rubinstein thought Godowski an impossible act to follow.
This Elegy is a short piece. But it’s lovely, and melancholy. It was an encore played by the great South American pianist, Jorge Bolet, at a concert I was privileged to be at almost a quarter of a century ago, on 21 December 1983, at St John’s Smith Square, London. The applause is cut off at the end, which is a pity, for it was rapturous.
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