NYTimes.com: The Perseverance of André Watts: Putting physical disability on view in the highly competitive arena of classical music takes grit

André Watts performing with the New York Philharmonic at Avery Fisher Hall in 2012.  

Credit...Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images

The New York Times

Toward the end of 2019, the classical pianist André Watts was facing what seemed to be an insurmountable impediment. The last time he had encountered nerve damage in his left hand, back in 2004, an operation on a herniated disk led to rapid recovery. But this time the injury was not to the nerve sheath but to the nerve fiber, and after vertebra surgery, the prognosis was not good. Regeneration would take time; there was no guarantee that it would enable him to fully use his all-important left thumb. He canceled quite a few concerts, but would he have to relinquish his performance career altogether?

There was no need to concertize in order to boost his reputation. Half a century of performances and recordings had already earned him the National Medal of Arts as well as many other honorary prizes and degrees. Innumerable appearances with virtually every major orchestra here and overseas had brought raves by audiences and reviewers over his “personal magic” and the “opulence” of his sound.

André knew that his teaching would also survive the cancellation of performances. I use his first name because after he joined the music faculty at my school, we bonded as cancer patients and then celebrated when his prostate cancer went into remission in 2017. At the start of this year, I marveled at his ingenious plan to meet at least some of his upcoming commitments to appear onstage, despite the immobilized fingers of his left hand.

While driving home from school one day, André heard on the radio Maurice Ravel’s “Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major,” which was commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, an Austrian pianist who had lost his arm in World War I. Could the piece be tackled by the right hand, André wondered as he began working on a transcription? Would the conductors in Detroit and Atlanta, with whom he was scheduled to appear in March, be willing to swap the Ravel for what he had signed up to play, Beethoven’s “Fifth Piano Concerto”?

André’s love of performing dates back to the age of 10, when he played his first concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra and guessed that being a concert pianist could become “a grown-up job,” although even then he realized that “‘wanting’ and ‘being’ were not the same thing.”

And, of course, many of us remember seeing the 16-year-old André performing with Leonard Bernstein on his televised Young People’s Concerts.

That he continued making beautiful music for decades explains why both Thomas Wilkins, a guest conductor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and Robert Spano, the musical director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, immediately agreed to the proposed Ravel program. André began practicing, while I watched online videos of the piece, wondering how he could retain balance when reaching for notes in the lower range of the keyboard with his right hand. André’s esteemed teacher Leon Fleisher had explored left-hand compositions because of a dysfunctional right hand. But André would be using the traditionally stronger hand on a score composed for the weaker. No extensive right-hand repertoire exists.