Leon Fleisher died on August 2nd

A WHILE AFTER his argument with the patio table, when his sliced right thumb had had stitches and appeared to be healing, Leon Fleisher noticed a sluggishness in his right index finger. It was especially unresponsive when he tried to play trills, and that was no small matter. The ascending trills in the cadenza of the adagio of the Brahms first piano concerto, each joined by the next and then prolonged with a touch of the pedal—just a little, nothing showy—had a resonance like the shimmering of the universe.

He noticed, too, that the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand were starting to curl under. This made the playing of triplets more or less impossible. Yet in the third movement of the Brahms they made the dancing culmination of the work, delighting him so much that they made the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

In short he could no longer play the most important piece in his life, the one that had first struck him like Thor’s thunder on his 12th birthday, had anchored his debut as “the pianistic find of the century” at Carnegie Hall in New York when he was 16, and had been his talisman and friend ever since. He, whose greatest terror was failure, could not, in fact, play anything.

It was 1964, and he was 36. In the spring he was due to tour the Soviet Union, having performed in America and...