2020年经济学人 钢琴巨匠莱昂·弗莱舍(1)（在线收听）

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.

莱昂·弗莱舍被切开的右手拇指缝好了针，似乎正在愈合。而他在露台餐桌上与人争论后不久，就注意到自己右手食指动作迟缓。尤其是当他试图演奏颤音时，右手食指没有反应，这可不是件小事。勃拉姆斯第一钢琴协奏曲的慢板华彩乐段中的上升颤音，每一个都与下一个相连，然后随着他触摸踏板而延长——只是一点点，没有炫耀的意味——它有一种像宇宙闪烁的共鸣。

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.

弗莱舍还注意到，他右手的第四和第五根手指开始弯起来。这使他几乎不可能演奏三连音符。但是在勃拉姆斯的第三乐章中，他们把舞蹈推向了高潮，这使他非常开心，脖子后面的汗毛都竖起来了。简言之，他不能再演奏他生命中最重要的乐章了。弗莱舍12岁生日时第一次听到那个乐章，当时就像雷神的雷声击中一般。16岁时，他在纽约卡内基音乐厅首演时弹奏该曲目后，便被冠名为“世纪钢琴发现”。自那以后，这首曲子一直是他的护身符和朋友。

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 Europe all through the 1950s. He had made definitive recordings of Liszt, Beethoven and Brahms with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, with Leonard Bernstein and with Otto Klemperer.

他最大的恐惧就是失败，实际上，他什么曲子也弹奏不了了。那是1964年，他只有36岁。春天，他本来要去苏联进行巡回演出。整个20世纪50年代，他都在美国和欧洲演出。弗莱舍已与乔治·塞尔、克利夫兰交响乐团、伦纳德·伯恩斯坦和奥托·克伦佩雷尔一起录制了李斯特、贝多芬和勃拉姆斯的最佳曲目。