“In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister”: Technik und Ästhetik der Klaviermusik für die linke Hand allein (review)

With the recent auction of the formerly inaccessible Paul Wittgenstein Archive, with an increasing number of one-hand pianists now sustaining successful concert careers, and with more American musicologists interested in the intersections between music and disability, the once-marginalized repertoire of one-hand piano music is now ripe for historical and critical scrutiny. This monograph, by the Austrian pianist Albert Sassmann, is an important contribution to the topic. Sassmann divides his study into four main sections: (1) a long-range history of the left hand’s role in piano music, culminating in the cultivation of the left-hand-only piano repertoire by pianists Leopold Godowsky, Géza Zichy, Paul Wittgenstein, Otakar Hollmann, and others; (2) a consideration of one-hand performance practice and technique; (3) an “aesthetics” of one-hand performance, meditating on the reasons why many composers are drawn to this medium; and (4) a large, ninety-page catalog of piano repertoire written for the left hand alone. Generously illustrated with over two hundred music examples, and written in straightforward German prose, Sassmann’s study has the potential to appeal to a diverse audience, including primarily the students and faculty of graduate programs in piano performance and composition. (Several fine Ph.D. and D.M.A. dissertations anticipate Sassmann’s topic, including So Young Kim-Park, Paul Wittgenstein und die für ihn komponierten Klavierkonzerte für die linke Hand [Aachen: Shaker Verlag, 1999] and Won-Young Kong, “Paul Wittgenstein’s Transcriptions for Left Hand” [D.M.A. diss., University of North Texas, 1999]). Sassmann’s monograph paves the way for future doctoral students in piano performance to embark on similar studies.

In his title, Sassmann quotes from the penultimate line of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem “Natur und Kunst”: “In der Beschränkung zeigt sich erst der Meister,” or, “mastery reveals itself in limitation.” (Sassmann stops there, but Goethe closes his famous sonnet with an equally relevant formula: “Und das Gesetz nur kann uns Freiheit geben,” or, “only law can give us freedom.”) This conception of artistic achievement and expressive freedom— as predicated on rules, limitation, Beschränkung—is a trope that composers of one-hand piano music repeatedly invoke. Sassmann quotes Godowsky (whose virtuosic one-hand arrangements of Chopin were staples of Wittgenstein’s performance repertoire): “Working within self-imposed limitations convinced me that economy of means lead to a superior form of concentration” (pp. 212–13; italics added). Variations on this trope may be seen in many of the excerpts included from interviews that Sassmann conducted with composers of one-hand piano music; consider the comments of the Australian composer Michael Hannan: “[T]he idea of placing a limitation or set of limitations on what you do . . . stimulates the discipline of composing; and it makes one work harder to achieve solutions to problems” (p. 221; italics added). The Beschränkungen of the one-hand piano repertoire, though certainly restrictive in one domain (the reduced number of fingers), are liberating in another. The same formulation may be adjusted to apply to performance (musical or otherwise): the “single-handed” achievement is more impressive than a two-handed enactment of the same feat.

This is a powerful reconfiguration of the nature of limitation (and it parallels how the field of disability studies has sought to reinterpret the supposed “limitations” of physical impairment). An ambitious Sassmann reads the implications of his aesthetic into artistic works, styles, and genres that lie far outside the one-hand piano repertoire: he also discusses one-note fantasies, Ligeti’s Musica ricercata, minimalist music and art—even the continuous takes famously used by Alfred Hitchcock in his film Rope. (Describing his creative process, the novelist David Mitchell recently put his own characteristically clever spin on the trope: “The better-tied straitjacket, the more spectacular the act of escapology has...