Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Tuesday December 14, 2010
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MY NINE LIVES: A Memoir of Many Careers in Music
Leon Fleisher and Anne Midgette
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0385529181
325 pages
$26
Reviewed by Mindy Aloff
In the summer of 1964, the classical pianist Leon Fleisher, at his wife's request, was grudgingly moving a patio table out of the basement of their Baltimore home when he hit a door frame and sliced off part of his right thumb. A doctor stitched him up, but his relationship to the piano -- the greatest and most enduring love affair of his life -- had taken a hairpin turn.
Little by little, the last two fingers on his right hand curled against his palm. For the next 30 years, despite numerous medical consultations and unorthodox treatments, he became a left-handed pianist, trapped in a much-reduced (albeit brilliant) repertory of works written exclusively for that hand.
Left-handed pianists, when they are as awe-inspiring as Fleisher, will find work, but not sufficient work to support a wife, an ex-wife and five children. So, as Fleisher writes with his co-author, Anne Midgette (classical music critic for The Washington Post), in "My Nine Lives," he began to explore aspects of his field he might never have paid much attention to: conducting, teaching, advising. In a book that is thrilling as much for its narrative suspense as for its psychological sensitivity and intellectual insights, he tells about also exploring nonmusical aspects of our culture: motorcycles, drugs, Rolfing, EST. All the while, he harbored the hope that one day he would sit down at the keyboard, his fingers would uncurl, and he would once again be able to play the two-handed German repertory by Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms, which, for Fleisher, a five-year student of the legendary Artur Schnabel and a "musical son" of the revered conductor George Szell, constitutes the crown jewels of piano literature.
Thanks to a diagnosis of focal dystonia -- a condition that cannot be cured but can be temporarily relieved by Botox injections -- his dream finally came true, albeit in a tempered way. Now over 80, Fleisher once again is concertizing and recording as a two-handed pianist, and this time his repertoire embraces not only Bach and Schubert but also Chopin, Debussy, Scarlatti -- the repertoire associated with such pianists as Vladimir Horowitz, often the whipping boy of those who affiliate themselves with the purity of the German school. (Fleisher calls Horowitz "perverse" in his use of rubato and, on his own CD "Two Hands," demonstrates a very different approach, playing, for instance, Chopin's Nocturne in D Flat Major as if he were channeling Schubert. The result is diamantine and must be heard to be believed.)
Beyond that, Fleischer's personal life has soared into happiness. The wife of the patio table and he parted ways, with reasonable collegiality, and his third wife, Kathy, a considerably younger former piano student of his, has proven a helpmeet and soul mate.
His children have not only forgiven him his admitted neglect of them in their childhoods, but most of them have gone into music themselves. He has come to terms with his mixed feelings about his mother, a woman comparable to Gypsy Rose Lee's or the Marx Brothers' mum, who, in her pursuit of her prodigy's career, never sent him to school or permitted him to have friends outside his older tutors. Today, he has friends of all ages all over the world, both inside and outside music.
And he has come to understand that what music means for him is only partially what the instrumentalist's body achieves through finger action and other aspects of physicality. Music is larger than the body. As he tells his students, repeating a key lesson he learned from Schnabel, "Practice less, think more. All the notes (in the score) are equally black. It's up to us to make the decisions about which notes are of primary importance." His ultimate adage: "Support the composer. Classical music -- Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert -- should be played as if you're a part of the universe: man finds his proper place in the cosmos ... By contrast, in the Russian repertory -- those big showpieces by Tchaikovsky or Prokofiev -- you have to play as if you are the center of the universe."
"Should"? "Have to"? Regardless of how much you know about classical music -- or what convictions about it you may hold -- this book is an engine for thinking.
Mindy Aloff is a cultural critic who lives in New York.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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SCORPIONS: The Battles and Triumphs of FDR's Great Supreme Court Justices
Noah Feldman
Twelve
ISBN 978-0446580571
513 pages
$30
Reviewed by Dennis Drabelle
Twenty-one years ago, James F. Simon served up a piquant dish of American history called "The Antagonists," a book about thwarted expectations at a very high level. In the late 1930s and early '40s, Simon wrote, Washington insiders would have picked Justice Felix Frankfurter, a brilliant and well-connected former Harvard law professor, to take charge of the liberal Supreme Court that President Franklin Roosevelt was fashioning as vacancies arose. The same insiders would have cast Justice Hugo Black, a former senator from Alabama whose description of himself as "a country lawyer" was not far off the mark, as a probable acolyte.
In fact, however, Black went on to develop a plain but powerful approach to constitutional interpretation that made Frankfurter look conservative. To Frankfurter's dismay, it was not he but Black who became the Court's intellectual leader.
Now Noah Feldman, himself a Harvard law professor, has written a book similar to Simon's, although "The Antagonists" have bulked up into "Scorpions" and two more Roosevelt appointees have entered the lists: Justices William O. Douglas and Robert Jackson. Having reviewed "The Antagonists" for The Washington Post, I doubted that Simon's topic deserved another, broader look. In truth, however, it did. "The Antagonists" remains a very good book, but "Scorpions" is even better. In it, Feldman tells how four ambitious and strong-willed jurists jockeyed for position on a Supreme Court asked to rule on the constitutionality of New Deal programs and to find a balance between governmental objectives and individual rights.
In striking down New Deal statutes, Frankfurter believed, the Court had superimposed its own ideology on Congressional and presidential attempts to restore an ailing economy; as an antidote, he counseled judicial restraint across the board. The other justices were of the same mind as a challenging case reached the Court in 1940: Minersville School Dist. v. Gobitis.
The Pennsylvania school district had expelled two Jehovah's Witness children for refusing to salute the flag in class. Following his principle of restraint and writing for an 8-1 majority that included Black, Frankfurter sided with the authorities. He hinted that the school district might have acted more wisely by allowing the children to follow their consciences but decided that the Constitution did not require such an accommodation.
Frankfurter, who had helped found the American Civil Liberties Union, was roundly criticized for this decision; over the next few years, the Court's composition changed, and some of his brethren had second thoughts -- Black among them. In West Virginia v. Barnette (1943), the Court overruled Gobitis in an eloquent majority opinion by Jackson, who had joined the Court in the interim. "The very purpose of the Bill of Rights," Jackson wrote, "was to withdraw certain subjects from the vicissitudes of political controversy, to place them beyond the reach of majorities. ... Fundamental rights may not be submitted to a vote; they depend on the outcome of no elections." Frankfurter was so upset by this about-face that he took the extraordinary step of citing his own Jewish background in his dissent, which Feldman calls "the most agonized and agonizing opinion recorded anywhere in the U.S. Reports": "One who belongs to the most vilified and persecuted minority in history," Frankfurter asserted, "is not likely to be insensible to the freedoms guaranteed by our Constitution. Were my purely personal attitude relevant I should wholeheartedly associate myself with the general libertarian views in the Court's opinion, representing as they do the thought and action of a lifetime." How a "guaranteed" freedom could end up not being enforced by the court of last resort, however, was a puzzle Frankfurter did not solve.
As for Jackson, Feldman notes that he tended to pale next to the forceful Black and the flashy Douglas, but that in recent decades his reputation has risen. Not only was he a fine prose stylist, but his flexibility in judging contrasts favorably with the dogmatism of Frankfurter and Black. Indeed, a remark by Jackson might give pause to today's proponents of originalism (deciding cases on the basis of what the framers of the Constitution had in mind when they wrote its language). What the framers meant "or would have envisioned had they foreseen modern conditions," Jackson wrote, "must be divined from materials almost as enigmatic as the dreams Joseph was called upon to interpret for Pharaoh."
"Scorpions" climaxes with the Court's deliberations over Brown v. Board of Education, the 1954 case that marked the beginning of the end for government-sponsored segregation in the United States. Feldman ably captures the behind-the-scenes maneuvering to hammer out a unanimous opinion, including repeated visits by the new chief justice, Earl Warren, to the bed-ridden Jackson, who had been hospitalized after a heart attack. As Feldman points out, Brown not only heralded the end of the Roosevelt Court (Jackson died at the start of the following term). "It was also one of the only times that those fiercely independent men (Black, Frankfurter, Douglas and Jackson) agreed on a common opinion in a case of great moment."
Occasionally, I wanted Feldman to go a bit further. He makes much of Jackson's stint as a prosecutor (on leave of absence from the Court) at the Nuremberg Trials but overlooks Rebecca West's sharply etched portrait of Jackson in her coverage of those trials for the New Yorker. And in his account of how Hermann Goering sparred quite successfully with Jackson at Nuremberg, Feldman neglects to mention that the biggest (in more ways than one) surviving Nazi went on to cheat the hangman by committing suicide in his cell; for that matter, a summing-up of all the trial verdicts would have helped the reader assess Jackson's overall performance.
Still, one is grateful for what the author has accomplished: a book blessedly free of legal jargon, nuanced without being cryptic and full of high-stakes intellectual drama.
Dennis Drabelle is a contributing editor of The Washington Post Book World and a lawyer. He can be reached at drabelled(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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