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.
萊昂·弗萊舍被切開的右手拇指縫好了針，似乎正在愈合。而他在露臺餐桌上與人爭論后不久，就注意到自己右手食指動作遲緩。尤其是當他試圖演奏顫音時，右手食指沒有反應，這可不是件小事。勃拉姆斯第一鋼琴協奏曲的慢板華彩樂段中的上升顫音，每一個都與下一個相連，然后隨著他觸摸踏板而延長——只是一點點，沒有炫耀的意味——它有一種像宇宙閃爍的共鳴。
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.
弗萊舍還注意到，他右手的第四和第五根手指開始彎起來。這使他幾乎不可能演奏三連音符。但是在勃拉姆斯的第三樂章中，他們把舞蹈推向了高潮，這使他非常開心，脖子后面的汗毛都豎起來了。簡言之，他不能再演奏他生命中最重要的樂章了。弗萊舍12歲生日時第一次聽到那個樂章，當時就像雷神的雷聲擊中一般。16歲時，他在紐約卡內基音樂廳首演時彈奏該曲目后，便被冠名為“世紀鋼琴發現”。自那以后，這首曲子一直是他的護身符和朋友。
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.
他最大的恐懼就是失敗，實際上，他什么曲子也彈奏不了了。那是1964年，他只有36歲。春天，他本來要去蘇聯進行巡回演出。整個20世紀50年代，他都在美國和歐洲演出。弗萊舍已與喬治·塞爾、克利夫蘭交響樂團、倫納德·伯恩斯坦和奧托·克倫佩雷爾一起錄制了李斯特、貝多芬和勃拉姆斯的最佳曲目。
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