Word: rapp
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...years late. In West Berlin's ultramodern Conservatory Concert Hall one night last week, a large crowd gathered for the first performance of Piano Concerto No. 4, written by Russia's late great Sergei Prokofiev in 1931. At the keyboard was East Berlin's Pianist Siegfried Rapp, impeccable in white tie and tails. There was only one odd thing about the soloist: his right sleeve was empty and pinned to his coat...
...Rapp is the latest of a grim little line of musical specialists: the one-armed pianists. Pieces for one hand used to be merely pleasant musical oddities, but forsome pianists they became necessities. In World War I a Viennese pianist named Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm, but stubbornly refused to abandon his virtuoso career. He commissioned and performed Ravel's Concerto for Left Hand, two works by Richard Strauss, and Benjamin Britten's Diversions on a Theme. Wittgenstein (now 68 and a teacher in Manhattan) also commissioned-but never understood or played-the Prokofiev concerto that...
...Rapp got the idea in a roundabout way from Dr. Garwood Richardson's simple urine test for pregnancy (TIME, May 2, 1949). Rapp decided to see whether any secretions besides urine showed pregnancy. He tried tears and sweat, found them no good. Saliva seemed to be a flop, too: half the results were negative, even with women known to be pregnant. Dr. Rapp decided to forget about it, and put the work aside...
Some time later, an idea struck him: perhaps those "false negative" tests had been telling him something, after all. He checked the hospital records of 50 cases, found that all the "negatives" had had girls, the "positives" had had boys. Rapp's hypothesis: a male fetus releases male hormones into the mother's system-in sufficient quantity to be detected in saliva...
...check his theory, Dr. Rapp has since tested 400 women five to six months pregnant, and 92% of his predictions have been right. (The test is no good for diabetic women, and can be thrown off by drugs such as aspirin.) Dr. Rapp still considers his findings "preliminary." But recently, when his wife had a baby son, her doctor came hustling out of the delivery room with the happy news that Rapp was right again...