Word: wittgenstein
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
Having lost his right arm to shrapnel on the Russian front in World War II, Rapp heard of Wittgenstein's example,* decided to go on playing too. "With me the yearning was so great I felt I never wanted to give up." He began to study the limited repertory, began to get ahead using the Ravel concerto as a staple...
...Prokofiev's left-hand concerto on a list, wrote to his widow in Moscow to ask her for the score. As the music was heard in Berlin last week (with the Metropolitan Opera's Martin Rich conducting), it no longer seemed aggressively modern, as it had to Wittgenstein, but more like an old friend. The whole piece is sprayed with crotchety harmonies, but it always makes the kind of leeway towards a safe harmonic port that is part of Prokofiev's charm. The solo part is no virtuoso standout, contains no smashing chords; it is a kind...
...posthumous publication of a book of Ludwig Wittenstein's lecture notes. The book, Philosophical investigations, in already being used in Harvard's course in Epistemology and should, according to Dr. Robert Ziff, instructor of Philosophy, "produce a greater orientation of Philosophy in America in regard to language." Claims Wittgenstein in Investigations: "The work of a philosopher consists of assembling reminders for a particular purpose...