By Emmeline Burdett
Maurice Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand was performed at the BBC Proms 2025 by Nicholas McCarthy, the only professional one-handed pianist in the world. It had not previously been performed by a one-handed pianist since 1951 (McCarthy, 2025). This inevitably raises questions about how physical disability is seen and interpreted, and how much this has really changed over the decades.
It also reminds me of the 2016 film Florence Foster Jenkins, starring Meryl Streep. This film was based on the true story of the US amateur soprano Florence Foster Jenkins (1868-1944), who was destined from childhood to become a concert pianist, but who had to abandon what were presumably her dreams due to an arm injury. The idea clearly is that if you only have one arm, it is impossible to become a concert pianist. This is not the case, as this post will show.
Historical Background
Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand was written for Paul Wittgenstein, (1887-1961) an Austrian pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War.
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| Figure 1 - This Photo of Paul Wittgenstein by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND |
McCarthy has described Wittgenstein as his ‘hero’ and pointed out that Ravel was not the only composer to write works for one-handed pianists. A lot of nineteenth century composers wrote works for the left hand for the purposes of showing off: statistically, most people are right-handed, and writing for a performer’s less-dominant hand was gave a good opportunity to showcase a musician’s talents (Roberts, 2024). Tenacity and a desire to show off meant that there was plenty of scope for a one-handed pianist to make a career. In addition, in 1957, Paul Wittgenstein published School for the Left Hand, a series of exercises, etudes and transcriptions intended for one-handed (not necessarily left-handed) pianists. So, why did Florence Foster Jenkins feel that she had to give up a career she presumably wanted to pursue; why had Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand not been performed by a one-handed pianist for over seventy years; furthermore, why had Nicholas McCarthy been discouraged from taking up the piano – he had been told at different times that training to become a pianist would be a waste of his and everyone else’s time, (Jackson, 2012) and also that he needed to concentrate on playing pieces written specifically for the left hand (Everett, 2014). This means that people from a minority – particularly people who are in a minority of one – are obliged to reinvent the wheel as it were – not because there have never previously been, for example, any disabled musicians, but because they are all considered to be individual unfortunates whose existence means nothing. Nicholas McCarthy had to reinvent the wheel by assembling a repertoire of piano works for the left hand – not because the people for whom they were written were despised outcasts, but because it seems not to have been thought that the reasons why they were written had any meaning other than in terms of personal biography, e.g. Paul Wittgenstein losing his arm in the First World War. A result of this attitude is that a disabled individual might not be able to succeed in their chosen field without being unusually tenacious. This is one reason why ’rights’ movements prefer to concentrate on the welfare of their group, rather than on specific individuals. Concentrating on the achievements of one individual can make the group’s situation appear better than it really is, but conversely, the last thing a ‘rights’ group may want is a successful individual who is not interested in portraying everything as being stacked against them. If one feels unable to participate in anything where it will be obvious that one is not ‘the norm’, the chances of one becoming any sort of pioneer are not high, but there are ways of approaching the fact that one differs from the norm, and merely telling someone that they should have had more backbone does nothing towards making the world a better place. Nicholas McCarthy has said that he was brought up to think of himself as being just like everyone else (Macmath, 2015), but this could mean anything from accepting that someone’s difference is just there, and is only relevant to certain situations to assuming that a disabled person has to abandon his or her ambitions to fit in with what ‘everyone knows’ about disability, regardless of whether what ‘everyone knows’ is actually true.
Florence Foster Jenkins and Franklin D. Roosevelt
There is no clearer demonstration of this than the case of Florence Foster Jenkins and how it is perceived.
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| Figure 2 - This Photo by Unknown Author is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND. |
In the 2016 film about her, there is no suggestion that she abandoned her career as a concert pianist for any reason other than she felt that it would not work. This suggests that either it was not common knowledge that a pianist could play one-handed, or that Jenkins felt that doing so was not an acceptable compromise. There may however be more to it than that, and it may be more indicative of the place of disability in certain kinds of societies. In his 1985 book FDR’s Splendid Deception, Hugh Gregory Gallagher highlights how the US president Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882-1945), who contracted polio in 1921 which meant that he had great difficulty walking, stipulated that he should never be photographed or filmed using a wheelchair lest it be assumed that he was too weak to be president (Gallagher, 1985). Roosevelt was President before, during, and after the Great Depression, and Gallagher argues that FDR wanted to show himself as ‘getting over’ polio as the US was ‘getting over’ the Depression. Gallagher also pointed out that previous biographers had regarded Roosevelt as an individual superhuman and not put his disability into any kind of context or discussed it in a rational manner. (Floyd, 2010) Their attitude is also instructive for the insistence that Nicholas McCarthy should not waste everyone’s time by training as a concert pianist, because there certainly would not be enough pieces to sustain a career.
A lot of the ‘disability context’ that might apply to Roosevelt might also apply to Florence Foster Jenkins. They were virtual contemporaries, and Foster Jenkins died a year before Roosevelt. They came from similarly privileged backgrounds. Though this does not make them ‘the same’, it does raise the possibility that they may have had similarly squeamish attitudes to the public exhibition of what would widely have been seen as a weakness.
The Ugly Laws
Both Foster Jenkins and Roosevelt lived in the shadow of the so-called ‘ugly laws’ (Schweik, 2009). These laws, which were in operation in various US states between 1868 and 1974, were ‘unsightly beggar’ ordinances, aimed at criminalizing actions indicative of disease or disability, such as limping. As these laws were in operation for over a hundred years, they were clearly not a temporary measure. They did not legislate against the public exhibition of disabled individuals, but against interactions between disabled and non-disabled people, meaning that they could be interpreted as having a quasi-eugenic purpose. Since the US passed the world’s first eugenics law, in the state of Indiana in 1912, such ideas have a certain inevitability. As President, Roosevelt could have been instrumental in repealing them, but his obsessive desire for secrecy makes this unlikely. Foster Jenkins may have been influenced by the legal requirement to hide a disability – an impression which is bolstered by her later decision to sing in public. She may not have been very good at it, but it would have enabled her to express herself musically whilst not displaying a damaged arm. By contrast, Nicholas McCarthy wore a suit which emphasised the fact that his arms were different lengths. This striking difference may be explained partly by the passage of time, but why was Nicholas McCarthy the first one-handed pianist in over seventy years to play a composition specifically written for a one-handed pianist?
Stigma (1963)
In his book Stigma: On the Management of Spoiled Identity, published in 1963, the sociologist Erving Goffman suggested that a person with a ‘stigma’ (something that marks him or her out as being different from other people) will try to conceal this difference, and feel shame at being unable to meet other people’s standards. The book opens with a letter, supposedly from a teenage girl to an agony aunt. In this letter, the girl, who was born without a nose, bends over backwards to understand others’ negative attitudes towards her, conjectures that she must have done something wrong in a previous life and asks the agony aunt whether she should kill herself. (Goffman, 1963)
Enter Paul Wittgenstein, who was so resolutely unembarrassed by having only one arm that he asked the composer Maurice Ravel to compose a piece of music for him. He might, however, have felt himself to be a non-disabled person who had had a serious injury. This attitude might be partly attributable to having lost his arm in wartime, which lends a certain heroism and might mean that he did not struggle with his identity to the same extent as someone who had been disabled from birth. Nevertheless, even if Wittgenstein was not ‘the norm’, he unquestionably existed. The apparent assumption, however, that his attitude was not how someone would ‘normally’ react to disability, together with Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s biographers’ portrayal of him as an individual superhuman, lend weight to the idea that there is a general assumption about how one ‘should’ respond to disability, and that (a) deviating from this requires considerable strength of character and (b) deviations are generally interpreted as evidence that one is an unusual individual, rather than that one has a legitimate point of view. It may be that if deviations became more accepted as meaning something more than that one was a remarkable individual, it would not be so necessary to be a remarkable individual.
Dr Emmeline Burdett is an independent researcher.
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References:
Dias, L. (2025) ‘Using negativity to drive forward: One-handed pianist Nicholas McCarthy conquers the classical world’. Scroll.in
Everett, Lucinda (2014) ‘Concert pianist Nicholas McCarthy on music education and the Paralympics’. The Daily Telegraph.
Floyd, B. (2010). Hugh Gregory Gallagher's Splendid Reception. Disability Studies Quarterly.
Goffman, E. (1963). Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
McCarthy, N. (Performer). (2025, July 20). BBC Proms 2025: Ravel's Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. Royal Albert Hall, London, United Kingdom.
Schweik, S. M. (2009). The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York/London: New York University Press.
Shaw Roberts, M. (2024). World’s only one-handed pianist reveals fascinating history of left-hand piano. Classicfm.com
Recommended citation: Emmeline Burdett (2025): The only one-handed pianist in the world - and not just because most people have two hands. In: Public Disability History 10 (2025) 7.
