Only 5 Fingers Playing Piano, but the Sound of So Many Hands

When Nicholas McCarthy was 15, he telephoned a local music school to ask about taking piano lessons and mentioned that he was disabled, having been born without a right hand.

The school principal didn’t take the news well. “How will you even play scales?” McCarthy recalled her saying, dismissively, before hanging up.

Now, some 20 years later, McCarthy is set to prove anyone who doubted him wrong — and in a high-profile way. On Sunday at the Royal Albert Hall in London, McCarthy is the star name for a concert at the Proms, Britain’s most prominent classical music series.

In front of thousands of spectators in the hall, as well a live TV audience, McCarthy, 36, will perform Maurice Ravel’s bravura Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, using the grand piano’s sustain peddle to elongate the bass notes while his hand leaps around the keyboard.

During a recent interview at his home near London, McCarthy said he was both nervous and excited about the gig. Many piano stars, including Yuja Wang, have used the Ravel concerto as a showpiece, and he didn’t want anyone to dismiss him as a diversity hire. “I’d very much like, and expect, to be judged just the same as everyone else,” he said.

For an instrument on which the performer’s left hand often takes a subordinate role to the right, there is still a vast repertoire for the left hand alone: over 3,000 pieces, including some 30 concertos.

In the 19th century, virtuoso pianists, including Adolfo Fumagalli, composed left-handed works to wow audiences during encores. (Sometimes, Fumagalli used his right hand to smoke a cigar.) “They were saying, ‘You think I’m good with two hands? Wait until you see what I can do with only my weaker one,’” McCarthy said.

The most important figure in the repertoire’s development was Paul Wittgenstein, a promising Austrian pianist, who fought with the Austro-Hungarian army in World War I, alongside his brother Ludwig, the future philosopher. Paul Wittgenstein was shot in battle, and woke up in a hospital to learn that doctors had amputated his right arm.

Wittgenstein said later in interviews that he had never contemplated giving up music, and recalled drawing a charcoal keyboard on a crate when he was sent to a Siberian prisoner-of-war camp so that he could practice one-handed. In the decades after his release in a prisoner exchange, Wittgenstein used his family’s wealth to commission composers including Ravel, Paul Hindemith, Sergei Prokofiev and Richard Strauss.

McCarthy said that Wittgenstein, who performed the Ravel concerto at the Proms in 1932 and again in 1951, was his hero. “I was born with one hand, and that was hard enough,” McCarthy said. “But to have had that hand and lost it,” he added was “mind-blowing.”

McCarthy’s journey to the Proms began late for a pianist. As a boy, McCarthy didn’t play instruments at all, and listened mainly to pop music like the Spice Girls. That changed when, aged 14, he went to a school assembly and heard a friend play Beethoven’s epic “Waldstein” Sonata.

He was transfixed. “It sounds corny,” McCarthy said, “but it was like a life-changing Oprah Winfrey moment. Just, ‘Wow! This is what I’m going to do for my job.’”

The idea that having only one hand might hold him back didn’t cross his mind, McCarthy recalled. “It was teenage invincibility. At 14, you think it’s so easy to become an astronaut, an Olympian, a gold medalist. So it’s also easy to become a one-handed pianist”

He asked his parents to buy him a piano, but instead they got him a cheap electronic keyboard, on which he taught himself.

McCarthy progressed rapidly, and his parents hired a teacher after they heard him playing Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata in another room and thought the sound was coming from a radio. He went on to win a place at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, then the Royal College of Music, where he became the institution’s first one-handed piano graduate.

In the early years of his professional career, McCarthy said, he often had to “stand and smile” while two-handed stars won engagements to perform left-handed pieces over him.

“I love hearing other pianist play the repertoire,” McCarthy said. “But at the same time, you’re sidelined.” It was particularly galling if orchestras were trumpeting their work to promote diversity and ignoring him at the same time, McCarthy said.

Things started changing last year when McCarthy made his solo debut at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, an esteemed London venue, and began playing with top British orchestras including the Royal Philharmonic.

Now, McCarthy said, he is commissioning composers to add to the one-handed repertoire, just as Wittgenstein once did. He said he was also working with Britain’s major piano exam board to develop a grading system for disabled pianists.

In his sunlit home studio after the interview, McCarthy sat on a piano stool at his instrument with his belly button lined up an octave above middle C. That position is to the right of where a two-handed player would sit, but McCarthy said it allowed him to glide more easily along the keyboard.

He began playing a section of the Ravel concerto that featured what he described as a “watery” melody. His hand flowed up and down the keys, drawing out a sparkling tone.

Whenever McCarthy’s hand climbed to trill the piano’s highest keys, his left leg shot outward to keep him balanced. He’d then swing upright, then lean left so that his little finger could strike a deep bass note that echoed in the room.

The sound was lush, full and McCarthy brought out the shifting moods Ravel’s music: from heartbreaking, to comic, to romantic.

Even standing just feet away, it was hard to believe McCarthy was producing all that emotion, all that sound, with two hands, let alone just one.