Leon Fleisher was born on July 23, 1928. Fleisher is a pianist who specialized for many years in music written to be played using only the left hand.

Fleisher made his public debut as a pianist at the age of eight, and played with the New York Philharmonic at 16. He made a series of critically acclaimed recordings in the 1950s, playing the standards of the mainstream piano repertoire. In 1964, Fleisher began to suffer from focal dystonia, a neurological disorder that affects the muscles. In his case, it affected the muscles of the right hand so severely that he could no longer play the piano with that hand. Fortunately for Fleisher, a small but significant body of music exists to be played solely by the left hand.

That music dates back to at least the mid-19th century, when the Italian pianist Adolfo Fumagalli (1828-1856) began to compose music for the left hand. Sketches exist of Fumagalli holding a cigarette in his right hand while playing with his left, suggesting that he had the use of both hands, and that his music was written not from necessity, but as a way to display the virtuosic dexterity of his left hand. Hungarian Géza Zichy (1849-1924) had a successful career for 40 years as a left-handed pianist; he had lost his right arm in a teenage hunting accident. Like Fumagalli, Zichy wrote much of the music he performed, including a concerto, a sonata, and several transcriptions of music by other composers.

The single greatest source of music for piano left hand was the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961), who lost his right arm during World War I. Wittgenstein was not a composer himself, but had already had such success as a pianist before the war that he was able to commission left-hand music from many major composers. New music was written for Wittgenstein by (among others) Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten, Sergei Prokofiev, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Paul Hindemith, and Maurice Ravel. Ravel's concerto has so firmly entered the piano repertoire that it is frequently played by two-handed pianists.

Fleisher has recorded three of the major concertos for piano left-hand, those by Ravel, Britten, and Prokofiev. He has also recorded a solo recital of left-hand music, and a program of chamber music for strings and piano left-hand.

Fleisher and his friend Gary Graffman (1928- ), another pianist who suffers from focal dystonia, have commissioned their own additions to the left-hand repertoire. American composer William Bolcom wrote a concerto for Fleisher and Graffman that can be played in three ways—either pianist can play his solo part with a reduced orchestra, or the soloists can play the concerto together with the two small orchestras combining to form a full orchestra.

In the 1990s, Fleisher regained the use of his right hand after a series of botox injections. In 2004, he released his first two-handed recording in more than 40 years; it was called Two Hands.

For other ventures into music for piano left-hand, Gary Graffman performs a concerto by Ned Rorem, and Stefan Warzycki offers a recital that includes music by Camille Saint-Saëns, Frank Bridge, and Alexander Scriabin.

You might be wondering about music for piano right-hand. It exists, though there is less of it. Much of it was written for the British pianist Cyril Smith (1909-1974), who usually performed as a duo with his wife, Phyllis Sellick, before suffering a stroke in 1956. A few composers wrote pieces for them to perform as a three-handed duo.