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Who would have ever thought the Wittgenstein family was so talented? ...and twisted, with an overabundance of suicides...

That leaves the two youngest sons. Paul, who made his debut as a concert pianist on the eve of the war (the conductor, to be sure, went on to commit suicide), showed great bravery as an Austrian soldier. After a bullet shattered his right elbow, the arm was amputated and he was taken prisoner by the Russians. Yet he was determined to stick with his pianistic career. Confined to the invalid ward of a Siberian P.O.W. camp under the most miserable of conditions, Paul set about solving a puzzle: how could a single hand play both melody and accompaniment? Obsessively tapping out a memorized Chopin piece with his freezing fingers on a wooden box and imagining the music, he began to develop an ingenious bag of tricks that would fool even the sharpest ear. "His most far-reaching innovation," Waugh writes, "was a combined pedaling and hand-movement technique that allowed him to sound chords that were strictly impossible for a five-fingered pianist to play."

Having perfected his piano technique between the wars, he thrilled concert audiences (especially women -- he was something of a lady-killer), who delighted in the spectacle of this one-arm wonder pounding out fortissimos. "The sheer speed at which he was able to move his fingers across the keyboard was breathtaking,” Waugh writes. Backed by the Wittgenstein family fortune, Paul set about commissioning piano concertos for the left hand from the leading composers of the day. His dealings with them proved comically tempestuous. He rejected Hindemith's composition as unplayable and wrote to Prokofiev, "Thank you for your concerto, but I do not understand a single note and I shall not play it." He accused Benjamin Britten and Richard Strauss of over-orchestrating -- "How can I with my one poor hand hope to compete with a quadruple orchestra?" -- and made an enemy of Ravel by altering the composer's Concerto for the Left Hand to suit his own taste.

But how did Paul sound? Well, this review from ClassicalCDReview.com isn't kind to the one-armed wonder:

The Concerto for the Left Hand was commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein (1887-1961) who had lost his right arm in World War I. Wittgenstein also commissioned concertos for the left hand from Franz Schmidt, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Richard Strauss, Benjamin Britten and Serge Prokofiev. It seems his ability as a left-handed pianist was rather limited; he never attempted Prokofiev's Concerto No. 4. Wittgenstein made no commercial recording of Ravel's concerto. Here we have a live performance recorded February 20, 1937, with the Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra conducted by Bruno Walter. It is far removed from the brilliance of the best of other recordings (Fleisher, Katchen, Françoise, Ousset). From the beginning, Wittgenstein is tentative and insecure with a final cadenza that is a near-disaster. This performance is solely of historic interest.

Oh yes, there's one more thing: Paul's brother was only the greatest philosopher of the 20th century. His name was Ludwig.

What a family!

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