After losing his right arm in combat during World War I, Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein was determined to continue his concert career. In the process, he was solely responsible for establishing an unusual group of compositions. He developed a virtuosic left-hand technique and approached numerous composers—including Paul Hindemith, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, and Benjamin Britten—to write works for him to perform with his remaining arm. His unique circumstances made him no less exacting. In one tale, Wittgenstein received music from Richard Strauss with a rich, extensive lush accompaniment and commented, “How can one hand compete with a quadruple orchestra?” Prokofiev’s Fourth Piano Concerto was dismissed with, “Thank you very much, but I don’t understand a single note of it and shall not play it.” And when he saw the extended cadenza that opens Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand—considered the finest of the left-hand compositions—he complained, “If I wanted to play without the orchestra, I wouldn’t have commissioned a concerto!”  

Despite Wittgenstein’s complaint, Ravel refused to amend the concerto—and Wittgenstein premiered the work in Vienna on November 27, 1931. Ravel wanted the piece to be more than a parlor trick. “In a work of this kind,” he wrote, “it is essential to give the impression of a texture no thinner than that of a part written for both hands. For the same reason, I resorted to a style that is much nearer to that of the more solemn kind of traditional concerto.” Although it differs from the traditional concerto in its three-movement form, Ravel creates the aural illusion that both hands are involved. The piano traverses the breadth of the keyboard freely, generating such rich melody and harmony that if one closes one’s eyes, it is impossible to believe that the work is composed for the left hand alone.