Ich bin ein [Texas-Born] Berliner

This astonishing video has the title “The Four-Finger Pianist”.  I did not find it easy to watch, and probably neither at first will you, but what I heard so fascinated me that I forced myself, to my very definite benefit and enlightenment. 

I took it for granted that “The Four-Finger Pianist” meant four fingers on each hand – but no, this Korean musical phenomenon Hee Ya Lee, now 20, has only two fingers on each hand, although I imagine you’ll find that next to impossible to believe when you listen to her lace into Chopin’s “Revolutionary” Etude, a far from easy piece for even ten-fingered pianists. 

The text here introduced me to the medical term phcomelia, which caused her disfigurement at birth.  You may recall the wave of tragedy that struck Germany some years ago when many mothers who had taken the inadequately tested new drug thalidomide gave birth to babies similarly disfigured.  That happened to Hee Ya’s mother, who in Korea had taken something similar to counteract motion sickness.  I suggest you watch and listen to this mind-boggling video, then I’ll tell you more about this amazing young woman:

Anyone familiar with Germany’s great bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff will understand why I immediately relayed this video to him by email.  (I never pass up an opportunity to brag about having “discovered” him at a time when most Americans had yet even to hear his name for the first time, and soon after that my unbounded enthusiasm burgeoned into an unusually long story – three full pages – I wrote about him for the European version of “Time”.)  His mother, during her pregnancy with Tommy, had taken the inadequately tested German drug Contergan (generically known as thalidomide – fortunately never approved by the American authorities) and Tommy entered this vale of tears along with plenty of other affected German kids with a permanently deformed body, details of which you can easily find by Googling.  It has gratified me beyond words to follow his progress during the years since then to become the logical successor to the Berlin-born legend Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, with such leading conductors as Claudio Abbado, Daniel Barenboim, and Sir Simon Rattle today virtually vying with one another for his services.

Hee Ya Lee has no possible chance of emulating Quasthoff’s world-wide success; he overcame his own cruel handicap thanks to having a singer’s physical fundamentals – vocal cords, lungs, and head – completely intact, but when nature provides you with only four of the human body’s customary ten fingers, you can’t really do very much about it.

Tommy Quasthoff also had the rare luck of having exceptionally intelligent loving parents plus a brother he once described to me as “wonderful”, and they made one basic sentence a sort of cantus firmus during his childhood: “You can do that, Tommy – do it!”  This video makes abundantly clear that in a different way Hee Ya enjoys the blessing of an equally remarkable mother, and her very manner when she appears before an audience to do her thing at the piano speaks volumes about her own psychological development and triumph over one of the cruelest lifelong handicaps one can even imagine.