Somewhere in America tonight, two grown men are ruining a perfectly good dinner arguing about whether Michael Jordan would beat LeBron James. The argument cannot be settled, which is precisely why it never ends. The two men in question never met in their primes and never will; one belongs to 1996 and the other to 2013, and there is no court anywhere on which those two years can play each other. Every greatest-of-all-time debate carries this quiet joke inside it: greatness arrives with a date stamped on it. A trophy says what happened, and when, and against whom. About everything afterward, it keeps a polite silence.

I’m not here to put a damper on anyone’s accomplishments, but most of the time, the trophy was modest even in its own moment. And it wasn’t actually the point. A championship, a diploma, a personal best, a corner office — each one is a certificate, and a certificate can only certify something that has already occurred. The game reveals the practice. The recital reveals the scales. By the time the applause arrives, the substance being honored is old news: months and years of growth accumulated in rooms where nobody was watching. Which leaves a question worth turning over slowly. Every certificate expires — the record falls, the title passes, the body ages out of the game. When it does, what becomes of the thing it certified?

Now to history. In December 1913, a young Viennese pianist named Paul Wittgenstein made his debut in the Golden Hall of the Musikverein, and the critics approved. He had grown up in a house where Brahms and Mahler came to dinner, where a boy could play duets with Richard Strauss. The path ahead was as clear as a path can be. Nine months later, Europe went to war. Wittgenstein went to the eastern front as an Austrian officer, where a bullet shattered his right elbow, and surgeons in a Russian field hospital took the arm. He woke up a concert pianist with one hand and was shipped to a prisoner-of-war camp in Omsk, Siberia.

He continued to do what he knew. He found a wooden crate, sketched a keyboard onto it, and began working out fingerings for the left hand alone — in a Siberian prison camp, on furniture, in silence. Through the Danish ambassador he sent a letter to his old teacher Josef Labor, a blind composer back in Vienna, asking him to write a concerto for the left hand. Labor wrote back that he had already started.

Repatriated in 1916, Wittgenstein shut himself inside the family house and practiced seven hours a day, inventing techniques as he went — combinations of pedal and hand-movement that could make five fingers sound like ten. Then he took the family fortune and did something nobody had done at that scale: he commissioned an entire literature. Strauss, Prokofiev, Korngold, Britten, Hindemith, and Ravel, whose Piano Concerto for the Left Hand would become the most famous of them all.

He was, it should be said, history's most exacting customer. He informed Prokofiev, regarding a concerto written expressly for him: "I do not understand a single note and I shall not play it." He griped that Strauss and Britten had buried his one poor hand beneath a quadruple orchestra. He rewrote Ravel's score for the premiere — thickened the harmonies, cut bars, awarded himself a grander cadenza — and Ravel, upon discovering this, stopped speaking to him for years. The Hindemith concerto he rejected outright and hid in his study, where it stayed until after his widow's death in 2002. Genius, apparently, does not always come house-trained.

But look at what the cranky one-handed man actually built. By the time Wittgenstein died in New York in 1961, his own performances had long since faded from memory. What remained was the room he had furnished: a whole wing of the piano literature that had not existed before him, sitting quietly in the world's libraries.

Three years later, in 1964, an American pianist named Leon Fleisher noticed the fourth and fifth fingers of his right hand beginning to curl into his palm. Fleisher was thirty-six and among the most admired pianists alive; his recordings of the Beethoven and Brahms concertos with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra were already the versions other pianists measured themselves against. No doctor could tell him what was wrong; the neurologic condition, focal dystonia, went unexplained for decades. The curling didn't hurt, and it didn't stop. Within a year, the career as he knew it was gone.

Two dark years followed, of a kind he rarely described. And then, slowly, a discovery that sounds simple and took half a lifetime to earn. Fleisher began to teach. He learned to conduct. And he walked into the room Paul Wittgenstein had built forty years earlier — the left-hand repertoire — and found that everything he was still lived there. The ten thousand hours, the ear, the phrasing, the judgment. His left hand was still a capable ally.

Fleisher played that literature for more than thirty years. In the 1990s, experimental treatments began to loosen the curled fingers, and in 2004, at seventy-six, he released his first two-handed album in four decades, titling it — with the economy of a man who had thought the matter through — Two Hands. That same year, in Berlin, he gave the world premiere of the Hindemith concerto Wittgenstein had rejected and hidden, eighty-one years after it was written.

Their pursuits of greatness are instructive. Each man began with a definition of success that seemed perfectly clear when he started — the debut, the recordings, the settled path upward. The game, predictably, changed. Wittgenstein's definition was taken by a bullet; Fleisher's by two fingers with an unyielding will of their own. The same thing happens, more gently, to nearly everyone. The body ages. The industry turns. The children grow up and stop needing the exact thing you had gotten so good at giving. Life does not consult anyone before changing the sheet music; it simply sets the new pages on the stand. The temptation is to grieve the old song, or to argue with the new one — to stand in the wings insisting on 1996.

The two pianists suggest a different accounting. The performance was always the smallest part of the enterprise — a receipt, dated and fading, for growth that had already happened somewhere quieter. The beautiful thing is that growth, unlike the trophies that measure it, transfers. Musicianship survived the loss of an arm and the curling of a hand because it had never lived in either place. Patience, judgment, craft, the trained ear, the character underneath all of it — these turn out to be the only winnings that are portable, the only currency the next season will accept.

There is a corollary here, and it is a comfort. Definitions of success morph and mature the very way the people holding them do, and arriving at a new one is usually a receipt in its own right. The man who once counted applause and now counts students taught, or children raised, or work done well without witnesses, is reading a truer instrument than the one he started with. And growth, once banked, owes nobody an annual recertification. Even the great dynasties cannot win every year. The scales, once learned, stay learned. They next become the foothold.

Let the certificates yellow in their frames. They were lovely. They were also, from the very beginning, about something else. The trophy was only ever the receipt, and it’s best to keep what you paid for.

John

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