One day when I hadn’t done any practice, my piano teacher told me this fantastic story about how Schumann was so jealous of Chopin’s handspan (or maybe it was Liszt’s) he invented a hand stretching machine. It damaged his hand so badly he had to give up performing.
It turns out that Schumann did indeed damage his hand somehow, but it seems the evidence suggests his injury wasn’t caused by the device. (Which, in fact, wasn’t even for stretching his hands—it was for strengthening them.)
The more plausible (but also boring) possible explanations are below:
- Schumann’s hand injury — R A Henson and H Urich
- Schumann’s hand injury — Eric Sams
- Some further evidence — Eric Sams
(via cosmonaught)
