This pianist played an epic Rachmaninov prelude with a broken finger

21 September 2019, 22:41 | Updated: 4 October 2019, 15:45

An incredible x-ray and story from a very, very lucky Rachmaninov pianist.

A few days ago, reddit user AN0N0-00 made the following post:

They were going to play a Rachmaninov prelude with a severely broken finger. And obviously, there were going to be questions.

Following the upload of the x-ray, fellow Redditors immediately responded suggesting that permanent damage would result from playing in this condition, and strongly advised the musician to cancel their performance.

That was when things got deeper. The injured pianist responded: ‘I’m playing at a friend’s father’s funeral and they didn’t have enough money to hire a pianist so I offered to do it so now I’m not gonna be that guy who cancels last second...” (it would have been literally last second).

They also said the Rachmaninov piece in question – his epic Prelude in C sharp minor – had been specially requested by the late father. Many Redditors still pleaded for the pianist to cancel in case of permanent injury.

Here’s that prelude, for context:

Several hours later, AN0N0-00 posted an update: he had gone ahead with the performance.

“Bad news, my finger is in horrible pain. It’s looking a little blue and it’s perpetually shaking which is probably not a good sign. I don’t even know how to describe it, it just hurts a LOT. I’m sitting in the urgent care waiting room right now so hopefully, it’s not that bad.”

“Good news: I gave a f****** glorious performance.”

A little later, there was a further update: “I went to urgent care and it looks like I displaced it a little further. The doctor said I should be fully functional again after surgery and like 3-4 weeks of healing.

“Also just a disclaimer, I don’t encourage anyone to do this I got lucky but you can actually f*** things up and potentially never play again.”