Coming of age in the first half of the 20th century were two exceptionally talented children of wealthy Austrian steel magnate Karl Wittgenstein: Ludwig Wittgenstein became a famous philosopher and Paul Wittgenstein a concert pianist.

Paul Wittgenstein served in the Austrian army in World War I, and, for a concert pianist, had suffered a terrible injury: the loss of his right arm. Undaunted, he rebuilt his career by commissioning and performing works for piano left-hand. The family fortune enabled Paul Wittgenstein to commission many of the leading composers of his day, including Richard Strauss, Maurice Ravel, and Sergei Prokofiev.

Unfortunately, even the Wittgenstein fortune couldn’t protect the family from the racial laws of Nazi Germany, given the family’s Jewish heritage, and, in 1938, Paul Wittgenstein decided to leave his native land for the United States after Austria’s “Anschluss” with the German Reich.

In America, Wittgenstein commissioned a concert work from a young British expatriate named Benjamin Britten, who was also living in America at the time. Paul Wittgenstein gave the premiere performance of Britten’s “Diversions” for piano left-hand and orchestra on today’s date in 1942, with the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy, and confessed that of all the commissions he had motivated, Britten’s work came the closest to fulfilling his needs and wishes.