Episode notes
Original Airdate: March 26, 1974
Episode 0063 "Death By Whose Hands"
Original Story by Ian Martin Directed by Himan Brown Host: E.G. Marshall
Set in the early 1900's; a surgeon attaches the hands of a dead piano player to the arms of his rival. The consequences are deadly.
What would you say is the one single feature that distinguishes man from all his fellow creatures? His brain? Speech? His ability to walk erect? The fact that he's the only living thing that kills for any other reason than self-defense or food? None of them. Something much more simple. A phenomenon shared only by our cousins, the apes. The human hand. This is a gripping, eerie story of a pair of, how best to describe them, superhuman, unique, no, perhaps best, a pair of immortal hands.
In the beginning of the 19th century, no city in Europe shone more brightly, or boasted a more resplendent culture than Vienna. City of dreams, of glittering balls of royalty and nobility and beautiful women, but most of all of music. Music to the Viennese was and is a religion of faith. An insidious destructive emotion which can lead to sinister and deadly results. You are listening at the moment to the hands of Rudy Baum on the piano in Vienna's great concert hall.
Starring: Stephan Schnabel, Robert Drivas, Roger Dekovan, Marian Seldes, Ira Lewis