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Piano Technique – Harold Bauer

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I do not believe in so-called ‘piano technic,’ which must be practised laboriously outside of pieces. I do not believe in spending a lot of time in such practise, for I feel it is time wasted and leads nowhere. I do not believe, for instance, in the struggle to play a perfectly even scale. A scale should never be ‘even,’ for it must be full of variety and life. A perfectly even scale is on a dead level; it has no life; it is machine-made. The only sense in which the word ‘even’ may be applied to a scale is for its rhythmic quality; but even in this sense a beautiful scale has slight variations, so that it is never absolutely regular, either in tone or rhythm.

Then I do not believe in taking up a new composition and working at the technical side of it first. I study it in the first place from the musical side. I see what may be the meaning of the music, what ideas it seeks to convey, what was in the composer’s mind when he wrote it. In other words, I get a good general idea of the composition as a whole; when I have this I can begin to work out the details.

Chopin and Beethoven – Piano Technique Without Limit

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By John Aschenbrenner

There are two composers from the common practice period whose solo piano music will exhaust a pianist faster than any other.

Chopin is merciless in his physical demands on the performer. One “impossible” passage follows another, each one harder for the fact that one is exhausted from the last.

I mean physical exhaustion, like your wrists are shaking from too many octaves, or the tendons on the top of your arms start to ache from such contorted hand positions. Chopin puts difficult passages, as one would expect, in the right hand, and his right hand parts are wonders in themselves: cogent, contrapuntally perfect and ever lyric and natural.

But the Chopin left hand, like the male ballet dancer, must do stoic work at the same time, and Chopin never made his left hand part a mere accompaniment.

Chopin is unique in that his demands are made of both hands in fairly equal measure. He had no fear of awkward positions and expected that pianists would find solutions to his daunting problems.

Beethoven made similar demands, if somewhat less lyrically than Chopin. If you ever doubted what a great pianist Beethoven was before he went deaf, look at some of the right hand parts in the Sonatas.

His right hand figuration is not really pianistic in the way Chopin’s is. Difficult as they are, Chopin’s figures (arpeggios) always fit some physical logic in the hand. Beethoven never does. He never follows what is physically gracious, opting rather for the music itself to be perfect, and the pianist is then left to struggle with what are often almost insurmountable physical and technical problems.

A perfect example is the finale to the famed Moonlight Sonata, a tangled frenzy in the almost impossible key of C Sharp Minor.

Yet within that mass of physical problems lies music of such perfection that the musician is inspired to find ways to master the knotty Beethovenian language.

Chopin would not like to be mentioned in the same breath as Beethoven, for he found Beethoven’s music awkward and ugly.

John Aschenbrenner is an Emmy Award Winning Composer and a leading children’s music educator, book publisher, and the author of numerous fun piano method books in the series PIANO BY NUMBER for kids. You can see the PIANO BY NUMBER series at http://www.pianoiseasy.com and http://www.pianoiseasy2.com

Composing the Sixth Prelude and Drowned in a Lake

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The Preludes were published in 1839, yet there is internal evidence which proves that most of them had been composed before the trip to the Balearic Islands. This will upset the very pretty legend of music making at the monastery of Valdemosa. Have we not all read with sweet credulity the eloquent pages in George Sand in which the storm is described that overtook the novelist and her son Maurice? After terrible trials, dangers and delays, they reached their home and found Chopin at the piano. Uttering a cry, he arose and stared at the pair. “Ah! I knew well that you were dead.” It was the sixth prelude, the one in B minor, that he played, and dreaming, as Sand writes, that “he saw himself drowned in a lake; heavy, ice cold drops of water fell at regular intervals upon his breast; and when I called his attention to those drops of water which were actually falling upon the roof, he denied having heard them. He was even vexed at what I translated by the term, imitative harmony. He protested with all his might, and he was right, against the puerility of these imitations for the ear. His genius was full of mysterious harmonies of nature.”

The Sixth prelude in B minor was played at Chopins own funeral service.

Chopin’s Conscientiousness as a Composer

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George Sand has given us a vivid sketch of Chopin’s conscientiousness as a composer. “He shut himself up in his room for entire days,” she says, “weeping, walking about, breaking his pen, repeating and changing a bar a hundred times, and beginning again next day with minute and desperate perseverance. He spent six weeks over a single page, only to go back and write that which he had traced at the first essay.”

Contrary to his seemingly endless small revisions whilst striving for perfection we know from letters Chopin had written that he often had pieces almost fully composed in his head. No doubt, during his improvisations, many themes occurred to him which he remembered and utilized. His creativeness was often inspired by visions of female loveliness and patriotic reminiscences and when inspiration struck  “it descended upon his piano suddenly, completely, sublimely, or it sang itself in his head during his walks, and he made haste to hear it by rushing to the instrument.”