Chopin’s hands

Technology makes us forgetful: each advance, each new wave tends to wash away the memories of its predecessor.  Thus in the world of computers, the 3.5 inch floppy disc is so ubiquitous that to encounter the older 5.25 inch format is like meeting a long-lost ancestor.  Few people know of the existence of an even earlier design, a full 8 inches square, which now looks like the fossil of a dinosaur.

The same is happening with recorded music.  The triumph of the CD over the LP means that we are losing everything it once represented to us.  In particular we are losing its physicality.  In the place of the large, glistening black disc, with its faint, exotic odour, we have the small, convenient, antiseptic piece of plastic which seems devoid of characteristics, devoid of content almost.  The fact that it contains music is reduced to a kind of magic, and the connection between what we have and what we hear is broken.

As a result we find it hard to experience recorded music for what it is: a real moment in time, caught like a beetle in amber.  We forget that the sounds we hear were made by people, perhaps long dead.  It is only when we listen to something completely out of the ordinary – for example the sound of the last Western castrato, caught on an ancient 78 record – that we may be shocked into a sense of the reality of the experience.

Before LPs, before 78s – and how many of us have ever played a 78? - there was an earlier technology which puts us in even closer touch with the music and musicians.  These are the piano rolls, cut by the player on a special instrument, and capturing nearly every nuance of the performance by means of punched holes.  Listening to a roll is therefore a ghostly re-enactment of those moments: the keys go down, the pedals are pressed, the music peals forth with all its phrasing – only the original player is absent.  In this way we have a good idea of how famous composers such as Elgar and Mahler actually played their music.

But there is another, even simpler, technique for capturing the extraordinary sense of music being created.  As we play on the piano a work by composers who were themselves pianists, we can begin to sense underneath our hands, in the chords they put down on paper, and which we now form with our fingers, their own hands as they played.  Just as there is a spectral musician in the player-piano, so that spirit is present too every time we play the piece ourselves.

This effect is more haunting in some music than it is in others.  Composers such as Mozart seemed to produce music of such classical beauty and perfection that it almost transcends the physical.  To play his music is to create music pure and simple.  Beethoven, by contrast, assaults his instrument; in his music we can feel the sense of strain as chords and notes are thrown around the keyboard.  But it is perhaps in Chopin that we find this effect at its height, a composer who wrote nothing without the piano, and whose music is so intimately bound up with the sensuous act of playing that every bar seems to bear not just his fingerprint, but the marks and shape of his very hands too.

(1.3.92)

See also Moody’s Sonnets

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