Chopin's fingering

When we listen to a record we tend to hear only the sounds; we forget that behind those sounds lies a complete reality, that we are eavesdropping on a performance that actually happened, at a specific place and time.  What we lose is the sense of the physical, of people playing instruments, and replace it by the ideal, of disembodied, automatic music. 

Before the gramophone record, there was another means of mechanical reproduction; the player piano.  A piano roll with small holes stored the music; air blown through the holes activated the keys on the piano.  Various arrangements and types of holes allowed all aspects of playing - tempo, volume, articulation, phrasing to be caught with great fidelity.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the player piano could also record performances.  As a pianist played, the exact details would be transferred to a piano roll, punched out as a series of holes.  Running the roll reproduced the pianist's performance almost exactly.  Thus it is that we can listen to some of the greatest composers of the early part of this century - Mahler and Elgar, for example - playing their own music, with none of the obfuscating wall of hisses and clicks of early records.

A piano player in action is an eerie sight.  The sound is that of a piano, and the actions required to produced those sounds are also those of a normal piano; the keys go down in the usual way.  Only the pianist is absent.  It is as if the player's ghost had sat down and played, the physical effects visible, but not the supernatural cause.

In a sense, the piano score is another kind of roll, without the need for air pressure, and with yourself as the mechanism re-enacting great musicians movements as they created the piece.  Generally, though, you have little sense of the composer's hands on the keyboard; they remain yours struggling to encompass the details of scales and chords. 

An exception can be found in the music of Chopin.  He was the ultimate pianist composer.  Practically every composition of his uses a piano.  Moreover, nearly every bar of the music for piano is stamped with his personal style, one he evolved independently from the musical mainstream, and one which grew out of his own pianism and the essence of the piano's resources.  This ‘piano-ness’ permeates all he wrote.

As a result, playing his piano music is an experience like no other.  Harmonies lie naturally under the hands, melodies arise inevitably from the physical layout of the keyboard, and every figuration seems to come from the fingers themselves.  As you play Chopin, whether one of the brilliant showpieces from the two great sets of studies which map out his pianistic heartland, or the simplest lilting mazurka, your hands take over from your head; the piece plays itself.

Or rather your hands are taken over: you no longer feel that they are your hands, but Chopin's, who is using you as his instrument.  Possessed, you can listen to the music with a rare detachment, and you can gain for a moment a true sense of its deep physicality. 

(16.12.89)

See also Moody Sonnets – Bach, And Chopin’s Hands

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