Piano Notes: The World of the Pianist by Charles Rosen

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CHAPTER ONE

Perhaps the most obvious device is the imitation of a singer trying to reach a high note , always an expressive effect .

What is considered primary is a set of pitches which we must imagine as independent of any instrumental color: rhythmic indications are less primary (that is, they can be inflected to some extent according to the personal taste of the performer, with rubato and expressive alterations and deformations) but they are still relatively abstract.

The musician who has surrendered his will to tradition has abandoned the possibility of keeping the tradition alive .

It was , I think , above all the fact that it was the only instrument that could both realize an entire musical score on its own and at the same time call into play all the muscular effort of the body of the performer .

The danger of the piano , and its glory , is that the pianist can feel the music with his whole body without having to listen to it .

It is evident that he wished not only to hear the canon , but to feel the two-part counterpoint in one hand .

The graceful or dramatic movements of the arms and wrists of the performer are simply a form of choreography that has no practical effect on the mechanism of the instrument , although if it looks more graceful , it may sound more exquisite , not only to the public but to the pianist convinced by his own gestures .

The real source of a beautiful tone quality is the musicianship and intelligence of the performer . This is what should be encouraged in piano pedagogy and not the illusion that there is a purely mechanical or technical method of making a good sound .

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CHAPTER TWO

Within limits, the familiarity given by repeated performance does not remove spontaneity from the playing : on the contrary , the greater ease and the larger awareness of what one is doing allow for new inspiration and a less mechanical rendition .

In difficult technical passages , on the other hand , the problem is to disengage the mind and allow the body to take over on its own .

A proof of how purely physical the process of learning music can be is the fact that if one practices a passage steadily for a quarter of an hour , an immediate improvement does not always appear . The next day , however , it has suddenly and magically improved as if the labor was validated only by a night’s sleep . It is simply that technique works at its best when the involuntary part of the mind takes over more completely . Then consciousness , no longer burdened with the difficulty of hitting the right notes , can assess all the other aspects of performance .

It is a path that leads from the perception of the elements of music taken individually to a sense of the single elements blending together as if they must be understood from the perspective of a greater distance .

Contrasts of tone color were given a significantly lower place in the hierarchy of musical elements.

One of the great glories of the piano has been its ability to imitate other instruments .

he was tired of being expected always to play pianissimo.

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CHAPTER FOUR

In about six months of sight - reading for three hours a day , one could go through most of the keyboard music of Bach , Handel , Mozart , Chopin , Schumann , Mendelssohn , and Brahms .

The best method of teaching is to practice with a student , or to demonstrate how one practices and then watch the student work until the passage comes right .

The greatest teacher does not impose an interpretation but tries to find the way the student wishes to play and to improve the effectiveness of the interpretation .

The part of his education that is not suited to his personal view of music has to be cast away like a carapace from an earlier stage of life .

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CHAPTER FIVE

All pianists want applause , but quiet attention is the true tribute .

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CHAPTER SIX

We demand the same sort of fidelity and authenticity from our recordings . Whatever montage is employed must remain as inaudible as Le Gray’s montage was invisible . Illusion is essential .

That is why so many of the most admired recordings of the past can seem at once both breathtaking and knuckleheaded , dazzling and revolting , depending on whether they are listened to either as simply effective performances or as interpretations which carry out the emotional and intellectual possibilities inherent in the composition .

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CHAPTER SEVEN

The piano music of the eighteenth century was largely directed to the pleasure or the education of the performer , amateur as well as professional ; by the end of the nineteenth century , however , it had become almost exclusively the pleasure and the interest of the listener that determined both the form and the style of writing for the piano .

It encourages a certain prudence in the performers , a refusal to improvise or to take chances .

playing the left hand before the right . In the eighteenth century , this was called rubato ( or temps dérobé ) , and considered an expressive ornament .

The belief may be too often mistaken , but the illusion of coming into direct contact with the past is intoxicating and persuasive , and it can result in an interpretation that carries conviction . Sometimes confidence is all that is needed .

In our time , however , in a concert hall or on a record for a public that is not expected to look at the score , it is only sensible and rational to try to make both the separate lines and the extraordinary way they merge aurally perceptible and understandable for the listeners in a manner that neither insults their intelligence and the music itself by dissecting the score with an overtly didactic condescension nor leaves them in the dark about the wonderful artistry of the work by settling simply for a generally agreeable impression . I do not know of any single method to solve this problem .

it is better to get all the aspects wrong if the performance is thereby made more effective , although my own prejudice , as I said , lies with the interpretation that respects the composer’s directions with absolute fidelity and yet with imagination — neither is worth much without the other .

It seems to me that the major fault of most performances of his work is that musicians attempt only too obviously to restrain the dramatic force so often called for by the music in order to realize its extraordinary grace .

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POSTLUDE

A fervent passion for performing a work of music or on a musical instrument will always find or create an audience .

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One of the great glories of the piano has been its ability to imitate other instruments .

Imitations of guitars, trumpets, and drums abound in Scarlatti:


From Scarlatti’s Sonata no. 99 (imitating a guitar, A) and no. 139 (trumpets and drums, B)

I cannot find the specific pieces (no.99 and no.139), but the idea is clear enough. The guitar-like effect can be found in K.455 in G Major, while drum and trumpet effect can be found in K.491 in D major

Mozart imitated the triangles and drums of Turkish music in his Sonata in A Major, K. 331:

Haydn amazingly discovered how to make the piano sound pizzicato at the opening of his Piano Trio in E Major, H. XV: 28:

In his Sonata in F-sharp Minor, Schumann directs the pianist to ape the sound of wind instruments in a passage both dramatic and partly facetious that mocks operatic style:

Imitations of the horn, of course, abound in piano music, the most famous being the opening of Beethoven’s “Les Adieux.”

P.S. the bell-like passage is famous as well:

Even more interesting are two bars from the last movement of the Sonata in A Major, op. 101:
Here Beethoven directs the pianist to hold down the pedal and play softly so that the horn sounds poetically as if it is coming from a distance.

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playing the left hand before the right . In the eighteenth century , this was called rubato ( or temps dérobé ) , and considered an expressive ornament .

There were indeed a few pianists who abused the device, in particular Paderewski, in whose hands it was almost monotonously omnipresent (he had studied in Vienna with Leschetizky). An excellent American pianist, Harold Bauer, employed it most of the time: in his beautiful recording of Schumann’s Des Abends his hands almost never coincide, and in this piece, once you get used to it, the device gives great fluidity to the movement. Other pianists used it more sparingly and that economy certainly corresponds to the older tradition in which the rubato added expression either to a contrasting or to a recurring texture. In Josef Hoffman’s recording of Chopin’s Waltz in C-sharp Minor, made for Brunswick records in 1924, his hands stay together throughout the outer framing sections, but when the new lyrical theme of the central section in D-flat major arrives, his right hand is delicately and unostentatiously — almost imperceptibly, in fact - delayed on every beat.

Paderewski playing Chopin and playing Liszt.
Harold Bauer playing Schumann.
Josef Hofman playing Chopin

The attempt to revive the technique is very recent, widespread if not universal, and some pianists use it relentlessly—not only young pianists, but a few whose careers are already on the edge of middle age. The trouble with any systematic employment of an expressive device is that it ends up as a cheap way of persuading the listener that one is playing with deep feeling and sensibility, with the expression smeared like butter indiscriminately over every phrase of the work. Instead of stimulating a rethinking of the expression of each work, the fashionable rubato of playing with the hands apart has become a mechanism that substitutes itself for expression and replaces interpretation. In a similar fashion, the insistence on what is thought to be a beautiful tone quality systematically taught in most music schools ends up by blocking any essay at coming to terms with the styles of different periods and any consideration of how works written at a time that pianos had a different sonority and tone quality can be made effective on the modern piano without destroying their individuality. It ought to be evident that it is absurd to play Bach with the same tone quality as Mozart, or Chopin or Bartók, but that is what is so often encouraged, not only by academic training but even by critical taste.