Pianist Byron Janis explains Chopin’s five-finger position & exercises

Pianist Byron Janis explains Chopin’s five-finger position & exercises Chopin’s approach to teaching was original and individual. In his sketch for a method, he writes, “One needs only to study a certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys to obtain with ease the most beautiful quality of sound, to know how to play long notes and short notes and [to attain] unlimited dexterity.“ “A well-formed technique, it seems to me, [is one] that can control and vary a beautiful sound quality.“ (Quoted in Eigeldinger, 16-17). The idea of “musical declamation“ also relates to Chopin’s interest in bel canto. Chopin is known to have frequently advised his pupils to listen to great singers of the time (Eigeldinger 14). He was concerned with developing hand position in a natural way. Thus, he says that C major, which he considered the most difficult scale pianistically, should not be introduced first. Rather, he suggests beginning with the B-major (RH) and D-flat-major (LH) scales in order to more naturally introduce the passing of the thumb—an understanding of piano technique from a piano-centered rather than music-theory centered approach. Chopin writes: “Find the right position for the hand by placing your fingers on the keys E, F#, G#, A#, B: the long fingers will occupy the high keys, and the short fingers the low will curve the hand, giving it the necessary suppleness that it could not have with the fingers straight.“ Chopin’s method was predicated on what the student actually needed to know in order to play the piano. Chopin writes in the Sketch for a method: “People have tried out all kinds of methods of learning to play the piano, methods that are tedious and useless and have nothing to do with the study of this instrument. It’s like learning, for example, to walk on one’s hands in order to go for a stroll. Eventually one is no longer able to walk properly on one’s feet, and not very well on one’s hands either. It doesn’t teach us how to play the music itself—and the kind of difficulty we are practicing is not the difficulty encountered in good music, the music of the masters. It’s an abstract difficulty, a new genre of acrobatics.“ (Eigeldinger 193) According to Jan Kleczynski, who collected reminiscences from a number of Chopin’s pupils, “For all rapid passages in general the hands must be slightly turned, the right hand to the right, and the left hand to the left; and the elbows should remain close to the body, except in the highest and lowest octaves.“ (Eigeldinger 31) Mikuli writes: “According to Chopin, evenness in scales and arpeggios depended not merely on equal strengthening of all fingers by means of five-finger exercises, and on entire freedom of the thumb when passing under and over, but above all on a constant sideways movement of the hands (with the elbow hanging freely and always loose)“ (Eigeldinger 37) Chopin writes “No one will notice the inequality of sound in a very fast scale, as long as the notes are played in equal time“ (Eigeldinger 37) –an important indicator of where his priorities lay.