Pieces that include enormous hand stretches!

[savvygal]

As I pore over pieces to play, I immediately set aside ones that include me to have monster hands to play a chord!  Really?  I'm not a small woman with little hands, but like normal hands and I get so discouraged when I see a piece that wants me to stretch my hand like 10 notes!  Is this for real?  What do you guys do with those pieces?  I'm kind of a perfectionist and feel like I'm cheating on the music if I can't play how it's composed.  Any thoughts?  Thanks!

[quantum]

If you can't grasp the entire chord, you can roll or break it.  It could also be feasible to redistribute the notes between both hands.  Sometimes composers do omit any specific instructions under the premise that the pianist understands their own particular physique and know how to approach the chord.

What I tell my students: the purpose of score is to be descriptive not prescriptive.  It's goal is to efficiently describe the music to the performer so that it may be interpreted; it is not the score's purpose to tell the performer how to play. 

[danny_pianist]

quantum is right, you can break the chord or roll it. BUT if you do reach the whole chord, you should try to do it. Just practice the bar where the chord is very slowly and a lot of times, without tensing your arm. And don't play with the whole finger, just the tip of the finger.

Personally the largest chord I have found in a piece was from E to C in the left hand, I have large hands  but still I had to practice it a lot because it was a very fast staccato 1/8 note and it was repeated throught the piece.

In your place I would just play what the composer wrote (some composers like Rachmaninoff wrote very large chords because they had very large hands  )