Piano Forum

This is not necessarily a piece I plan to learn at the moment—it's probably beyond my level. But since it contains many of the difficult things I need to learn (scales, arpeggios, leaps, broken and unbroken octaves, counterpoint, very quick passages using only the 3rd/4th/5th fingers) I play through parts of it and practice them in the hope of gaining at least a little of the knowledge for how to do whatever technique.

However there are some things that I simply can't figure out how to play at speed at all, no matter how much I practice them. Playing them slowly doesn't seem to translate into being able to play them at the right tempo. I'm just wondering how other people were able to do them.

(the right tempo meaning: whatever Beethoven's metronome mark says, which I realise many people disagree with, but I'd rather not get into that argument)


In this passage, my right hand is physically unable to play the chord Bb-D-C due to the stretch of a seventh between the 2nd and 5th fingers (the ninth is also one of the most difficult for my hand alongside Eb-F, E-F# and B-C#). I break the chord instead. However I also almost always miss notes in the two following chords Bb-Eb-A and Bb-D-F because of the rapid shifts in vertical hand position and that I have to play the white keys closer to the keyboard lid where it is a bit of an obstacle course with the black keys on all sides. I can play everything here (except the ninth) at slower tempi of e.g. minim = 116 or below but can't figure out how to maintain accuracy at faster tempi, and I can't figure out how to convince my hand to make that stretch at all.


In the sections marked in red Schenker's fingering does not seem usable, or at least I can't play the sixths evenly and legato if I use my thumb on every note. I have substituted in every case 41 52 41 52 which seems the only possible legato fingering. But as soon as I try to get faster my hand falls over itself because the reaction time of my fingers is evidently not good enough. Is that something that can be changed, so I can get my 4 & 1 fingers out of the way in the space of 0.11 seconds? This feels like a brain puzzle more than anything, or like running into a conceptual limitation in maths, but whilst I can with practice get to the point of alternating 41 and 52 and not get confused (I can also pat my head whilst rubbing my tummy) it doesn't seem to play out that way for my hand at speed.


The scherzo is full of this pattern, which requires rapidly restriking the top note of a chord. Again, the top note is usually initially given to the 3rd or 4th finger and it simply can't get off the note fast enough when I try a real Vivace assai, so I end up with unwanted ties.


I play the two upper voices in these bars (195-199) with the right hand because that's the only way that seems feasible. However when I play them at speed, the "hocketing" pattern between the two voices gets blurred and I end up with what sounds like just a bunch of semiquavers; the voices lose their independence. It's possible that slow practice would make it possible to play the voices more independently but I don't really see how.


Again, Schenker's fingering using the thumb repeatedly doesn't seem feasible (or maybe he just had insanely flexible thumbs, who knows). In this case though I'm not sure anything else is possible for me since I can't play sevenths with 52 and if I were to play e.g. G-F with 51 and then the lower F that follows the G with 2, the upper F would turn into a semiquaver, which is not what's written. How do you play semiquavers at crotchet = 144 with just your thumb, basically?

Thanks for your patience, I realise I'm quite annoying >.>