Can I play Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 with small hands?

[pianoblitz]

Hi, I'd really like to play Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, however my hands are quite small. I can reach an octave comfortably with both hands and just about 9th's but that's a stretch. Any advice??

[lelle]

Try it.

If you can do everything in the score comfortably keep going.

If you at some point discover that you can't, if possible refine your technique until you can, else drop the piece and move on with your life.

[dedalus89]

Why don't they make pianos of different sizes? Like 10% smaller, 3/4 size, whatever.  The keys don't make the they're just mechanical levers so they could look like literally anything and it would still work exactly the same. I wonder why there aren't different shaped keys even while I'm thinking about it

[pianoblitz]

Why don't they make pianos of different sizes? Like 10% smaller, 3/4 size, whatever.  The keys don't make the they're just mechanical levers so they could look like literally anything and it would still work exactly the same. I wonder why there aren't different shaped keys even while I'm thinking about it

Then people who try playing on different piano's would have trouble. Like when you go to a concert room, they can't have 10 different piano's stored up and then choose the best size to suit the performer... It's probably more practicable in the long term for everything to be standardized even though it would help to have different sizes on a personal level

[dedalus89]

Small hands seems like a common enough issue it could be reasonable to have just the 2. A regular one and one with a smaller keyboard.  I asked some friends and it seems that there are companies who make smaller keyless l keyboards that can be switched out. Come to think of it, why not manufacture pianos standard to have modular keyboards where switching out keyboards is only an inconvenience nothing more. I don't know how those would be built but that's an engineering problem, smart people would figure it out! In the end I'm not a pianist so I'm pretty ignorant about the practicalities of playing, and my questions are completely genuinely out of curiosity because I don't know

[mjames]

Why don't they make pianos of different sizes? Like 10% smaller, 3/4 size, whatever.  The keys don't make the they're just mechanical levers so they could look like literally anything and it would still work exactly the same. I wonder why there aren't different shaped keys even while I'm thinking about it

Because the ROI is terrible. The main market for pianos are Westerners and East Asians (Koreans, Japanese, Chinese). The vast majority of adults in these populations can comfortably hit a 9th, which is more than enough for 98% of the standard repertoire for piano music.

There's no point in mass producing specialized pianos for smaller hands for a small portion of the population.

[dedalus89]

I mean the variation of hand size fits along a standard variation with most of the people in the middle and with decreasingly fewer people on either side. The point being that 50% of the world has larger hands than the other 50%, and we're not even talking about sex, since women have on average much smaller hands. It seems to me that two sizes, one for the smaller half and one for the larger half, would create enough of a market. Exactly divide the sizes such that about half of the market will want one, and half the other. Get your research guys on it (I'm talking to the companies). Any excuse beyond that is just because the poor companies would like to make more money and it's cheaper to make a large amount of the same exact model. This is also why all pianos sound the same today.

[ravelfan07]

Hi, I'd really like to play Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2, however my hands are quite small. I can reach an octave comfortably with both hands and just about 9th's but that's a stretch. Any advice??

I did a little bit of Lassan and in the intro your right hand has to reach from f sharp to g sharp, can you comfortably do that?