Tausig is so hasty and impatient that to be in his classes must be a fearful ordeal.
Fräulein H. began, and she has remarkable talent, and is far beyond me. She would not
play piano enough to suit him, and said ‘Will you play piano or not, for if not we will not
go farther?’ The second girl sat down and played a few lines. He made her begin over
again several times, and finally came up and took her music away and slapped it down on
the piano, – “You have been studying this for weeks and you can’t play a note of it:
practice it for a month and then you can bring it to me again.” he said.’
FINGERING
In piano music, fingering is notated 1 2 3 4 and 5, representing the thumb, the second,
third, fourth and fifth fingers. This used to be called European fingering to contrast with
the now obsolete English fingering which was notated: + 1 2 3 and 4. Composers such
as Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt on occasion provided fingering to suggest a solution or a
novel approach. Fingering is often added by editors.
In the early years of keyboard playing only the second, third and fourth fingers were used.
Since then piano music has used the thumb and all fingers of each hand. This means that
the hand should be positioned so that the fingers and thumb of each hand are in a straight
line. The rounded hand position facilitates the passing under of the thumb but may be
modified when large stretches or black notes are involved. The fingers should be convex
and should not buckle inwards. A pianist’s fingers are, in effect, small hammers and
should always strike downwards on the keys. They should never strike forward into the
keys.
The second and third fingers are the strongest and the fourth and fifth fingers are the
weakest. The practising of Bach’s contrapuntal keyboard compositions is of great value
in promoting the strength and individuality of the fingers. Chopin recognised and
accepted that the fingers are not equal in strength and he recognised the individual
strengths and weaknesses in his compositions and in his ideas on fingering. None of
those ideas seems particularly novel these days but they were in his day.
In the notation of fingering, particularly the most personally characteristic fingering,
Chopin was not sparing. Pianists owe him thanks for his great innovations in fingering,
which because of their effectiveness soon became established, though authorities such as
Kalkbrenner were initially truly horrified by them. Chopin unhesitatingly employed the
thumb on the black keys; he crossed it even under the fifth finger (admittedly with a
decided bending-in of the wrist) when this could facilitate the performance or lend it
more serenity or evenness.
He often took two successive notes with one and the same finger (and not only in the
transition from a black key to a white one), without the slightest break in the tonal flow
becoming noticeable. He frequently crossed the longer fingers over each other, without
the help of the thumb (see Etude opus 10 no. 2) and this was not only in passages where it
was made absolutely necessary because the thumb was holding a key. The fingering of
chromatic thirds based on this principle (as he indicates it in etude opus 25 no. 5) offers,