Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Volume 2
Article 9
Number 1 Spring
Holland, Jeanne (1989) ""Chopin: Pianist and Teacher as Seen by His Pupils" By Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger," Performance Practice
Review: Vol. 2: No. 1, Article 9. DOI: 10.5642/perfpr.198902.01.9
Available at: http://scholarship.claremont.edu/ppr/vol2/iss1/9
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Jean-Jacques Eigeldinger. Chopin: Pianist and Teacher as Seen by His
Pupils. Trans, by Naomi Shohet. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1986. xiii, 324p.
For a long time we have been acting against nature by training our
fingers to be all equally powerful. As each finger is differently
formed, it's better not to attempt to destroy the particular charm of
107
108 Jeanne Holland
In the trio, the bass melody must dominate until the violin's Eb in
the fifth bar [bars 33-37] (p. 89).
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 practising is not the difficulty encountered
in good music... (p. 193).
Jeanne Holland