The Painful Joy of Playing Fast
Chopin's "Butterfly" Étude
Near the beginning of this year, while working with my piano teacher on a tricky passage in Beethoven’s 15th sonata involving a sequence of parallel octaves (the one that starts at the 1:06 mark in this performance by Alfred Brendel), I felt my arm tiring from the strain. I turned to her apologetically and said, “sorry, but my octaves aren’t very good.”
“Well, let’s make them good,” she replied, and immediately assigned Chopin’s Étude Op. 25 No. 9, the “Butterfly”.
When played by a professional, the piece is a little over a minute long. Here’s Lang Lang:
Chopin’s études, though they’re beautiful and interesting enough to be concert repertoire, were written for pedagogical purposes: each is designed to confront the pianist with a specific technical challenge that must be mastered in order to play the piece convincingly. All of them are considered advanced pieces and are difficult to play. There are two designed to train octaves, and the “Butterfly” is the shorter and easier of them (this is the other one, and it’s scary). In concert it’s meant to sound light, almost throwaway; a party piece that makes you sound good and ends before your friends get bored. It’s also considered, by Chopin Étude standards, to be on the easier side. But when my teacher assigned it, it came with warnings. “It’s very easy to injure yourself if you don’t play it properly,” she said. “You must keep your wrist completely relaxed. If you feel pain, you must stop playing right away.”
I have a friend who, as a teen, was abruptly dropped by her hotshot piano teacher when she developed severe wrist pain. Another friend, a working professional pianist, had to play with wrist braces on for a time. I’d heard warnings before: in music, unlike in some athletics, there’s no “pushing through” — pain and soreness are always indicators of bad technique or overwork and likely to get worse if not addressed.
But of course when I sat down to learn the étude, my wrist started hurting almost immediately. I couldn’t play for more than a few minutes at a time before feeling sore, even when practicing very slowly. How was I supposed to learn the notes? I tried some mitigations, like using only the thumb (which plays most of the melody notes) in the right hand alongside the full left-hand part. But even moving my thumb up and down made my wrist tense up.
So, I wound up doing the bad thing: playing through the pain. It wasn’t even really a matter of masochistically pushing myself — it was about being able to have fun at the piano, hearing the melody come out.
At my next lesson, my teacher caught me out immediately. “I can tell from your sound that you have some strain,” she said. '“You are not doing this properly.” She explained exactly how my fingers, arm, and wrist should be moving: keep the shoulder down, let the hand be driven by the arm rather than move independently, keep the thumb curved and active. Most importantly, the wrist must bounce: down-up-down-up-down-up. It took me a long time to get it — but at some point she heard what she wanted to hear. “That’s it,” she said. “You got it".” And it did seem to work. Once I put all those pieces together, I didn’t feel anything pulling.
“When I learned this étude back in the Soviet Union,” she said, “my teacher did not explain anything to me — just told me to learn it. And I suffered so much!” She clasped her hands. “Everyone suffered with this étude! And you do not have to suffer!”
It seemed to help, although in the more difficult sections of the piece I’d sometimes feel the pain come back. It felt unfair: these were precisely the sections I needed to be working on the most, and it was hard to stop working on them prematurely. Patience has never been a virtue of mine when it comes to learning a piece: I always try to play too fast, too soon. So I found myself trawling the internet for tips, hoping for a quick fix.
The combination of the pandemic and the availability of YouTube tutorials for everything means that we’re perhaps in a golden age of self-teaching, and the piano is no exception. There are a lot of videos purporting to teach piano technique from beginner to advanced levels; searching “chopin etude op 25 no 9” turns up quite a few.
While some of these videos contain actual technical instruction, many are intended for amateur pianists who do not know how to read music and want to learn by memorizing the sequence of keys to press. This one points a camera directly over the instructor’s hands while they play very slowly, while the method behind this one will be familiar to anyone who has ever played Guitar Hero.
If you look at certain online piano forums, sometimes you see videos of self-taught pianists who have decided to brute-force their study by using these and similar tools to learn very difficult pieces that ordinarily would only be attempted by pianists with at least a decade of serious instruction behind them. They’re almost always playing electric keyboards, pay very little attention to style or dynamics, and have some telltale technique mistakes, namely low wrists and flat fingers. It’s easy to understand why they do it — lessons are expensive, beginner music isn’t interesting or satisfying to play, and if you’ve been captivated by one piece in particular, why waste time with anything else? In addition, it’s easy to get frustrated and disheartened when getting criticized by a teacher, and learning in complete solitude means you won’t have to hear feedback until you feel ready.
It always rankles me to see these videos, but I try to keep myself in check. When I try to identify the precise source of the ranklement, it’s something like stolen valor — the idea that they’re “cheating”, that they’ll go around telling their friends they play “at an advanced level” without really understanding what goes into playing the piano well, and that my own years of hard work at the keyboard are devalued by their posturing. But I recognize that this is a snobby, gatekeep-y, and generally bad attitude to have. It’s silly to think that what they’re doing has anything to do with me, that there’s a right or wrong way to engage with music, or that memorizing all the key positions of a tricky piece rather than reading sheet music isn’t a difficult and impressive feat on its own. Plus, see above — lessons are expensive. And no adult has any fun playing from the Alfred books.
A couple of years ago at the height of the pandemic, when there was a much larger volume of these self-taught videos popping up on the internet than there are now, I wrote a short story (unpublished) about a man who has learned La Campanella from YouTube videos and brings in an arrogant, insecure pro teacher to help him polish it up for a party. The story was mostly a way of castigating myself for feeling so irritated by the YouTubers.
But one thing I know for certain about the autodidacts attempting Liszt: they’re playing with a large amount of arm and wrist pain.
I’m an impatient learner too, and could never resist playing fast when I should have been playing slow. At a recent lesson, I found myself trying to lie to my teacher: she asked if my wrist was hurting, and I said it wasn’t (it was) because I didn’t feel up for another explanation of thumb and wrist movements. She didn’t believe me. Finally, I confessed that my wrist was hurting “a little bit,” and she nodded. “I could hear it,” she said. “Practice slowly, with hands separate.” I knew that was what she would say because I knew that’s what I should have been doing. When you’re trying to do something difficult, sometimes the pain feels easier than slowing yourself down.
You might enjoy some of my other posts about playing the piano:
See also learning to play blues harmonica ; )