The four Ballades by Chopin is some of his most intense and difficult music. The codas in particular have a reputation for being especially difficult. Here I want to give three tips that have been helpful for me.
1. Examine where the difficulty is
Even in challenging music, things are not difficult everywhere.
Thanks for reading Fallible Pianist! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
This is more of a general tip. If you think about it; difficulties in executing consecutive notes have to do with how to get from one note to the next. So where are the most difficult “spaces” between notes? That’s what we need to find out.
By doing this, you will automatically go from thinking “ahh three pages of crazy difficulty” to “Ah, it is exactly between these two notes that there is a difficulty”. Much better.
2. Handling the leaps in the left hand
Doing leaps is about training yourself to move between two notes automatically.
That sounds obvious, but leaps are quite simple. It’s just that they need patience to get into the system. In the left hand below the basic approach that works for me is.
- Place your hand on the chord, but look at the base note
- Play the chord and allow that to send your hand to the base note.
- Stay on the base note without playing and look at the next chord
- Play the base note and allow that to send your hand to the chord.
- And repeat.
- Then do it without looking.
We should always think about where we are going in leaps. And be on our way there even before we play the note currently under our hand.
3. Handling the most difficult (IMO) space
I said space because as per the point above, it is the moving part that presents difficulties.
In bar 216 the difficulties in the right hand start. At the same time though, the left hand gets easier. Thanks, Chopin. If you look closely at the right-hand figurations, the difficulties lie in moving between the positions. So let’s mark all those in our score.
We have a), b), c), and d). Already the difficulties have been broken down into more manageable steps, but let’s look even closer. To my mind, it is only b) and especially c) that is difficult. In a) and d) the double notes are played with the third finger. That means that there is no stretching of the fingers from 2 to 5. When playing b) and c), the hand gets a bit stretched between 2 and 5, thus making the position a bit more tense. That makes it slightly more difficult. Here are my tips for playing b) and d)
- Play the F# positions as close to the fallboard as possible. This will make the double notes with the 2nd and 5th finger easier to stretch.
- When you do the leap in c) really allow the thumb to send you to the next position. Land close enough to the fallboard so that your thumb will reach the Ab in the next bar.
Conclusion
Playing difficult passages is about learning a difficult choreography of moving the hands. We should stay away from the idea of just repeating passages over and over, then what happens will be random. Instead, dissect the problems as best as you can and try to find solutions.
Apart from my small tips here which just breaks down some of the difficulties, the master pianist Garrick Ohlsson has a nice video on YouTube which is great.
Happy practicing!
Thanks for reading Fallible Pianist! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.