EDUCATION

Shortly after Pianist issue 134 landed on doormats across the globe, social media user Tea-Time-Gossip asked us why we had assigned Dora Pejačević’s Remembrance, in A flat major, as an ‘intermediate’-level work, while Daquin’s Le Coucou, in E minor, was considered ‘intermediate/advanced’. (Frankly, I wish all gossip was so cultured, at teatime or any time!) The answer we gave then was limited to what social media allows. What follows is a more in-depth consideration of ‘difficulty’, and what that means for us pianists.

As a student, I often found myself stuck in waiting rooms full of other aspiring pianists, and for some reason – maybe sizing up the competition – many would gleefully ask: ‘So, what’s the hardest piece you can play?’ I would always reply ‘Mozart K 545’, and would invariably get one of two facial expressions in response: ‘Huh?’, or ‘I know, right?!’

I wasn’t just making a point about the fatuousness of the question. There is a special terror in playing something so well known, and so texturally spare that any slight blemish will immediately be apparent. As Schnabel famously said,