Frédéric Chopin (1810-1849)
Piano Sonata No.2, Op.35
Piano — Ivo Pogorelich
Deutsche Grammophon Recording.
Piano Sonata No.2, Op.35
1. Grave
2. Scherzo
3. Marche funèbre. Lento - attaca:
4. Finale. Presto
I kept the bottle we drank from together
I don't know, is that insane?
It's just every once in a while you
Got to remind yourself
That it's you against the rain
And I'm not sure yet who will win
“——”Bird, Bedouine
For a long time players have been acting against nature by training our fingers to be all equally powerful. As each finger is differently formed, it is better not to attempt to destroy the particular charm of each one’s touch, but on the contrary develop it. Each finger’s power is determined by its shape: the thumb having the most power, being the brightest, shortest and freest; then the fifth finger, at the other extremity of the hand; the third as the middle and the pivot; then the second, and then the fourth, the weakest one, the Siamese twin of the third, bound to it by a common ligament, and which people insist on trying to separate from the third—which is impossible, and fortunately unnecessary there are as many different sounds as there are fingers. “—” Frédéric Chopin
Hands of a Stranger, a science-fiction b-film from1962—that I absolutely wouldn’t recommend even watching ironically—about a pianist whose hands are badly injured in a car accident but, conveniently, surgeons are able to transplant someone else’s hands unto his wrists and he promptly resumes his virtuoso career (spoiler alert: his new hands used to belong to a murderer, thus he soon develops murderous tendencies as a result). Had it been a comedy it would have been brilliant. Despite the especially cringeworthy lacklustre screenplay, the film manages to take seriously the question: just how much of a person’s character can be found lurking in, deduced from, the physiology and behavioural tendencies of their hands?—not to mention how far ahead of its time this film was by suggesting, albeit unintentionally, that trauma is a thing that lives just as much in the body as in the psyche.
Hands of a Stranger (1962)
When Chopin arrived on the scene, piano playing was dominated by “finger equalization” school, who’s aim it was to make all ten fingers equally strong. Add to this a host of technical exercises that flooded the market, together with the promise that they would create a “democracy of the hand.” Czerny was the acknowledged leader of the school, and his bone-breaking exercises are still a blight on the happiness of piano students everywhere. “—” Fryderyk Chopin / Alan Walker
“Suppleness above all”—recalling Hands of a Stranger did cause me to pause and ask a variation of the above question: how would you describe, if you could, Chopin’s hands solely from the aesthetic of his music? We need not leave it entirely to imagination, there is in fact a marble cast of Chopin’s left hand by sculptor Auguste Clésinger—and it’s almost exactly what I’d imagine. Long, nimble fingers, not particularly muscular, nor exceptionally svelt. Few, if any, sharp angles, yet the alacrity of hands which one hears in his music—this Sonata No.2 particularly—is visible therein, a robust combination of strong and supple…
A distinctive feature of Chopin’s playing was smoothness and ease of execution, qualities he cultivated in his pupils as well. He often recommended massaging and flexing the hands and fingers away from the instrument in order to reduce stiffness and prepare the player for that first crucial contact with a keyboard, where comfort and ease had to prevail. Suppleness above all was his watchword. “—” Fryderyk Chopin / Alan Walker
Staying in the film world for a little longer, perhaps the most famous set of hands in all of Swedish cinema belongs to Max von Sydow, more specifically his character in The Seventh Seal (1957). There’s a scene in that film where he’s standing by a window and, as if noticing his own hands for the first time, remarks with an eery serenity: This is my hand…my blood pulses through it, the sun is high in the sky and I, I am Antonius Block. Like almost everything else in that film, it’s a baffling indecipherable scene, but there’s something in the way he holds his hands in it—the same hands that would, later on, famously play seaside-chess with the devil—that adds more gravity to his words. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention another famous pair of hands from European cinema in the 50’s: Martin LaSalle’s eelish digits in Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959)—a brilliant film loosely inspired by Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, about a Parisian pickpocket whose skills, albeit exaggerated, grows in inverse relation to his morals. His, more than von Sydow’s, reminds me of Chopin’s. It’s an invigorating mixture of gaunt and supple that I see in those hands, the same mixture of gaunt and supple—in the treble and bass—that I hear in Chopin’s music.
Pickpocket, 1959
Perhaps one more comparison for the road? They’re the most famous hands in all of modern architecture: Le Corbusier’s. There’s an iconic photo of the french architect gesturing towards a model of his Radiant City (his plan to turn Paris into a city on a grid—which was, and to no surprise, swiftly dismissed by any and everyone who had a say in the matter). Nevertheless, I can’t look at that photo without hearing music in the air, particularly Chopin’s. Come to think of it, there’s a striking similarity between his right hand and that bust of Chopin’s left by Clésinger.
Much of the teaching in vogue in Chopin’s time revealed an ambivalent attitude toward the thumb. Its use on black keys was generally frowned upon, especially when the fingers themselves could do such work. Chopin did not hesitate to emancipate the thumb. His best-known act of audacity in this respect was to provide the pianist with work that obliges all five digits of the right hand to play exclusively on black keys, an activity in which the thumb is promoted to full partnership with the fingers. The “Black Keys” study remains a landmark in the history of the literature, because it shuts the door so firmly against the older, more conservative approach to the keyboard. “—” Fryderyk Chopin / Alan Walker
Le Corbusier’s hand
A person’s hands, how they hold it, are intimations of their relationship with beauty. At any rate I think the hands tell you much more about a person than, say, their eyes…eyes aren’t meant for revealing—hence our chagrin when a partner in conversation fails to maintain eye-contact—it’s hard to perceive someone when they’re mainting eye-contact, we’re locked-in with them, it’s a face-to-face armistice, I won’t judge if you don’t judge me. But the hands are the real stool pigeons, they intimate a depth far beneath the realm of intentions. A good pianist is, above all, a purveyor of sincerity.
Intimations
The line I trace with my index
indicates the path of planes Pearson-bound.
These clouds take the day with them.
The sky keeps nothing of a history
no ranarim homage to be made by the earliest riser
in the house—does he notice the way the morning moon fades
like a tiring stamp? Transparent as an apparition.
The view of the street lamp is divided by its own anchor.
All through May the branches yawned thick with leaves.
Intimations: from a performance by the COC Ensemble Studio
There’s a pianist by the glass wall,
hers was the patience of an empire, sitting
sideline to her partner’s pudgy knuckles:
hers could bend without bulging, gliding over octaves.
In her wait, her hands were placed, one on top of the other,
merely suggesting the violence they’re capable of,
the monuments they could drum up in the open air.
Mine are neither the pudgy sort
nor hieratic when raised.
Awkwardly they chop through sentences,
creasing the open air.
It’s the elbows that are at fault, they’re heavy, hip-hinged.
Unlike hers: expressive as wings,
more nimble even than fingers,
suggesting—with their etudes and mazurkas—
of the lightest feet.
I raise my right hand, by the window, to guide a path
from the corner-top of a building, through transmission poles,
wires, branches rising of Christie Pits, chimneys.
Thinking how someday, some very regular training would make
these hands entirely mine.
The sky over Christie
Blinking red lights, beige and taupe-brick buildings
hinge the horizon; I must be near the edges
of a dome. Just behind a fence of squatting two-storied
complexes—even between their narrow inserts—I can see
the simple green bricks of a stable kneeling
in the stomach of the pit, The horses flashing into the dark.
There’s little else but the column of sky that I every morning
inherit, the vagabond clouds that elsewhere had their reign—
now resemble a glaciated skyscape that eastbound
breaks into smaller bands—someone somewhere
unable to keep the unit:
the horizons are littered with anarchists.
Heavy feet
Eloquent was the pugilist that filled those velvet loafers
—The times are tidy—their shining black nearly blue.
There might elsewhere have been better use for the duvet
of muscle he’s wrapped in, heaving with every breath
the tufts that join arm to shoulder, rib to waist and leave
gaunt legs hung like laundry.
Steam whistles a tune I now know by head and heart:
through nostrils, and the hot arcs of molten ears.
Oh what monuments such heavings have undone
—here I’m reminded of two brothers from my youth,
hunched as boulders they wrap
from eyesight the holes punctured by our common ills:
malaria in my case, typhoid in theirs.
I’ve been thinking, lately, of wrapping myself
in those same sheets.
I too can be blunt,
I too can trundle,
up the stairs at five o’clock in the morning—part brawn,
part fawn—the earliest riser in the heaviest feet.
The moon at night
…scythes the hinge where earlier
beige and taupe eye-motes glistened by the dozen,
all dressed down now in gowns bluer than black,
buttoned at the top left corner of the column
by the boniest phosphorescence.
…woke me too early in the morning to draw a bath,
it’s cold light pressed against the pane. I wait for the spidering
glass-crack but the pressure tires and retreats
with the first plop of feet pressing their way up the stairs.
He turns the corner, stupid and sweating.
Intimations: from The Beat My Heart Skipped
The upheaving rivulets that unspool from a one-handed Horowitz:
each finger’s eelish coils as they murmur through octaves
from their fisted worlds
and clap to life the spindrifts of shimmering
splintering notes like loose coins.
These two, too, are hands. Unshaped by vocation
they ruffle the air around them and stack
the hours of their complaint. One on top of the other
they cup their hollows
and wait for me to unhip their elbows
unhinge the the wrists
that cuff their waking hours.
Perhaps mine are my mother’s hands once more.
She would sit heavy in her shop flicking back and forth
the hinges of her ankle bones to unloose the aria of
her black manual Singer: the threads roped tight, then loose,
then straightjacketed into stitches that curve hips and
bridge shoulders. It was morning when the little blue
shop caught fire and sent her hands whirling like windmills
and all the little blue buttons fuming their plastic ichor
and the carpet hissing its singed hairs.
Only the Singer stood the scalding test, the black gloss
of its lacquer boiled to blue and flaked away when she kissed
her teeth and scythed their bubbles with the crescent nail
of her index finger.
Perhaps mine are exactly my father’s hands:
I too the crown prince of gestures?
Massaging the open air into the bone thick
clutch of dreams, hawking on sticks—
for the untracking of serpent trails—
the snake-rooted fumes of unseen worlds.
Alpa! Alpa!
This is my hand
and I, I am Antonius Block
Who today is readier than I for all
Four-hundred blows?
‘Picked in’
It’s pretty warm for late September
The yawned trees still tongued green
from a late summer.
I raise my right hand
and fumble the pulleys
till the blinds kiss the sill.
SONG OF THE WEEK: ‘Bird’ — Bedouine
A couple weeks ago I took on the task of looking after my girlfriend’s pet bird while she was away…it’s amazing how something so small can project so much personality. Such a bird must have caught the eye of Aziv Korkejian (otherwise Bedouine). She’s one of those new-ish artists that gets me excited to see where her work goes next. The uniqueness of not just her sound but her entire artistry, is undeniable, yet it encompasses a familiar amalgamation of folk artists who came before: Joni Mitchell meets Leonard Cohen meets Nick Drake meets Laura Marling meets Alela Diane meets Sibylle Baier and so on…Wherever she goes with it, I hope she sticks more with the sweeping symphonic sound that occasionally emerges on her second album (Birdsongs of a Killjoy, 2019).