Hello Piano World forums, Long story short, I live in the boonies of Minnesota and don't have the resources to keep progressing on piano so I just pick pieces that I think sound good and try to figure them out..Anyways I picked this piece and I think I may be getting in over my head with this one. 2-3 bars into the piece my left hand needs to stretch a 11th on a piano (D# to G#) Is this really necessesary? I'd say my hands are average size but that is a crazy gap between notes! Any tips on actually being able to hit those notes? Just the left hand part in this piece is rocking my world. I'd appreciate any tips in being able to play this the right way, I've been teaching myself lately and I just want to know if I'm on the right track. Sorry if this post seemed vague, thanks for reading it and I look forward some imput!

You don't have to stretch it. Play the lower note first, then snap the hand up to the other note. That's how most people play it.

By the way, it's a really hard piece even not counting those "stretches."

Thank you so much! Ahh it's so frustrating sometimes.

No problem!

BTW, don't be surprised if your left hand feels like it's falling off after working on that piece for a while....

Ok so I tried to snap back from the D sharp to the G sharp, you mean play one right after the other as quick as I can with the same hand, one after the other? I feel like an idiot asking this question, haha oh man.

Yes! (No problem, maybe what I said wasn't clear enough.)

BTW, the lower note is generally played a tiny bit before the beat, so that the upper note can be played on it. But you want to make sure to catch that lower note with the pedal so that it gets sustained together with what follows. In fact, often with such things in this piece, you're holding a pedaling from even before that, and in this case, you might not change the pedal at all from the whole previous measure.

Didn't a member make a video of this with some interesting soto voce pedal usage?