Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner 2 octave reach problem

And in doing so, smash their forehead on the piano fallboard.

(Just curious - will the five simultaneous glissandi all be in the same direction??)

I think those are all playable if you can play a tenth, though, by recruiting the other hand. This is the sort of thing that would encourage me to find something else to play though lol

Funnily enough, none of those passages in Kreisleriana ever confused me.

You're a genius.

Perhaps.

I've already written the Glissando Etude - no nose required but bandaids are a must .

We might be able to wonder about those being "reaches" if not for those wavy lines.

I mean, we'd be wrong ....but we might be able to sort of argue it.

With the wavy lines, there's no room to even start suggesting it.

The interesting thing about that passage is the slur between each pair of Bbs in the LH from bar 4 to 10.

....which, of course, isn't a "reach."

(But it is a bunch of other things, particularly pedal.)

Indeed.

There aren't wavy lines on the double-octave

Right -- my bad!

Except, I think it's sort of 'understood.'

(The alternative would be that Schumann's hand, or maybe the hand of who he had in mind to play it, like maybe his wife or Chopin, to whom he dedicated the piece .....was that big, and I suspect it wasn't.)

That's because it is avant-garde. You are supposed to have an assistant to play the notes you can't reach.

The nature of the writing actually makes me wonder if he had the pedal-piano in mind. If not actually to be played on it - since there are rolled chords - at least he had the effect in mind.

You can play the top note with your right hand, if you can play a tenth. Actually I didn't realize Clara Schumann could play a tenth, but I guess so.

Indeed... It's the first thing I noticed the first time I played her music.
I posted this in December 2010:

I can play a tenth, but I would still be leaving out a note. I can't play an octave with 2-5, nor can most people even if they have large hands.

I have small hands, but can easily span an octave with 2-5. But I can only play tenths with preparation, and only with my fingertips (1-5 of course). My last teacher, who had big hands and can play 12ths, can't play octaves with 2-5.

He told me that one of us is probably a freak of nature. We agreed to agree on that......

I can play octaves with 2-5, but I definitely cannot play Bb-D-D with one hand, although I can play A-C-C or similar.

I can do even better than that: I can play octaves with 1-1 effortlessly, as long as I use two hands .