Wrong Note Etude - Etude Op. 25 No. 5 - Frederic Chopin

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The Wrong Note Etude is such an interesting piece.

It begins with such a weird, detached texture that feels bouncy and articulate that is also strangely intriguing as it lyrically lilts its way up and down the keyboard, almost half-ponderous, before transitioning into a beautiful, dreamy, soothing B-section that paints a relief of tranquility over the entire atmosphere of the piece while speckling it with flecks of dissonance that carry over from before, reminding us that perhaps all is not as it should be.

And it is precisely because of this that I find this piece incredibly difficult to interpret.

The first time I attempted this was when it was assigned to me by my teacher in my senior year of high school. At the time I wasn’t super focused on the piano, and all I wanted to do was finish the pieces I would play at my senior recital and then take a break from the instrument. Needless to say, I didn’t finish this Etude then.

Precisely because of this, I never bothered to hear or even find out what it was really supposed to sound like. For the duration of time that I worked on it, I only ever thought of it as something that sounded weird, maybe a bit cool when I sped it up, but nothing spectacular. I didn’t even make it to the B-section before I clocked out.

Fast forward a few years as I’m coming back to the instrument, and I hear Kousei play it in Your Lie in April. In tandem with my reinvigorated drive to learn, I finally realized what potential the piece had and resolved to pick it back up at some point.

I remember I tried playing it a little to see how much I retained, and slowly recovered the rest of it to a practicable level over the next several months.

I finally picked it up in earnest in March after I finished recording A Cruel Angel’s Thesis and Fiction. But because of the workload from school, I still couldn’t seriously grind it. Worse, no matter how I tried playing it, I couldn’t find an interpretation, especially for the A section, that felt “right” or fit what I was looking for.

Maybe it’s because I didn’t even know what I wanted.

Then, after my finals ended, I began putting in more time to finish the piece, which turned out to be a mistake.

One of the difficulties of this piece is the large stretch between the second and fifth fingers of the right hand on almost every beat in order to create the “wrong note” dissonance. In moderation, this doesn’t really bother me at all because my hand can somewhat easily reach it.

However, jumping from 10-15 minutes of practice a day to an hour and a half plus of grinding per day for a week on top of practicing Love’s Sorrow (which is also big because Rach) and To the Beginning (which is a bit big because anipiano loves big chords), this ended up really aggravating my wrist.

I spent two days trying to record this; on neither day did I feel like I got a good take, and even though I took a day off before recording to rest, doing multiple takes in tempo resulted in me needing to ice my wrist after the first day of recording.

It also ruined my ability to then record what I felt was a good take of Love’s Sorrow.

So that’s why it feels like this take is a “work in progress” sort of recording. In some parts it sounds like I’m just fighting to get through, other parts are too matter of fact, and in others still it sounds like I lack direction.

However, despite all this, it has still remained one of my favorite Etudes to play, despite still not feeling like I have a good interpretation figured out. But it has definitely become more refined, more contemplative, more technical, more me. Who knows, maybe I’ll re-record this someday or play it live on stream.

This piece somehow makes me feel serious, yet dreamy at the same time. It’s truly special in it’s own way.

Well, until next time!

- Watt

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