Chopin Etude Op. 10 No. 12 in C minor - "Revolutionary"

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This was a very interesting Etude that came at a very interesting time for me.

I started working on this in June. I chose it because I loved the sound of the undulating left hand combined with the loud, clear proclamations in the right.

To be honest, I’m not exactly certain where I first heard this. Maybe it was at a recital or on YouTube. But the most recent time I heard it that sticks out in my mind was in Your Lie in April when Takeshi performed it in the last competition.

The editor to the edition of Chopin etudes that I read from included some playing notes in the beginning of the book, and he snarkily notes that if Chopin were to write something “revolutionary”, then it wouldn’t be as tame as this etude. I kinda agree with that: the etude overall feels less “revolutionary” and more of an angry tirade at the way the current state of things are.

And that’s certainly the place I found myself in when I started learning this. Quite a few things had happened to me up to that point in the summer, but the biggest and most pertinent was when I developed tinnitus towards the end of June.

I didn’t realize its full implications until I got it checked out in July, and I was told that I have hearing loss. And it was a very complicated and tough few weeks of processing, and probably the biggest breakdown that I’ve experienced in recent memory. I mean, this is like one of a musician’s biggest nightmares.

For those few weeks, playing the piano felt insulting. Like here was the instrument that may be the cause of this problem. And it high-key hurt because of everything the instrument means to me, and yet it might be the thing that at some point I have to give up in the future.

A few things helped get me back to playing, especially one piece, but that’s coming in a few weeks, so I’ll save that part of the story for then. But this etude really gave me a sort of voice to vent a lot of my frustrations and confusion at the situation when I really didn’t have the words to describe it. I could cry, shout, boil, simmer, and whatever through this piece. And it was such a godsend in a lot of ways.

One of biggest impacts of tinnitus at least one my playing in a technical sense is that my touch feels off. In order to protect my ears now, I frequently practice with earplugs in, especially when I’m grinding passages or doing repetitive work. But as a result, I can’t hear the nuances in phrasing and my touch as well, and so I feel like my expression is more off than I want it to be. When I practice without earplugs, everything sounds different and I wish that I could always practice that way, but after a while, the higher notes begin to really irritate my right ear especially and I have to put them back in.

That in combination with the fact that I still feel like I need more time with this piece in order for it to settle in, makes for a performance that is certainly not the greatest and could feel a lot more comfortable. But at the time of recording this (September), it was still a lot of how I felt, and I just wanted to get it done and on record. So, even though it’s not perfect, I hope you still enjoy this and some of the more raw parts of my thoughts and feelings.

So yeah, that’s Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude. This was a whole lot of fun in its own way, and somehow makes me more excited and less excited to play more etudes. I suppose that since I’ll play all of the pieces in Your Lie in April at some point that I should get cracking at “Torrent”, “Wrong Note”, and “Winter Wind”, but personally I don’t think I’m quite up for the grind yet. We’ll see!

So, until next time!

- WattKeys

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