Part 12 of chopin-pianist-and-teacher-as-seen-by-his-pupils (pp. 270-279).
Question this unit answers
What did Chopin himself — not a pupil recalling him decades later — actually intend to teach about the piano? This appendix prints, in full English translation for the first time, the surviving autograph draft of his unfinished treatise (the Projet de méthode, “PM”, now in the Pierpont Morgan Library), including his own crossings-out inside {}. It is the only place in the book where the teaching doctrine is stated in the first person, so it functions as the control against which all the secondhand testimony in Part 1 must be read.
Two things it answers concretely: (1) how Chopin conceptualised and would have taught the rudiments (what a note is, why staves have lines, where middle C sits) to an absolute beginner; and (2) what his own taxonomy of “mechanism” was — a complete, closed, three-part system he claimed exhausts everything the piano can require.
Key terms
- Projet de méthode (PM) — Chopin’s unfinished draft method; the autograph is paginated by another hand, and the translation follows that binding order, with a horizontal rule marking each new sheet (p. 270).
- Mechanism (mécanisme) — Chopin’s own word for the purely technical side of playing, explicitly quarantined from “musical feeling or style” (p. 273).
- Points of pivot — the black (“higher”) keys, which anchor the hand and make thumb-passage, legato thirds/sixths and legato in general possible (p. 273).
- Disjunct notes (les notes sautées) — his category-2 material: intervals wider than a semitone/tone, the octave divided in minor thirds, common chords and inversions (p. 273).
- Adjacent notes — his category-1 material: tones and semitones, i.e. diatonic and chromatic scales plus trills (p. 273).
- Double notes — category 3: thirds, sixths, octaves; from these, chords and 3-part playing (p. 273).
- Nuancer / bien nuancer — to shade, control and vary tone; his criterion for “a well-formed technique” (p. 276).
- Inequality of fingers — the doctrine that each finger’s differently determined power is a resource (“particular charm”) to develop, not a defect to level (p. 276).
- Siamese twin of the third — the fourth finger, ligament-bound to the third; separating it is “impossible and, fortunately, unnecessary” (p. 276).
- Intonation is the tuner’s task — the structural premise that the pianist, unlike a string or wind player, is relieved of pitch-production, so technique reduces to hand-positioning and dexterity (pp. 272, 273, 275).
- Ladder of sounds — his pedagogical image for the staff: an imaginary ladder of steps spanning all pitches, truncated to five lines above and five below a suppressed middle step (pp. 271-272, 275, 277).
- Acrobatics — his pejorative for abstract, music-less technical drilling (p. 274).
Propositions
Every proposition below is Chopin’s own stated position in his own draft.
- Because the tuner supplies intonation, the piano is free of the single greatest difficulty of instrumental study — so what remains to be studied is only hand-positioning relative to the keys, sound quality, note-lengths, and dexterity (p. 272).
- The keyboard’s design is ingenious precisely because it is not level. The raised black keys are “destined for the long fingers” and act as pivots (p. 273).
- Levelling the keyboard would be destructive, removing the hand’s security and making thumb-passage in sharp/flat scales, legato thirds and sixths, and legato generally enormously difficult. His deleted quip: levelling the keyboard should logically be matched by removing a joint from each finger (p. 273).
- The piano’s mechanical difficulty is therefore less than commonly imagined (p. 273).
- Mechanism must be treated separately from musical feeling and style — an explicit methodological boundary he draws on himself (p. 273).
- Mechanism divides into exactly three parts — (1) adjacent notes: chromatic and diatonic scales, trills; (2) notes further apart: the octave divided in minor thirds with a finger per key, common chord and inversions (disjunct notes); (3) double notes: thirds, sixths, octaves (p. 273).
- The three-part system is closed and exhaustive. No fourth theoretical combination of adjacent notes can be devised, so any invented tone/semitone figure is a combination or selection of scales and trills; and once thirds, sixths and octaves are playable, 3-part playing and chords follow, two hands give 4-6 parts, and “there is nothing more to be invented” in piano mechanism (p. 273).
- The method offers practical, experience-verified simple ideas, not theories. He deleted the more polemical framing (“not just some more or less brilliant and debatable theories”) in favour of ideas “which I know from experience to be really useful” (p. 274).
- Teaching should accept the limits of the art’s means, because art is infinite within those limits — self-limitation is what confers boundless potential (p. 274).
- Existing piano methods are tedious, useless and unrelated to the instrument (p. 274).
- Abstract technical drilling is a different genre of difficulty from the difficulty found in good music — the difficulty of the great masters is not the acrobatic difficulty being practised, and drilling it leaves you able to do neither thing well (the hand-walking analogy) (p. 274).
- Seating: position yourself to reach both ends of the keyboard without leaning to either side (p. 274).
- The right foot rests on the sustaining pedal without operating the dampers — i.e. contact with the pedal from the outset, but silent (p. 274).
- Elbow level with the white keys; the hand turned neither inward nor outward (ni en dedans ni en dehors) (p. 270).
- Hand position is found by placing the fingers on a chord that puts long fingers on black keys and short fingers on white keys, then levelling each group so leverage is relatively equal (p. 274).
- Curvature is a consequence, not a goal. That placement itself curves the hand and produces “the necessary suppleness that it could not have with the fingers straight” (p. 274).
- The hand leads; the rest of the arm follows in order — “A supple hand; the wrist, the forearm, the arm, everything will follow the hand in the right order” (p. 275).
- Do not begin scales with C major. It is easiest to read but hardest for the hand because it has no pivot; begin instead with a scale that puts long fingers on black keys, e.g. B major (p. 275).
- Even sound is not the aim; even time is. In a fast scale nobody notices inequality of sound provided the notes are rhythmically equal (p. 276).
- A well-formed technique is defined by the ability to control and vary a beautiful sound quality, not by uniformity (p. 276).
- Training all fingers to equal power is acting against nature, and has been done for a long time (p. 276).
- Each finger’s differently determined power should be developed, not destroyed — its “particular charm” of touch is an asset (p. 276).
- Power follows shape, with a stated hierarchy: thumb strongest (broadest, shortest, freest), then the fifth as the other extremity, then the third as middle and pivot, then the second, then the fourth as weakest (p. 276).
- The fourth finger’s dependence on the third is anatomical and should be accepted — ligament-bound, impossible to separate, and fortunately unnecessary to separate (p. 276).
- “As many sounds as there are fingers” — timbral variety is a function of fingering, so everything comes down to good fingering; Hummel is named as the greatest authority on it (p. 276).
- The whole apparatus is used, not only the fingers — hand, wrist, forearm and arm are as necessary as finger conformation, and one cannot play everything from the wrist “as Kalkbrenner claims” (p. 276).
- Notation is derived, not decreed. Music proceeds by sounds; two sounds imply higher and lower; therefore stacked lines are the logical way to write them (pp. 275, 277).
- Middle C is chosen empirically, not conventionally: from the region of pitches whose vibrations are most easily perceptible, take a sound comfortably singable by everybody — men, women, children — that all principal (string and wind) instruments can play; it sits almost at the middle of the keyboard, on the white key before a group of two black keys (pp. 271, 275, 277).
- The five-line staves result from suppressing the middle step and truncating the ladder — one rarely writes above the fifth line for the voice or below the fifth line downwards, so the surplus lines are omitted “except to add them when required” (p. 272).
- The keyboard itself teaches the direction of pitch: right is higher and higher, left lower and lower (pp. 275, 277).
- Sound precedes speech. “Word is born of sound — sound before word”; music is the indefinite/indeterminate language of men, and sounds are to music what words are to language (p. 276).
- One sound is not music, just as one word is not language — several sounds are required (p. 277).
Arguments
The tuner argument (pp. 272-273, 275). Chopin’s whole method rests on one structural claim: pitch-production, the hardest part of learning an instrument, is outsourced to the tuner. Two consequences are drawn. First, technique shrinks to a tractable problem — hand position, tone, note-lengths, dexterity. Second, and pedagogically sharper, the reading-based ordering of instruction becomes indefensible: since intonation is no obstacle, there is no reason to start with C major merely because it is easy to read. He drafted this as “would be absurd” before softening it to “useless” (p. 275).
The pivot argument (p. 273). Rather than treat black keys as an obstacle, he inverts the usual view: the raised keys are the keyboard’s cardinal virtue because they give the hand fixed anchors. The argument is made by counterfactual — people who know nothing about playing propose levelling the keyboard; if levelled, thumb-passage, legato thirds and sixths and legato generally become enormously difficult. The deleted sentence (“If levelling the keyboard, one should logically remove a joint from each finger”) shows he first argued it by reductio, then cut the joke. The pivot argument is what licenses proposition 18: B major is the easier starting key because it is pivot-rich; C major is the hard one.
The exhaustiveness argument (p. 273). The three-part division is defended as complete rather than merely convenient. For part 1: adjacent notes admit no fourth theoretical combination, so scales and trills generate everything at that interval class. For part 3: thirds + sixths + octaves yield 3-part playing, hence chords, which are then divisible by what part 2 taught about disjunct intervals; two hands yield 4-6 parts. Conclusion: nothing further can be invented in mechanism. This is a closure claim, and it is the justification for refusing to add exercises.
The anti-acrobatics argument (p. 274). Two moves. (a) A category argument: the difficulty manufactured by exercises is “an abstract difficulty, a new genre of acrobatics” — a different kind of thing from the difficulty actually met in the music of the great masters, so practising it does not transfer. (b) The hand-walking analogy: learning to walk on your hands in order to go for a stroll ends with you walking badly on your feet and not very well on your hands either. He deleted the more socially barbed version (“to make an entrance in a salon”). Together these ground the positive programme: only what “goes straight to the point and smoothes the technical side of the art”.
The nature argument for finger inequality (p. 276). Premise: each finger is differently formed, and power is determined by shape. Therefore equalising power is “acting against nature”. The recommended inversion — develop each finger’s particular charm rather than destroy it — is then rescued from being a mere limitation by the fingering doctrine: because there are as many available sounds as fingers, unequal fingers become a palette, and the whole art reduces to good fingering (Hummel as authority). The fourth finger case is the argument’s strongest instance: its dependence is ligamentous, so the goal others pursue is not merely misguided but physically impossible — and, he adds, “fortunately, unnecessary”.
The equal-time-not-equal-sound argument (p. 276). An empirical observation is used to dissolve a pedagogical goal: in a very fast scale nobody perceives sound-inequality provided the time is equal. Hence evenness of tone is not worth buying at the price of finger-equalisation; rhythmic equality carries the effect, and the real criterion of technique becomes the capacity to nuance a beautiful sound.
The derivation of notation (pp. 271-272, 275, 277). The rudiments are argued genetically, not asserted: sound → relative height → stacked lines → an unusably long ladder → the need for a visual anchor → a middle note fixed by what human voices and principal instruments can comfortably produce → suppression of the middle step and truncation to five lines each side. The p. 277 version numbers these as nine consecutive steps, making the deductive intent explicit. This shows Chopin planned to teach notation as a consequence of acoustics and the body, which is the same reasoning style as the tuner and pivot arguments.
Evidence
- The document’s own status as evidence. The editor states the text is reproduced in full for the first time here, with Chopin’s deletions and alterations preserved in
{}; the order follows the autograph’s non-authorial pagination in its present Pierpont Morgan binding, with a horizontal line at each new sheet; drafting history is discussed at p. 90 n. 1 (p. 270). - Multiple overlapping drafts of the same opening. The heading “Notes and their keys on the piano” (and the variant “For learning notes and the keys on the piano”) recurs on pp. 270, 271, 272 and again as “About notes” on p. 275, each time restating the ladder derivation with different wording and increasing compression. The p. 277 numbered list (points 1-9) is the most condensed version. This is direct textual evidence of how hard Chopin worked at the first explanation — and that the treatise never got much past it.
- Visible self-editing as evidence of position. Deletions show him moderating polemic (“would be absurd” → “it is useless”, p. 275), dropping the removed-joint reductio (p. 273), dropping the salon jibe (p. 274), and replacing “evident that we shouldn’t” with “better not to” on finger equalisation (p. 276). The direction of revision is consistently toward practical understatement.
- Named contemporaries as positive and negative evidence. Hummel is cited as “the most knowledgeable” on fingering; Kalkbrenner is named and contradicted on wrist-only playing (p. 276).
- The unfinished tail. The draft trails off into headings with no text under them: “Cadences, trills:” (p. 276).
- Then a heading on the values of modern notes and rests (p. 277), and a heading on bars in which each beat has the value of a crotchet (p. 278) — nothing follows either. Together with the list of alternative one-line definitions of music he was still choosing between (p. 276), this is direct evidence that the treatise is a plan, not a text.
- Concrete prescriptions rather than generalities, which is what makes the draft usable: the specific seating criterion (p. 274), the silent right foot on the sustaining pedal (p. 274), elbow at white-key level with the hand turned neither in nor out (p. 270), the levelled long-finger/short-finger placement (p. 274), and B major as first scale (p. 275).
- The addressee fragment. “Dear Child” (p. 275) shows the intended reader: a musically cultivated pupil who already sight-reads the great masters and lacks only “what one calls fingers” — evidence that the PM was conceived for a musician needing technique, not a beginner needing music.
Quotes
“The elbow level with the white keys, the hand [pointing] neither in [dedans] nor out [dehors].” (p. 270)
“Intonation being the tuner’s task, the piano is free of one of the greatest difficulties encountered in the study of an instrument.” (p. 272)
“One cannot overpraise the genius who presided over the construction of the keyboard, so well adapted to the shape of the hand.” (p. 273)
“Is there anything more ingenious than the higher [= black] keys – destined for the long fingers – so admirably serving as points of pivot.” (p. 273)
“this would eliminate all the security that the pivot points give to the hand” (p. 273)
“I am not, let it be understood, dealing here with musical feeling or style but purely with the technical aspect of playing, what I call the mechanism.” (p. 273)
“I divide the study of piano mechanism into three parts:” (p. 273)
“there is nothing more to be invented as far as mechanism of piano playing is concerned” (p. 273)
“As art is infinite within the limits of its means, so its teaching should be governed by the same limits in order to give it boundless potential.” (p. 274)
“People have tried out all kinds of methods of learning to play the piano, methods that are tedious and useless and have nothing to do with the study of this instrument.” (p. 274)
“Eventually one is no longer able to walk properly on one’s feet, and not very well on one’s hands either.” (p. 274)
“It’s an abstract difficulty, a new genre of acrobatics.” (p. 274)
“Position yourself so as to be able to reach both ends of the keyboard without leaning to either side. The right foot on the sustaining pedal without operating the dampers.” (p. 274)
“to make the leverage relatively equal; this will curve the hand, giving it the necessary suppleness that it could not have with the fingers straight” (p. 274)
“A supple hand; the wrist, the forearm, the arm, everything will follow the hand in the right order.” (p. 275)
“to start learning scales with C major, the easiest to read, and the most difficult for the hand as it has no pivot.” (p. 275)
“with the long fingers on the black keys like B major” (p. 275)
“Dear Child: you’ve had excellent lessons in music. You’ve been taught to love Mozart, Haydn and B[eethoven].” (p. 275)
“You lack only what one calls fingers, in order to play more easily” (p. 275)
“No one will notice the inequality of sound in a very fast scale, as long as the notes are played in equal time – the goal isn’t to learn to play everything with an equal sound.” (p. 276)
“A well-formed technique, it seems to me, [is one] that can control and vary [bien nuancer] a beautiful sound quality.” (p. 276)
“For a long time we have been acting against nature by training our fingers to be all equally powerful.” (p. 276)
“better not to attempt to destroy the particular charm of each one’s touch but on the contrary to develop it.” (p. 276)
“Each finger’s power is determined by its shape. The thumb has the most power, being the broadest, shortest, and freest” (p. 276)
“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 – which is impossible and, fortunately, unnecessary.” (p. 276)
“Hummel was the most knowledgeable [?] on this subject.” (p. 276)
“Just as we need to use the conformation of the fingers, we need no less to use the rest of the hand, the wrist, the forearm and the arm.” (p. 276)
“One cannot try to play everything from the wrist, as Kalkbrenner claims.” (p. 276)
“The art of expressing one’s thoughts through sounds.” (p. 276)
“Word is born of sound – sound before word.” (p. 276)
“We use sounds to make music just as we use words to make a language.” (p. 276)
“One abstract sound doesn’t make music, just as one word doesn’t make language.” (p. 277)
“In this immensity of sounds we find a region in which the vibrations are more easily perceptible to us.” (p. 277)
Tensions and links
Against 02-basic-technique:
- Definition of technique — agreement, with the boundary drawn harder here. Pupils report Chopin separating mechanism from style; the draft states the boundary in the first person and as a methodological choice (“I am not, let it be understood, dealing here with musical feeling or style”, p. 273). Nuance: in the draft the separation is a writing convenience, not a claim that technique is musically neutral — proposition 20 makes tone-shading itself the definition of good technique, which pulls the two domains back together.
- Criticism of customary methods — agreement, but the draft supplies the reason. Pupil accounts transmit Chopin’s disdain for mechanical drilling; only here do we get the argument that exercise-difficulty is categorically unlike the difficulty of the great masters (p. 274). Secondhand versions preserve the verdict; the autograph preserves the premise.
- Categories of technical study — the draft is more systematic than any pupil report. The tripartite scheme with its explicit closure claim (p. 273) is a piece of theory pupils never reproduce in this form. Testimony gives fragments (scales, trills, thirds, sixths, octaves, chords) as lesson content; the draft shows they were the branches of a deliberately exhaustive taxonomy. Tension worth noting: pupils’ curricula (Clementi, Cramer, Bach, Moscheles etc.) supply repertoire-based technical work, whereas the draft implies almost no need for étude-like material at all — because nothing more “can be invented”.
- Position at the piano and hand position — agreement in substance, sharper in detail. Elbow at white-key level, hand neither in nor out (p. 270), no leaning to reach the extremes (p. 274). The draft adds one item pupil reports do not emphasise: the right foot placed on the sustaining pedal from the start without depressing it (p. 274).
- Curvature and suppleness — a real difference of derivation. Pupils describe the rounded, supple hand as a directly given instruction about shape. Chopin’s draft derives curvature as a by-product of levelling long fingers on black keys and short on white for equal leverage (p. 274). The prescriptive/derived difference matters pedagogically: in the draft, if the placement is right the shape takes care of itself.
- Passivity of arm and elbow; flexibility of wrist — agreement, but the draft settles the causal direction. “everything will follow the hand in the right order” (p. 275) makes the hand the leader and arm the follower, which is a stronger and more specific formulation than the pupils’ general “suppleness”. And it explicitly limits any wrist-centred doctrine: Kalkbrenner is named and rejected (p. 276) — the draft’s insistence on hand, wrist, forearm and arm is a counterweight to any reading of the pupil testimony as pure finger-and-wrist playing.
- Individuality and independence of the fingers — the draft is more radical than the received account. Pupil testimony tends to be read as Chopin cultivating finger independence; his own text attacks the whole project of equalising fingers as “acting against nature” (p. 276) and declares the fourth finger’s separation impossible and unnecessary. So “independence” in the pupils’ sense must mean freedom and differentiated touch, not equal strength. Anyone using unit 02’s five-finger exercises for “independence” should read them through this constraint.
- Scales, thumb-passage and evenness — the clearest divergence. Pupil accounts stress evenness as an ideal and generally reflect conventional scale order. Chopin’s own draft (a) demotes evenness of sound in favour of equality of time (p. 276), and (b) reverses the usual key order, rejecting C major as pivot-less and proposing B major first (p. 275). If unit 02’s heading on evenness of sound and tranquillity of the hand as principles of fingering is taken to mean literal tonal uniformity, it conflicts with p. 276; read as tranquillity achieved through good fingering, it agrees.
- Trills and double notes — agreement in content, blank in the draft. The draft’s heading “Cadences, trills:” (p. 276) has no text under it, so pupil testimony remains the only source for how trills were actually practised. Same for octaves and chords beyond their place in the taxonomy.
Against 03-musical-style:
- The vocal/speech model — strong agreement, and here it is foundational rather than illustrative. Unit 03’s bel canto and musical-prosody material is normally presented as Chopin’s interpretive ideal. The draft grounds it ontologically: music is “The art of expressing one’s thoughts through sounds”, “Word is born of sound – sound before word”, “We use sounds to make music just as we use words to make a language” (p. 276), and one sound is no more music than one word is language (p. 277). Declamation and phrasing are thus not stylistic preferences but consequences of what he takes music to be.
- The singable middle note ties style to rudiments. Middle C is fixed by what a man, woman or child can comfortably sing (pp. 271, 275, 277) — the same vocal criterion that governs the cantabile ideal in unit 03. The draft makes the voice the reference point of the notation system itself.
- Nuance and the dynamic scale — agreement, with the draft supplying the technical mechanism. Unit 03’s continuous gradation of nuance is, in the draft, the purpose of unequal fingers: “As many sounds as there are fingers” and the resulting doctrine that everything depends on good fingering (p. 276). This is the hinge that joins the two units — the style demand (infinite shading) is what makes the technical heterodoxy (unequal fingers) necessary.
- Fingering for legato and cantabile — agreement, and the pivot argument explains it. The draft’s defence of black keys as pivots is justified partly by legato thirds, sixths “and generally all legato playing” (p. 273), i.e. by exactly the cantabile requirement unit 03 documents.
- Pedal — a gap, not a conflict. Unit 03 has substantial testimony on pedalling; the draft mentions the pedal only as a matter of foot placement (p. 274) and never reaches use. The “mechanism” boundary at p. 273 plausibly explains why: pedalling belonged to the style half he never drafted.
- Rubato, agogics, ornamentation, simplicity, form-analysis — entirely absent from the draft. Everything in unit 03 beyond the vocal model has no first-person counterpart here. This is the single most important caveat for the wiki: the Projet de méthode authorises the technical doctrine directly, but Chopin’s interpretive doctrine still rests wholly on pupil testimony.
- Definition-hunting as a link to style. The stack of alternative definitions of music on p. 276 (“The art of handling [manier] sounds”, “The manifestation of our feelings through sounds”, “The indefinite (indeterminate) language [parole] of men is sound”) shows Chopin trying to fix, in a technical treatise, a definition that would have licensed the expressive teaching recorded in unit 03.
Open questions
- Would the projected style half have existed at all, or was the “mechanism” boundary at p. 273 a permanent limitation of scope? The pedal fragment on p. 274 suggests he expected to return to it.
- Which chord exactly did Chopin specify for finding hand position on p. 274? The extraction renders it damaged (“E, … B”), and the black-key/white-key logic implies a specific sonority worth recovering from the autograph or from p. 90 n. 1.
- Why B major rather than the enharmonic or another pivot-rich key — and what did he delete in its place (”{ major/deleted}”, p. 275)?
- Does the closure claim (“nothing more to be invented”, p. 273) survive his own late music? The taxonomy predicts that e.g. the op. 25 études and the Barcarolle’s double-note writing are recombinations of the three categories; that is testable against Part 2 of the book.
- How was the numbered nine-point derivation on p. 277 meant to relate to the prose versions on pp. 271-272 and 275 — a final compression, or a separate outline for a different chapter?
- Who is “Dear Child” (p. 275) — a generic addressee, or a specific pupil whose lessons prompted the draft?
- What did Chopin take from Hummel specifically on fingering (p. 276), and how far does the PM’s programme depend on Hummel’s method?
- The p. 272 fragment breaks off mid-sentence about the string and wind instruments defining the middle of the range; is the continuation lost, or did he abandon that draft there?