Piano Video Lesson: How to Play Burgmuller's "The Farewell" with Ease

Welcome to LivingPianos.com, Robert Estrin here with one of my favorite pieces to teach, Le Deux or The Farewell by Bergmiller. You know, years ago I did a whole set of tutorials on Bergmiller which you can reference in the description of this video if you want to cover more of them. But this is actually the last piece of Burgmuller I usually teach from this collection because I think it's about the most difficult one. This and Balade are the more extended etudes of Burgmuller and this is just a wonderful piece. And what I'm going to do for you is I'm going to go through and give you a complete tutorial of this piece but first a performance so you can hear what this piece is about.

Truly great music that's accessible even if you don't have a virtual technique. That's what's so great about this whole set of pieces. So now I'm going to break it down for you and show you each section and the challenges of this piece and how to practice it, how to learn it, all of it. So sit back and get ready.

So the first thing that you'll notice about this piece is that the very first few measures are completely different from the rest of the piece.

It's kind of a little bit of an introduction that has a melancholy, warmth tone to it that sets it up so that when the triplets start in the fifth measure it's rousing. So you want to be very lyrical but you don't want to be really drastically under tempo even though it sounds slower because you've got regular eighths instead of triple eighths. Now the secret to this section is playing extremely legato and as I've talked about so much is when you have repeated notes you want to change fingers to be able to get legato on repeated notes. So the very first little phrase of the right hand, just the first few notes, notices a rise and a fall which is typical for phrases.

The rise and fall, which is the natural intonation of your speech when you're speaking, it's all related to the breath which is pervasive in your thinking whether you realize it or not. Everything that you have in life is influenced from the fact that you're breathing all the time and that rise and fall is life and to bring life to your music you want to have that rise and fall and you want to change the fingers to maximize the legato.

So changing the fingers on the E's.

And the secret to being able to get those E's so legato is one finger is going up while the other finger is going down and the arm and the hand have a no motion whatsoever. If you move the arm or the hand that's the sound you'll get. If you use the same finger you'll get that sound too.

But to get that smoothness changing the finger where in this case the third finger is coming up and the second finger is going down.

Now when you try this you might experience this where the second note doesn't play.

Remember to raise high the previous note. In this case the third finger must raise up to allow the second finger to play.

And there the fingering is opposite, it's two to three. Because you start on the third finger and then you start on the second finger two to three.

So that's the way to approach those opening notes. Then you have this big sforzando decrescendo all legato with a ralentando and then we get into the meat of the work all these triplets and you have an ABA form.

Introduction ABA meaning that you have a whole section, a contrasting middle section and a repeat of the initial section. That's the A to the B to the A and then a little coda at the very end. Introduction ABA coda. That's the form of the piece. So we're starting now with the A section and at first naturally what you'll want to do to practice this is get out your trusty metronome, find a tempo which you can play absolutely securely. Don't worry if it's drastically under tempo.

It doesn't matter how slow it is. As long as you have the security to play each finger definitely, evenly, securely without moving the arm but just using the fingers and delineate each finger by releasing previously played fingers raising them high enough so you don't get sloppiness because you don't want to get that. You don't want that later on. You don't want notes to be overlapping too much. So you want to practice the release of notes with slow raised fingers. So to give you a little demonstration of that.

Notice also the paying attention to the accents, the slurs, the crescendos, all of it. That's from the very beginning.

Now any place in this piece as in other pieces that you can reduce the chords do so in the learning process. For example the third measure of the a tempo you have might as well learn that in chords first.

Makes it much easier to learn. Now any of you who have followed me for any length of time you all know that the first thing I do with a piece after reading through it a couple of times is to memorize it. Memorize first rather than at the end. It saves vast amounts of time. I have videos on this subject which will be in the description as well. Why it saves vast amounts of time? Because you learn it absolutely correctly from the beginning by bit by bit tiny bits of music that you digest exactly right so you never get into bad habits that you have to break later.

It's much quicker believe it or not. So I encourage all of you to read through this piece a couple of times and get right to work and memorize it first. You will save time and I have the method for how to memorize music which will be in the description for you. So anyway this goes on and on and this whole section really after you've been able to play it successfully and accurately you could work through all of it that way but you might want to zero in later when you have the whole thing learned or if you memorize it or even if you're playing it with a score where you can play this whole first section up to where it goes to the key change. Now the key change occurs but you don't have to change the key signature because it goes from A minor to C major which neither one has any sharps or flats in the key signature but the middle section is the C major section where you have the triplets then in the left hand instead of the right hand. So that whole section is pretty homogenous so whatever you do in one part of it should translate to all of it. Now you can break it down to smaller sections when you're doing metronome speeds to try to increase the tempo instead of trying to do the entire section one notch at a time which would be a very tedious process. You could just do that as little as what I just played or you could do a bit more if you wanted to but you have one notch at a time working it up and as you gain speed you lighten up and stay closer to the keys. Obviously you're not going to lift, raise fingers when you're playing it quickly. You stay closer to the keys and develop speed. Now are there other practice techniques you could employ? Absolutely. You could do different rhythms, accents, you know for example accents on the first note of each triplet.

Notice when you're doing accents that it's not pushing with your arm, it's just fingers. You want to train your fingers where the hands play together which is why accenting the first note of each triplet identifies in your hand where the two hands play together. You could also do rhythms like...

You could do different note groups that enable you to get the fluidity of your hand like...

So different things that... and you could even do larger note groups.

So there are all different techniques that you can utilize in order to gain the fluency.

Metronome speeds is one way to go one notch at a time gaining security and being able to increase the tempo and not to do the entire section with metronome speeds but just take a section at a time so it's not a tedious process and you could really zero in getting the feeling of the fluidity in one section which you'll find will translate to other sections once you achieve that. Then as I said accented notes, different groups of notes, find what works for you and once you start getting more and more notes that are fluent then it starts to all come together.

So the end of this... you know notice that I had a kind of ferocious sforzandi and... decrescendo at the end of that section before the key change.

The way to achieve this sforzandi is by using the wrist.

That's where you can... it's appropriate to use the hand not the arm.

The arm is still too big for this but the wrist can...

Nice decrescendo at the end of the section which brings us to the middle section, the B section of this etude. Here the left hand is all broken chords so once again learn it in chords.

Now you don't have to necessarily learn the entire section. As a matter of fact if you ever watch me practice and I have videos of me practicing new... how to approach a new piece then I should put all these in the description for you. I give myself little teeny tiny phrases to learn at a time. That way I can absorb them thoroughly and not have to go back later and fill in what I didn't get quite right the first time and then worse yet have music that I played over and over not getting all the details quite right. And I suggest you do the same thing. So you could just learn this much...

the first three chords which is the first chord, the C major chord, the F major chord and the second inversion and back to the C major chord. That's not hard to learn. So you learn just that much and then the melody won't be very hard to learn that much. So you learn two measures at a time then of course the hard part put it together. Put it in together, the hands together with the left hand in chords.

Then finally play the left hand alone as written.

Of course you'll have to go more slowly at first but doesn't matter how slowly you go then finally put the hands together with the left hand as written.

The big challenge with this section is the fact that you've got so many notes in the left hand that are going to overpower the melody. If you play the two ends equal in volume it would sound like this...

because the left hand, the right hand is fading away as the piano does especially in the higher register and you have these notes you know pounding away on every triplet eighth. So you've got to exaggerate the difference between the volume of the melody in the right hand and the accompaniment in the left hand tremendously. And the way to do that is to have a lot of weight of the arm supported by the fingers and have that weight transfer from finger to finger. So there's a lot of weight that the fingers are supporting and it's not pushing separately for each note otherwise you'll get this sound.

There's no line there but if you let the weight of the arm support by the finger and transfer you'll get that tone and then the left hand leave the fingers right on the surface of the keys rounded fingers with a minimal amount of motion and then you can get this balance.

That's the sound you're after. Now it's actually harder to get this kind of balance at this tempo than at a faster tempo because the melody notes have to last longer note than they do when you're playing faster compared to fading out.

That's why it's always more difficult to balance the hands at a slower tempo particularly when you have faster notes in the left hand than the right hand. The left hand notes reinforcing themselves as the slower right hand notes are fading away and high notes don't last as long as low notes anyway.

So you have a compounding of challenges to bring that melody out. The other thing you may have noticed as I was playing it, it's a double whammy because you not only have to be able to have the melody above the left hand which is hard enough for all the myriad reasons I just articulated but you also want to have a line so that it's not just static notes but there's a rise and a fall.

So about a four measure phrase and then again another four measure phrase and again change fingers for repeated notes to get smooth legato that it doesn't break up the phrase so you don't get this.

You want smoothness. I know there are ends of slurs but try as you might. Repeated notes can never be connected because of the mechanism of the damper which goes on the string and so if you try to play it as legato as possible it will still be the end of a slur. It will still be slightly detached which is exactly what you want. So again the weight of the arm which increases in the middle of the phrase and decreases at the end of the phrase. Much more sound than you imagine you would need to overcome.

Now you might wonder how to get those notes even. Well once again you could do a myriad of different techniques. The accent.

And you put that hands together once again it delineates which notes play together between the two hands.

Doing it with the finger once again.

An interesting technique of course you could do rhythms and such. Another interesting technique is leave out the third note.

So all the techniques I described in the triplets at the beginning apply here. Different rhythms, different accents, different note groups.

All these different techniques of practice.

And of course metronome speeds. Progressively faster metronome speeds a notch at a time.

And once again you don't have to do the entire section with the metronome. Just be able to focus on maybe the first four measures with the metronome doing metronome speeds. Then you can do the next four measures. Rather than do the whole big section with metronome speeds you'll find a lot more progress is made because you can study the way your hands are working, the way the music sounds and focus in. Which brings us finally to the coda. What do I mean by coda? There's an N section that is not like the introduction. It's not like the A section. It's not like the B section. It's new material.

Right here, six measures from the end.

Left hand, fingering. Make sure you can play these thirds legato.

And each one of those should be just one group of notes.

And you can practice once again note groups.

Get over the whole chord.

You can just play the first four notes being over the chord.

So easy to play the notes when you're over them before you need to play them. So practice that first.

If you can do that then the passage is simple. And the last two chords, I like them forte.

I think instead of...

I think a nice...

That's personal expression, my interpretation. If you like it, take it, use it.

Any other questions about L' Adieu, The Farewell of Burgmuller, leave them in the comments here at LivingPianos.com. We're your online piano store with lots of videos and by the way, lots of pianos. Anybody needs pianos, free delivery anywhere in the country. Thanks so much for joining me, Robert Estrin. We'll see you next time.

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