Piano Video Lesson: How to play the Moonlight Sonata with small hands

Hi, I'm Robert Estrin at Virtualsheetmusic.com with a video that is questions and answers from viewers like yourself. This one, somebody with small hands asks, "How do you approach the Beethoven Moonlight Sonata when the reach is greater than your hand can reach?" This is a great question and you asked the right person. I have very small hands. I can reach only a ninth, a tenth just barely around the keys.

As a child growing up it was really tough because I was studying repertoire that was quite sophisticated in my teen years, and could barely reach an octave. Thank goodness I can reach a solid octave, because if you can't reach a solid octave on the piano it's very difficult to approach the keyboard. But assuming you can reach a good solid octave, you should be in good shape and I'm going to show you the secret. Years ago I got to speak with the pianist Ivan Moravec, great pianist. Also a pianist with small hands and we talked a little bit at that time about the challenges of playing with small hands.

Of course, one of the things that you will need to do is develop a great deal of strength, because with a lot of strength you can overcome the limitations of the small hands. But specifically Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, of course right at the beginning there is a reach that is a little bit beyond what I can reach. I'm going to show you how I play it. Then I'm going to show you how you can play it even if you can't reach a ninth. I can reach a ninth but I still can't reach the passage as it's written, and I'll show you what I mean.

I don't know if you can see right there. Here, if I played it without the pedal you're going to hear how abrupt it is, because I cannot reach. So I take it on the pedal and that is the secret. And I'm going to show you some other pieces that I play that are far beyond my reach where I'm able to get chords by utilizing the pedal and breaking them. So I'm going to show you how you can play this if you can't even reach the ninth. If you can't reach that, I'm going to break it and get it on the pedal.

Now you might have noticed a little break, but it's not a big deal, is it? In fact, I do it all over the place in music. For example, the beginning of the Schumann Carnaval. Now if I play that same passage without the pedal, watch the left hand tenths. I can't reach these tenths at all, but I grab them quickly with a pedal while breaking them very quickly. The secret to breaking them properly is getting the balance out of them that you want.

So right there at the end, if I do that with a pedal, it almost sounds like I'm reaching the...But I'm not, I'm actually going...Do you hear the difference between...and...? So that is a tenth. I can't reach a tenth but I can make it sound convincing. Hopefully it's convincing to you.

So take that in all the places where you can't quite reach. Break it, make sure you get the bottom note, break it from the bottom up, grab that bottom note on the pedal so that you get the entire chord sustaining, even though it's an illusion. You know something? It works great, because if you ever listen to pianists who have enormous hands who don't need to break things, breaking chords is something that many people do just for expressive effect anyway. So it gives you creative license to break chords that you can't reach and don't even think twice about it. Incorporate this into your playing and there's no limit to the repertoire you can play, no matter how big the reaches that are called for.

Thanks for joining me, Robert Estrin here at virtualsheetmusic.com.

Automatic video-to-text transcription by DaDaScribe.com

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