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What would you do if there's only a couple days before a competition or recital, and you realized that you've been playing a note wrong (something that can't really be noticed much, but might mess up your playing of that section when you fix it at top speed) for months. Would you attempt to fix it, or leave it as it is so nothing gets messed up?

Leave it. It that happens to me, chances are I'll be hitting many wrong notes anyway, so what's one more... Haha

One misreading?

There are a number of studio recordings by great pianists that contain misreadings. Which means that not only the pianists but the recording producers missed them too.

Others just leave wrong notes in for posterity .

Yeah, it seems minor, but I'm just wondering, if you noticed it, would you attempt to fix it, or just leave it? Since its not a huge mess up

The problem: If you play a wrong note in a recital and you know it's wrong, it might influence the rest of the performance.

I'd say: Try practicing it once or twice with the "correct" note, and if it doesn't work, stick with what you know.

Forget about it.

Fix it afterwards, if you intend to play it again. Don't mess up your hard-learnt muscle memory for the sake of one note and put your recital in jeopardy - one moment of hesitation while you debate between two notes can derail the whole piece, so why risk it?

Turn it into the perfect wrong note! Clearly, the note you've been playing all this time fits musically in the piece otherwise you would have noticed it a long time ago. So, let it be and think of it as an ossia.

+1 exactly what I thought. If you've been studying this piece assiduously for months and only just noticed like anyone in the audience will.

Ok thanks everyone! And btw, it's a Prokofiev sonata and the wrong note was a b flat plus c instead of a b flat and a flat. Also, my competitions in 2 weeks, not a couple days, but I've got a performance in a couple days

In a Prokofiev sonata, one wrong note is not going to make much of a difference. Only those who have studied the piece (and not even all of those) will hear it, and if they do they'll probably just think it was a key slip.

Thanks!

Everybody here is right.
But when that happened to me once, I didn't follow what y'all are saying.

While I was in the warm-up room before going onstage in a competition, I noticed that the score of Chopin's F minor Fantaisie showed one note slightly different in an accompaniment figure than what I'd been playing -- dunno, maybe something like an Eb instead of a C in an arpeggiated thing. So, I figured I'd play it the right way when I got up there -- why the heck not. And I did -- but it probably kept me from playing the whole rest of the piece as freely and as well as I might have.

It was dumb. Especially because later on, I saw that my old wrong way wasn't really wrong -- it was just a thing of different versions in different editions.

Depends on the piece - if it's a Beethoven sonata, judges will notice - if it's Vers la Flamme, probably not...

You'd be surprised...

You'd be surprised.

I agree with Polyphonist. Beethoven has thick textures a lot of the time; Mozart, on the other hand, or Scarlatti (for the most part), have thin, super-exposed textures that need to be hit perfectly.

As for the Prokofiev, I probably hit 80-90% of the notes when I play it, but as long as the message is there, the judge won't mind TOO much.

Sviatoslav Richter played the same wrong note in Bach's Italian Concerto for decades. When he discovered it, he made his record label issue an apology with subsequent printings. In the apology he notes that in forty years, no one had said anything to him about the wrong note!

@pianorigami: oh I can never play all the notes right in Prokofiev either

I also vote for "leave it". This happened recently to me - just 5 days before my RCM GR 10 exam, I realized I had been playing a wrong note in a Chopin nocturne. I had previously played this piece in recitals, music festivals and adjudicators and no one, including my teacher,had ever noticed. It did sound harmonically correct. I left it and the examiner made no comment either. In fact, this piece earned my highest mark in the exam, wrong note and all. Trying to fix it at that stage can cause far more noticeable problems than a wrong note