Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner How hard is Chopin's Wrong Note Etude?

Just wondering how hard it is compared to the piece I am currently playing, Bach's Prelude and Fugue in C minor.

The Chopin Etude is much more difficult than the Prelude and Fugue in C minor. I presume you are referring to the Prelude and Fugue in C minor from Book I of the WTC, although there is also a Prelude and Fugue in C minor from Book II of the WTC which is more difficult than that of Book I; the P&F from Book I is a 3-voice fugue while that from Book II is a 4-voice fugue.

That said, the Chopin requires a totally different technique than the Bach, so it is difficult to compare the two but, overall, the Chopin is considerably more difficult than the Bach.

If you are already playing the Bach, try the Chopin. That's the best way to find out how difficult it may be for you.

Regards,

I thought I'd heard all the crazy etude nicknames but that's a new one for me.

Most people would consider them that way.


The Bach would be harder for me.


It's an odd name (for more reasons than one) .....but I'd say it's.....let's see.....about the 5th most common nickname among the Chopin Etudes.

What the hey -- I'll do a count.
Sort of in order:

Revolutionary
Black Key
Winter Wind
Butterfly
Aeolian Harp
Ocean
Tristezza

I guess "Wrong Note" comes right after that. That makes it 8th.

I'm not counting things like "Octave," "in 3rds," and "in 6ths" as nicknames. If we do, then it's 11th.

So, I take it all back. It's not one of the leading nicknames.

A recent visit to the wikipedia page of Chopin's op. 25 no. 11 had me laughing out loud and very confused.

Apparently, "Étude Op. 25, No. 11 in A minor, often referred to as the Winter Wind in English and literarily Seasoned Plants in some other languages, is a solo piano technical study composed by Frédéric Chopin in 1836."

I'd like to know in what languages exactly is it called "seasoned plants..."

Japanese.

But I still don't know which etude this thread is about.

Neither do I.

Oh cmon, don't pretend you've never heard op. 25 no 5 being called the "wrong note" etude. I mean, everyone calls it that... (no sarcasm)

Nope.

Wrong Notes is arguably one of the harder etudes from all 24 of them.
The only etudes harder than that I can think of would be 3rds, chromatic, winter wind, waterfall (mainly due to ungodly large intervals), and i don't know.. maybe octaves, if they aren't your strong point.

I would place it in 70th percentile when comparing across both the opuses. For reference, I would place tristesse in 30th percentile and revolutionary in 50th. Winter wind would be in 90th, chromatic being 95th and 3rds being out of that chart.

If you're willing to continue from Bach, black keys seems more appropriate, although the possibility of hitting a lot of wrong notes at first is high. The whole RH is in black keys and they're hard to adjust with. None the less, it's a great crowd pleaser and gets all the ladies.

Or go a little easier at first with Op.10 No. 9 in F minor. That haunting melody is beautiful to listen to and presents a decent enough challenge. Then there's revolutionary.

While I haven't played any of the etudes besides revolutionary, the one I'm concurrently dealing with right now, quite of bit of the info above makes a lot of sense. As far as revolutionary is concerned, it's not giving me any major issues and is coming along great so far. I'd highly recommend it for checking the waters.

Hello Liamu07. I don't know how hard the piece you've asked about is, but I do play the first WTC prelude and fugue, and I've played limited Chopin with limited success. Bach is to Chopin what roast beef is to sushi.

Have you played much Chopin before? If not, it sounds like, from what the others have written above, that this is one of the more difficult etudes. There are some quite accessible waltzes and preludes and even mazurkas, if you'd prefer to cut your Chopin teeth on something not so difficult. (And forgive me if I've assumed you haven't played a lot of Chopin already, when in fact you have).

No need to pretend - I'd never heard it called that. But thanks for identifying it.

The only nicknames for the etudes that have seemed common enough for me to know and remember, going back to my student days, are the Revolutionary, the Aeolian Harp, the Butterfly, and the Winter Wind. I think I learned the "Ocean" nickname somewhat later. I don't really think of the thirds and sixths and the black key as nicknames, since they identify technical issues involved.

I don't really much like the nicknames, since they seem to attach unnecessary extraneous ideas to the etudes, and can seem sort of childish and twee. To me, there's nothing about "the Winter Wind" that actually makes me think it even has anything to do with weather. I think it could just as easily be "the Revolutionary". Or "Splattered Arpeggios". Or "Shredded Daikon".

I thought Freddy was too perfect to write wrong notes. (He, unlike his pal Francis, probably never played a wrong note in his life either ).

Would someone like to point out the wrong notes in the Wrong Note Etude?

I hadn't heard that particular nickname, either.

Neither had I (I think) - however, when upon reading the thread title I knew immediately which etude was being referred to !! A lucky guess perhaps.

The lower sixteenth-notes of the chords that fall on the beat in the right hand are called "wrong" because they are a half-tone off the expected chord. The chord is resolved a sixteenth-note later.



By the way, the melody that makes up the middle section of this Etude is, to my taste, one of Chopin's most beautiful.





One of the technical difficulties of this Etude is simply one of stretch, playing the interval of a sixth (and sometimes a seventh) with 2/5. One can't play them with 1/5 because the resolved dotted eighth-note has to be held with the thumb. This becomes even more challenging later in the Etude when those chords with the "wrong" note become three-note chords.

Regards

Another very common one is the "Cello" etude (25/7).

There are some less common nicknames I have heard for another half dozen of the etudes, but they are not in wide use.

I generally don't use nicknames when referring to any of the etudes, even the Revolutionary - I just refer to them by the number.

When I heard that nickname the first time I immediately knew which one was meant...because it sounds like the pianist is hitting wrong notes.

For me, all of them are wrong note etudes.

Leonard Bernstein wrote the Wrong Note Rag.

I once tuned for a performance where Horace Silver was playing what sounded like stabbing at notes, trying to find the correct one. When he played it exactly the same way two or three times over, I thought it was one of the funniest things I had ever heard.