Elegie

op. 3 no. 1

Sergei Rachmaninoff

  • One of the most important things you can do as you learn piano to avoid injury and increase your quality of play is to make a special effort to keep your wrists relaxed and free to strain. The bridge of the hand should be firm and gently rounded but the wrist should be relaxed and supple.

    You will notice that your fifth and fourth fingers are weaker and less reliable than the rest of the hand. They will take more time to train, and if you are a beginner, they will be especially frustrating to work with. Don't strain or push - be patient and work with them diligently and tactfully, and they will catch up.

    The two most important tools you can use to improve the efficiency of your practice is the speed at which you practice a section, and in the manner in which you divide up the piece you are working on. You must work with the piece in fragments before you stitch the fragments up to make a whole. The sections of the piece as fragments to work on has to be strategically and intelligently chosen. Once you have selected a fragment to practice, you should be flexible with your tempo. If it is a difficult section, begin practicing it at a slow tempo to allow your brain to make accurate and definitive connections. As you progress with the piece, begin to work at increasingly faster tempos. If you are interested in understanding more deeply these systems of practice, I made a series called 'Blueprint for Perfect Technique' which dives deeper into these principles.

Sheet Music

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    [Music] Elegy no. 1 by Rachmaninoff, op. 3 - this is what he wrote when he was just a teenager incredibly so I'll begin by playing for you the first 10 15 seconds of music and then we'll go by bar bar and as usual break it apart so that you can learn it yourself here's what the music sounds like the start [Music] okay all right so the first thing is that the piece is actually quite regular 4/4 time so it's very measured and very easy to learn from that point of view but it is an E flat minor so lots

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    of black notes to take advantage of here that's where we're going to start with and we're going to start in the left hand most of the difficulty at least for the beginning of this piece is going to be the left hand so let's get that under our belt first we begin with an octave E flat in the bottom you can play this with a four and a one or a five four and a one or whatever is comfortable usually I use a four and one here then it's very wide it's basically just an E flat minor chord that's been

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    spread out spread out across half the keyboard that's really all it [Music] is five two pivot on two to reach the E flat thumb then across the thumb to a B flat up top second finger and back down the exact same way and then the next bar is the same now what's important about the technique here is that all of the movements are integrated and smoothed out so that there's no Jagged movement as you're going from note to Note Everything is kind of like under one umbrella of movement first towards the

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    right as you're ascending and then towards the left that way everything is there's nothing that sounds out of place or sticks out unnecessarily and to achieve that you'll have a few things to think about the first is of course this opening octave from which we leave kind of almost like throw yourself into the air not too high up just a reasonable amount and then three notes that follow it are basically one grouping they're very far apart but if you're moving towards the right they should feel as though you can

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    kind of play them on the way if you're not used to wide chords especially on black notes it might you might slip a little bit you know that's okay you'll get used to [Music] it single movement to the right then when you go across what you don't want to do is connect the thumb don't try and keep the thumb until the B flat because then it'll force your hand to have to contort and go over in this way so that your hand is facing right don't do that I think it's an unnecessary Wrinkle in

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    your Technique especially since the pedal is down it's not really helpful so when you hit this thumb you kind of Let It Go and Float over it like this and that allows you to arrive on the B flat with the second finger without any contortions and your thumb is more or less in the vicinity under my hand right looks like this it's still roughly in the same place so coming back to it isn't too too hard as you you can see all of my movements are smooth singular and integrated so take as much time as you need to learn this

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    because this type of technique is everywhere it's going to be in all sorts of you know different combinations and constellations and every one of them employs the same technique the one that I just described to you so learn the opening segment really well so that you can employ this technique wherever you find it and you can if it's well learned enough you can use most of your energy in learning the notes learning the positions learning the fingerings all right so back to the piece we know that the first

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    bar finishes here the second bar is identical third bar is also identical and in the middle of that third iteration is where the right hand comes in with its first melodic note but we'll do that later okay so we have three of them the piece begins in panimo but that's kind of an overarching panimo what I would suggest you do is play the opening bar a little louder maybe like a metaforte even and then the next one is a little bit softer like you're getting further away and then the third one is softer

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    still and that will leave enough space for this this melodic note to kind of differentiate itself from the left hand so that really sounds spacious that's what we're after here okay so that's three bars of the same thing so third time now moving into the fourth bar finally something changes in the fourth bar we begin with the same E flat we have kind of a pedal Point E flat here and then that's our next position and this plus a pedal Point sounds so rich and gloomy and delicious

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    doesn't it so so that'll be five 2 one across same kind of technique back down the same path and there you have it there's your fourth bar moving on bar five so as you can see bar five is the same as bar 1 two and three so that's easy next bar six another E flat but then we have an E flat dominant 7 so five two is now on G natural right you're expecting it to be here right that's what we've done so far but this time it's on G natural second finger thumb on d flat

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    across to a g natural and back the same way one more time [Music] and this secondary dominant will lead us [Music] into another Harmony so that's bar seven so from here we will then finally change the beginning of the bar to an A flat and it's not an octave right it's not like this it's one note after the other bottom first then the top next five 2 1 back the same [Music] way single smooth integrated [Music] movements moving on next bar bar it's going to be a B flat and what I would

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    like you to notice is the relationship between the last note of the bar you just learned so that would be this thumb a flat and then the fourth finger on B flat down below right it's almost an octave but make sure that the relationship between the bars are really well learned that's usually where people will fall apart so from here the B flat make sure that's well learned that is now bar eight so from here 4 1 so 4 1 5 3 one back down the same way and as I'm teaching this to you as

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    you learn it bar by bar stop the video pause the video and put everything together and just add the next bar and then put everything together then add the next bar This way everything is equally well learned right everything is contextualized all right so we move on now to Bar Nine which would be the last bar of this section that I'm teaching you C flat or B natural so again make make a an effort to to notice what the transition is so B flat to B natural and that is now the beginning of Bar

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    [Music] N next octave so that would be 5 1 5 3 1 back the same way all right take your time pause practice as much as you need and here it is all through you know bars 1 through nine with no pauses all stitched up but slow [Music] and there you have it learned that extremely well I'm telling you this is all the difficulty is here in the left hand the right hand is easy so learn that super well assuming now that you did learn it well here is the right hand so I'll just give you the notes and then it'll be

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    much easier to just align the notes in the right hand with the left so like the left will give you the scaffolding or which you can place your melodic moments so four to start hold hold hold three next one on D 2 32 here's your first phrase easy enough right next one [Music] three four it's a bit of an unusual fingering I'll admit probably hav if you're not really used to playing piano that might be a little unusual but it is a good one and then 5 4 [Music] 3 hold hold next lift

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    Four 3 2 1 that's it and now you've caught up with the left hand that's bars 1 through nine so now we uh put them together pause the video learn the right hand memorize the right hand I would suggest of course I guess if you can read you can follow along but make sure it's well learned and then here is how they interact so as you know the first two bars are empty for the right hand so the left hand starts us off with this intro first bar second bar also empty and now on the third

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    bar when you get to the top of this open chord this is where the hands play together left hand continues while the right hand [Music] holds and that's the next moment where they align left hand second finger a flat with right hand F together so far so good moving on alone and then together [Music] together so these two notes we just kind of split them against these two quick notes 16 in the right hand [Music] so and then back the same way there's your first phrase Stitch It Up together [Music]

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    together smoother still [Music] there you have [Music] it and then we'll continue into the next part of the tutorial where we start putting things together um for the next few bars and then of course into the rest of the piece we go you can find the rest of the tutorial series on my website and uh you can start a free trial to give it a go so I'll see you in part two see you soon