Heidelberg Piano

Dear friends of piano music, it was just a completely harmless tooth extraction, a wisdom tooth that was a bit too big, but since I didn't feel like waiting an entire hour for the next train, I ran to the station. Unfortunately, I also had a bit of a cold, so I had to cough on the train. In the eyes of my fellow travelers, sheer horror was reflected when a rush of blood spilled into a white handkerchief while coughing ....... You automatically think of a serious illness when someone coughs blood. At the time, of course, I immediately thought of Chopin, who, like so many of his contemporaries, had tuberculosis since he was a child. The Prelude in E minor was one of the pieces played at his funeral in Paris, on the La Madeleine organ. Death was always present in Chopin's life. At the age of 16 he accompanied his younger sister to a lung sanatorium. Knowing that he was suffering from the same disease, he saw the doctors try to help her with bloodletting, leeches and bladder plaste...

  Dear friends of piano music, Schubert and I, we have a lot in common. We are both completely lost without glasses, small in stature (although Schubert was a good bit shorter, just as tall as my grandmother), both of us as a teacher's child did not like going to school and worked as teachers ourselves later.   But that's where the similarities stop. I am already considerably older than Schubert was allowed to become. We are afraid of Corona, even more afraid of being hit by both diseases during a flu epidemic. That is certainly bad and not without risk, but how dreadful it must be to have syphilis and Typhoid fever at the same time is beyond my imagination. How much death was part of life at the time is illustrated by the fact that of Schubert's 15 siblings only 4 reached adulthood. It is unimaginable how women at the risk of their lives gave birth to one child after the other, only to watch them die again. Schubert, on the other hand, is immortal, his 600 songs alone ar...

  Dear friends of piano music, Almost a year ago I started uploading recordings of piano works to YouTube. Since it is a video platform, a picture is required in addition to the music, at least a static picture, or better moving pictures. It's a challenge, but I am happy to accept it. I spend a lot of time choosing a picture that goes with the music, because it either illustrates the music or comments on it. That is not always easy. Sometimes it works better, sometimes it's just a beautiful picture to beautiful music. Apparently this picture ("Spring Song") by Paul Hey went particularly well with Chopin's waltz (A mimor, B. 150 Op. posth.). Just enjoy and dream.

  Ansbach is a beautiful city in Franconia, the northern part of Bavaria, Germany. Does Ansbach have anything to do with Bach, except that it has “Bach” in its name, that there is a Bach square and a Bach monument here? Bach was never in Ansbach in his life. Nevertheless, there have been Bach festivals here for a long time. And there is another connection: In a cantata (Non sa che sia dolor e BWV 209) the city “Ansbach” appears. The cantata is probably dedicated to a lawyer returning to his hometown of Ansbach, who studied in Leipzig. The poet of the cantata is unknown. The awkward Italian suggests a German author. Like everywhere else in the world, Bach is revered in Ansbach. There doesn't have to be a special reason for this. His music is enough.

  Dear friends of piano music, "What should we dream of, as we are?" was the line of a song that my pupils at the comprehensive school wanted to hear over and over again, and which always made me very thoughtful and sad. For example, many of my pupils couldn't tell a deer from a squirrel - and that at the age of eleven or twelve: yes, what should you dream of? Of a habitable planet, perhaps. How happy, on the other hand, was Felix Mendelssohn. He not only had his music, he lived in a time full of ideals and utopias. "My soul still seeking for the land of Greece" (Goethe, Iphigenia In Tauris). At that time one was longing for an idealized antiquity, for Italy, for woodland solitude (German: „Waldeinsamkeit“), for a humanistic education, for the ideal development of the personality, perhaps even for a religion of reason based on the model of Nathan the Wise. Life was not easy then either, there was political unrest, wars, infectious diseases such as tuberculosis...

  Dear friends of piano music, “ You're playing too FAST,” my husband always says. “It's a gondola song, you see, a gondola, not a speedboat. A sightseeing tour, not a motorway! " I know, of course, that he is right. But as the child of two certified sports teachers, playing fast is in my blood, my athletic genes seem to determine me to do so. Fortunately, after decades of very sporadic encounters with my instrument, I am gradually rediscovering my touch technique. Hopefully I will gradually no longer sound like I'm on the run, but instead manage to capture light and shadow, nuances of color and tell stories. The journey to find one's true "I" is long and arduous, also in art, but there is always cause for hope. This waltz by Grieg (see link below) has several ritardandi. I wonder, since I have no idea from dancing, whether this can be done with the waltz. With many couples, when dancing, it is not even clear who is leading, and then these tempo changes? ...

  Dear friends of piano music, brightly colored balloons floating in the infinity of the bright blue summer sky. It's also the perfect piece for midsummer when you don't want to achieve top athletic performance on the piano. That was how I thought until recently - then I suggested this piece to my favorite student. She didn't like to play it right now - it was too sad for her, she said. For the first time I looked in amazement at the notes - I only knew this “catchy tune” acoustically. And there is actually "Lent et douloureux". It's a bit like our wonderful old trees here in Heidelberg - many of them were planted when our district was built. They are over a hundred years old, their mighty crowns shine up to the sky (at least this is what you get when you look up through the foliage on sunny days). But they are at risk because the drought of the last few years has caused the groundwater to drop sharply and their roots can no longer draw enough water from the g...

  Dear friends of piano music, this beautiful old gramophone is in the window of a small record store on our street. The children marvel at it, and it always reminds how much listening to music has changed in a relatively short time. In the 19th century people went to a concert, otherwise you had to play yourself, mostly the piano, so that in every well-stocked household with the appropriate means such an instrument could be found - often to the annoyance of the neighbors. "A piano is harmless - the pianist constitutes a danger" (Robert Lembke) When I was studying piano, it was impossible for me to find an affordable apartment where I could do my piano work. I still vividly remember a singer I accompanied with whom the police were regularly at the door when she had to warm up the voice at home for a matinee on Sunday morning. As a dramatic soprano she was probably as loud as a grand piano. All my fellow students, who practiced seriously, lived in the country in the house of ...

  Dear friends of piano music, Puccini is truly not caterwauling (“Katzenmusik” = “cat music” as we say in German). In the early twentieth century, concert audiences have so far expressed their displeasure by loud meowing when what they have heard was too distant from the familiar tonal sounds and incomprehensible like the screaming of cats in love or those smelling valerian. My little daughter obviously doesn't like Puccini (yet), nor does she like it when her mother plays so loudly on the grand piano. This explains the “meow” at the end of the recording - we have no cat at all ... As an exception, we experimented with a “loud” Bösendorfer grand, we were a little disappointed with the recorded sound! The technical equipment was probably too cheap. But at least it's a kind of cat video, and so it's in good company on YouTube. Best regards from Heidelberg! Kerstin Giacomo Puccini: Foglio d'album/album leaf (con un gattino/with kitty) https://youtu.be/3Yw08CqIksw

  Dear friends of piano music, Children and piano, that's another story. "Children are always looking for a gap in the market", my piano teacher used to say, which made it easy to explain why her own four children play little or no piano, whereas I, as the child of two diploma sports instructors and passionate athletes, fell for this instrument. So far, my children have also confirmed the “law of the market gap”. Playing the piano is so good for development. Of course, these are the well-known “soft skills” such as concentration, training in fine motor skills, etc. Above all, playing the piano serves to prevent mischief. A child practicing the piano cannot do nonsense during this time. The best example, albeit with a different instrument, is the violinist Nathan Milstein, who always knocked the neighbor's child on the head until his mother advised Nathan to learn the violin. The beginning of a fabulous career, the neighbors had to endure the studies on the violin, but...

  Dear friends of piano music, this is actually a fortified tower from the early 15th century, it only got the cute little roof afterwards. But it could also be the tower from which the fairytale Rapunzel lowered her incredibly long braid, in the absence of a ladder. As a child, I wondered if it didn't give her a terrible headache. Children are always told fairy tales and stories so that they are good and eat their plates empty, have their hair cut without resisting or brushed their teeth properly. It was about the same with Scheherazade and the Sultan. With her captivating stories, she kept him from having another woman's head cut off every morning. This frame story of the fairy tales from 1001 Nights inspired numerous composers, which is easy to understand. There is this incredibly beautiful and clever woman, who knows how to stop the Sultan with her art of storytelling, restore his faith in love, forgive his cruelty and save the lives of many other women. What a shame that ...

  Dear friends of piano music, I have always found tower rooms fascinating. They are particularly bright and friendly, and the view is often impressive. Here I can easily imagine a cradle or a cot. Additionally, however, you need a nice and effective lullaby, especially when you have to work at home.In German, we call this „home office“. Now musicians and composers are only a small part of their working time on stage, the rest is „home office“. Imagine a composer, a pianist and 7 children in one apartment! Robert and Clara Schumann were experts in „home office“ with children, and the only thing that really helps is a beautiful and above all effective lullaby ... Kind regards from Heidelberg Kerstin

Dear friends of piano music, who would have thought that Wagner composed an album sheet for piano? My father-in-law made me aware of this wonderful piece, he said that it already contained “the whole Wagner”. This is undoubtedly true for music. But if you consider that Wagner's total work of art („Gesamtkunstwerk“) also includes the libretti written by the composer, it is, if you will, half the Wagner. And, to be honest, that's one of the reasons I like this piece so much: it doesn't have a libretto! I have little to gain from the archaic stories in Wagner operas. They deal with adultery (like all authors, Wagner likes to write on subjects with which he is very familiar ...), murder and homicide, revenge, passionate passion, and in the end always someone dies. This is of course a matter of taste, but we don't have to argue about it, because, as already mentioned, an album page has no libretto, thank goodness! Kind regards from Heidelberg! Kerstin

  Dear friends of piano music, true geniuses are usually misunderstood during their lifetime, because they are ahead of their time and therefore incomprehensible to most contemporaries. Great popularity, on the other hand, could indicate the opposite, a mediocrity that hits the mass taste with easily accessible pleasing works. This picture hangs over my piano. Even if I could afford a more important work - I cannot constantly face an ingenious masterpiece, find myself reading the newspaper or vacuuming with the highest perfection, the last things, my own inadequacy and finiteness. I prefer a “pretty” picture, the pleasant sight of which relaxes me. Stephen Heller was a very successful composer during his lifetime who could actually live make a living from his works. Today his work is largely forgotten, and there are sometimes bad reviews - he is pale, irrelevant, shallow. I think of him as my picture - his music is pleasant and relaxing. I like it. Kind regards Kerstin

  Dear friends of piano music, During the last few weeks, before thank God the playgrounds were opened again, my children and I were sometimes at the mountain cemetery. There, we visited the "stone women", as my daughter called them, - statues on the graves, all of which represent young female mourners. Grief was female in the 19th century (and beyond), as was caring for sick relatives. If there was still time and power, you could dedicate it to the composition, as Josephine Lang did. In addition to her songs, only three piano pieces have survived from her, which I deeply regret. Last but not least, caring for her husband, who suffered from and died of lung disease, and the death of three of her six children took away much of her life energy. Let us be grateful for at least three piano pieces. Many Greetings! Kerstin

  Dear friends of piano music, "Santa Lucia" is my favorite Heidelberg restaurant. When we recently stuffed ourselves with mountains of spaghetti brought from there, we remembered that the Venice train station is also called "Santa Lucia" and how long we have not been there. Venice, which has always been a mythical place of longing, has become unreachable for all of us in the corona pandemic, soon it may be different. Also in the 19th century, an educational trip to Italy “in Goethe's footsteps” was the non plus ultra, also for Felix Mendelssohn. At the time, however, one spent weeks, if not months, in the land of one's longing, taking the time and leisure to study the rich treasures of art and culture, to absorb the colors and the light. Today you walk through the alleys from the cruise ship, buy a mask or pseudo Murano vase made in China, eat a burger and disappear again. Venice is consumed in a hurry, the actual treasures are left behind. Kind regards K...

Dear friends of piano music, on this bench one could well imagine a couple in love. The fact that none can be seen may be due to the fact that, as in our piano piece today, it is a secret, unfulfilled love. The three stars stand for Clara Wieck, later Clara Schumann, with whom the young composer fell in love and whom he later married despite her father's bitter resistance. What actually comes after the happy ending? We can imagine the everyday relationship with its good and bad days, but for Clara, mother of seven children, covering a large part of the household income with concerts, fulfilling this love was anything but easy. This little piano piece tells of enthusiastic longing, of future happy togetherness. It doesn't know anything about illness, "madness", early death. Kind regards from Heidelberg Kerstin

  Dear friends of piano music, it went even faster than feared. On our evening walk I admired a friend's roses. Then she gave us one of those wonderfully fragrant flowers, which we carefully carried home and immediately put in a bowl of water. But the next morning you saw that the flower, stripped of its natural environment, had lost much of its beauty and vitality. Even though we humans are far more complex beings, with possibilities for compensation and adaptation, it is no coincidence that this uprooted rose blossom reminds me of Grieg's “homesickness”. It is probably also a kind of "homesickness" that we are currently feeling. The longing for our everyday life, for the carefree get-together with relatives and friends. Grieg is able to comfort a little, I think. Kind regards Kerstin

  Dear friends of piano music, never in my life, I thought, Beethoven gave this composition the name "moonlight sonata". Beethoven appeared to me as a rather rational freethinker who did not value such enthusiastic romanticism. And right, the poet Ludwig Rellstab later made this sonata the moonlight sonata, while in Beethoven's lifetime it was called the "arbor sonata", since the master is said to have improvised it for the first time in an arbor. A few years ago, at a suburban railway-station in Heidelberg, I heard an elderly lady with a little theatricality saying: "Life kept an arbor from me!" Where you think life owes you an arbor, the world is still All right, I thought, and until recently it was. But thanks to Beethoven we have at least the arbor sonata, also known as the moonlight sonata ... Kind regards from Heidelberg! Kerstin

  Dear friends of piano music, it took me a while - maybe the general paralysis from corona is gradually affecting my brain - until I realized why Grieg's "Notturno" (Nocturne) sounds so different. Nocturne, you can expect nocturnal romantic escapades, lust walks in the moonlight and the like. At Grieg, however, there is clearly a twittering of birds. But it is also a Norwegian Nocturne, and the nights are very short in the time of year when you can walk outside at night without having to be rescued by a snow plow at worst. Just five hours in June, so the birds actually start chirping at night. Contrary to expectations, this Nocturne, but, in my opinion, just as poetic! Stay healthy! Kind regards from Heidelberg Kerstin

  Dear friends of piano music, I don't know about you, but I'm having a hard time thinking about anything other than Corona. It determines our entire life too much, is visible and dominant everywhere. On the way to shopping I always pass this playground with the lonely bobby cars where my children used to play. Loneliness is one of the big corona issues. When will they see their friends again, when their grandparents? A symbol of loneliness has become for me a woman who steps onto her balcony and plays the oboe every day at 6 p.m. She lives opposite an currently empty university building, next to her is an empty hotel, closed shops below her. She doesn't actually have an audience, but she plays every day - symbolically for the whole world. Kind regards Kerstin

  Dear friends of piano music, „but Mr. Mussorgsky“, I thought at first, „why only one tear?“ On what occasion do you cry only one tear? But gradually I came up with examples - like this photo. A smashed tombstone, which is actually a monument to grieving memories of one or more people. But after the first tear dried, I noticed the bizarre beauty of this monumental puzzle. After a certain time, there is simply no one left who needs the tombstone as a symbol of his grief, life goes on. We are here at the Heidelberg Bergfriedhof (mountain cemetary). Since playgrounds and green areas have been closed, I've been here with my children more often. The cemetery as the only change from the children's room at home - we have another reason to shed a tear. But we have to be thankful that we are allowed to go outside at all. If you like, we can make a list together with reasons to shed a single tear. Today, for the first time, there is an interactive 360-degree video in which you can exp...

  Dear friends of piano music, I switched sides. And after I realized that being a teacher is much more fun than being a student, I have to say; My favorite role change is actually from the egg seeker to the Easter bunny. There is hardly anything more fun than sneaking into a dark apartment and hiding chocolate eggs, combined with the idea that my children assume that a fluffy little animal with stubby tails and long ears has deposited it there for them. Stephen Heller probably didn't think of the Easter Bunny when he composed the Ètude I posted today, but I was reminded of a cute bunny and the anticipation of the children. This Easter will be lonely for many of us. The children are happy because they believe in the Easter bunny. We can believe in resurrection and eternal life. Fortunately, there is also the piano ... Despite everything, a wonderful Easter! Greetings from Heidelberg! Kerstin

  Dear friends of piano music, I do not know how long this clock has been standing still. In the summer it is hardly visible behind the dense green of the trees, so I walked past it for years without even noticing it. Now it has become a symbol of stagnation and paralysis, in Heidelberg as everywhere in the world. Desolate emptiness, ghostly silence where children usually laugh, shout and rage, because the clock belongs to a primary school. We live on memories. Even my recording today is rather the painful memory of a waltz, one should not try to actually dance on it. Towards the end, it reminds us of a lullaby, the memory of the security of childhood. Greetings from Heidelberg! Kerstin

  Dear friends of piano music, it is the first spring that we can experience only from the window. We'll probably have an exit gap in Germany as of tomorrow because of the Corona virus. In the past few weeks, my daughter had discovered her love for the messengers of spring, which were gradually growing towards the sun in the front gardens. We photographed them as long as we could to make a little memorial to spring. Therefore, my Sunday Post (Robert Schumann, "Spring Song") is accompanied by photos as an exception. It is the domesticated spring of the city that has little space to unfold, yet is overwhelmingly beautiful. We will all have to draw on the treasure of our memories for a while. Spring is renewal, new beginning, blooming after a long winter. Don't lose your belief in spring! Kind regards from Heidelberg! Kerstin

Dear friends of piano music, this picture is not perfect. On the one hand I am a lousy photographer, on the other hand the buds of this Heidelberg magnolia tree are mostly still closed. A very dear old friend told me once that her husband had planned the magnolia tree in front of the rectory as the perfect setting for their wedding. They watched it worryingly for days, but they were really lucky and the tree was in full bloom on the day of their wedding. It's like that, every Sunday, to have a new piano piece ready for YouTube. My recordings are live and it usually takes some patience and nerves - Chopin in particular is often a little shy, it is not so easy to get him in front of the lens for the perfect snapshot. And it is not uncommon for things to go really well until a small but devilish mistake creeps in shortly before the end, if only that I am getting nervous because I drank too much coffee in the early morning for Chopin ... I wish you all a lot of patience - a flower ...