The bare word technique, when applied to pianoforte playing, seems often to give people an erroneous impression of its real significance. It seems to mean to them just the power of being able to play very rapidly, and also to perform very difficult passages, upon the keyboard, and often the word seems to carry with it a strange sort of odium to certain kinds of music-lovers. “A wonderful technician,” they cry, about some pianist, “but nothing more.”
How can this prejudice against great development of technique have arisen? I think that it is just because technique is sometimes considered as meaning only that one-sided capability of being able to move the fingers and hands with special agility “digital dexterity,” as the critics call it!
That particular capacity is no doubt a very important and necessary branch of technique on the piano, but it is only one small part of the whole immense subject; and the pianist who has given all his attention to that branch alone can certainly not be called in the best sense of the word a great technician, nor can he arrive at the highest results with only that development.
Technique in pianoforte playing, as in all other arts, signifies far more than agility and rapidity of finger action. Rather does its perfect attainment comprise within itself every means of expression that it is possible for the artist pianist to command. Thus technique represents to him in all its varying branches, endurance, tone or colour production, touch, intensity of feeling, phrasing, elegance of execution, symmetry of detail. And the man who has only studied and can merely produce agility, has but acquired one-fifth part of pianoforte technique; therefore how can he be the highest kind of artist, if, indeed, a real artist at all!
Now I believe that many people have the imagination and the emotions of the artistic temperament, but these qualities with them lack outlet for want of adequate means of expression. They cannot give a vent to their thoughts, because they do not possess the technical development sufficient to enable them to do so. Technique should therefore comprise the mastery of all means of self-expression in music, and on the piano especially can no player afford to neglect any manual facility that tends in the long run to help him arrive at the summit of interpretation. For it stands to reason that the more physical capacity the artist possesses for clothing his thoughts, the less hampered will he be in giving expression to the best that is in him.