How to Play Legato on Piano
In the first phase, every exercise is played legato. To play legato, connect each note to the next one: one finger goes down while the one before it comes up. We learn it first for two reasons: it develops finger independence, and you learn the distance between the notes.
In my own exercises too, I play legato as much as possible. In Super Fingers, Module 1, I put it plainly: Always play legato when practising Phase 1 exercises.
What a legato line is made of, under the fingers, is the subject of my post on the secret thread that holds legato together. Here I stay with why it comes first.
What Is Legato in Piano Playing?
Legato means the notes are connected. I said it in a live lesson like this: "We will play always in the piano, we play legato. We connect the notes. Unless we want it different."
So connected is where we start. When the music asks for something else, we choose that on purpose.
And legato is the basis. It's not only for practising. It is the most essential way of playing the piano, the most basic, and most passages are played legato. To a student working on a Super Fingers exercise, I said: "Try to play legato, that you bind the notes." A little later in that lesson I said legato is "the most natural, and just to make the piano sing."
Why Legato Is Harder Than It Sounds
Connecting notes sounds simple, but it's more difficult to play legato. On paper it is one note after the other. At the keyboard, each finger has to come up at the right moment while the next one goes down. When one comes up too early, there is a small gap, and the line breaks.
Legato and Finger Independence
The first reason is the fingers. Binding the notes is best for developing finger independence.
One finger goes down while the one before it comes up, so each works on its own, at the right moment. You see it in the second Super Fingers exercise, a preparation for trills: played legato like every Phase 1 exercise, first with fingers one and two, then with other pairs, like two and three.
Why the other pairs too: "it's nice to play it with one, two, but we also want to train all the fingers. We want to make them as equal as possible. They will never be 100% equal, but we want to be able to do everything with all the fingers in piano playing."
The fingers built in the first phase are put to work in many places, for example in a fast scale where each finger has to go back up quickly.
Finger independence is asked of the hand in other ways too. One hand sometimes has to carry two dynamics at once, which I write about in my post on finger independence in one hand.
The Distance Between the Notes
The second reason is the hand. By playing legato, you learn better the distance between the notes also.
Why that matters, I say in another Super Fingers lesson: "Because to play passages without too many mistakes you have to also very good feel the distance between each note in that passage."
Feel is the important word there, and every passage has its own distances.
How to Practise Legato
When you start a new passage, play it legato first, before you do anything else with it.
A student in one of my live trainings thought it was maybe just nerves. "It's a little bit also nerves of course," I said. "But also practice. Practice like with the finger. Really to program the fingers. Very… slow and very much legato, very connecting all the notes and lifting the fingers."
Then I said: "I don't know if you practice like this a lot." The answer was no. "Yeah, I would advise you to do so."
Lifting and legato go together in this practice. Every finger is lifted, and still every note is bound to the next.
In the same lesson, I gave the student an example of slow practice: "Ashkenazy, once before the concert, he was half an hour before practising in the hall, and he was really walking on the Mozart passages, very… slow."
I added: "It does miracles, if you walk like that." Let's say one, two weeks, on the passage you are learning now.
In the second Super Fingers exercise, the one for trills, I ask for this:
- Really lift, exaggerate, exaggerate. Also the thumb, good lifting the thumb.
- Slow, and putting your energy in lifting the fingers.
- Better, slower and exact, than faster and lifting too little the fingers.
- A fast strike every time is far more important than speeding up.
- Don't skip any of the alternative fingerings.
And right after the line about the fast strike: "In the Phase 1, speeding up is not effective."
About the fourth finger, I say in that lesson: "You will notice that the fourth finger is much weaker than the others. It's more difficult to lift the fourth finger. But because we practise now in the first phase and we try to lift the finger as much as we can, we train that this goes much easier in the future. Yes, it's a matter of training." The reason I give: "the fourth finger is the weakest finger of them all, because it's locked in between the third and the fifth finger inside your hand."
Try this
Take a legato phrase from a piece you play.
- Find the group of notes where the line breaks.
- Play that part slowly, lifting each finger.
- Let each key go just as the next one goes down.
- Listen for any gap between two notes.
The first step asks for a group of notes: where a line breaks, it's mostly a few notes together. And if you want to know whether the connection you hear is really made by the fingers, that is the subject of my post on what legato feels like under the fingers.
In short
Give every new passage its start in legato, slowly and with lifted fingers. That's where each finger learns to work on its own, and where you learn the distances between the notes of that passage.
Where It Shows Up
If the fingers still depend on each other, the line comes apart into single notes. In the first phase we build both, the fingers and the distances, from the first exercise on. Bring that passage to the live coaching, and I listen for the gaps with you.
