I have always been awestruck by this story from The Art of Possibility by Benjamin Zander, founder and conductor of the Boston Philharmonic:
In the middle of the slow movement of Beethoven’s String Quartet op. 95, just before his big solo, Lehner suddenly had an inexplicable memory lapse, in a place where his memory had never failed him before. He literally blacked out. But the audience heard Opus 95 as it was meant to be played, the viola solo sounding in all its richness. Even the first violinist, Rudolph Kolisch, and cellist, Bennar Heifetz, both with their eyes closed and deeply absorbed in the music, were unaware that Lehner had dropped out. The second violinist, Felix Khuner, was playing Lehner’s melody, coming in without missing a beat at the viola’s designated entrance, the notes perfectly in tune and voiced like a viola on an instrument tuned a fifth higher. Lehner was stunned, and offstage after the performance asked Khuner how he could have possibly known to play. Khuner answered with a shrug: “I could see that your third finger was poised over the wrong string, so I knew you must have forgotten what came next.”
…after Richter realised that he had been playing a wrong note in Bach’s Italian Concerto for decades, he insisted that the following disclaimer/apology be printed on a CD containing a performance thereof: “Just now Sviatoslav Richter realised, much to his regret, that he always made a mistake in the third measure before the end of the second part of the ‘Italian Concerto’. As a matter of fact, through forty years – and no musician or technician ever pointed it out to him – he played ‘F-sharp’ rather than ‘F’. The same mistake can be found in the previous recording made by Maestro Richter in the fifties.”
Famously, Marta Argerich’s 1982 recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1st Piano Concerto has a couple of wrong notes at the beginning of the last movement. It’s still one of the all-time best recording of that concerto in my opinion.
This.
I can play about 15 solo piano pieces on demand but I can never be 100% sure that I’m not going to make some very noticable mistakes, or even worse, go completely blank at some point.
Actually, that’s one of the things that frustrates me the most about my playing. I can play the same piece fine a hundred times, but there’s still no guarantee that I’m not going to mess up the 101st time. If I make a mistake, however, it becomes immediately ingrained. I’ll be repeating that mistake consistently afterwards, and have to relearn the passage, or sometimes the whole piece.
I’ve been playing piano over 50 years now, strictly as an amateur, and I’ve achieved some ability because when I’ve had access to a piano I’ll happily play 1-2 hours a day. But I don’t make an effort to deliberately memorize pieces and keep the sheet music handy for reference.
My late spouse was a professional musician. He treated it like a full time job with mandatory overtime - 8 hours or more a day, every day. Hypercritical of everything. Meticulous attention to detail. Being married to him really taught me the difference between talented/enthusiastic amateur and a real professional. Also taught me to pick out errors I probably wouldn’t have ever heard before. Errors during live performances do happen, but professionals don’t stop and dissolve into a weeping puddle of shame, the show must go on! If solo they’ll try to cover for it, in a group the others will try to cover for it. Play one wrong note but if the next is correct keep going as if it didn’t happen. Most in the audience won’t notice.
My wife is a classically trained pianist who studied at conservatory and has performed at more weddings over her life than she can remember. She has played music at church for five decades.
…and she suffers from nerves every single time.
We record many Christian music videos of us playing, her on piano and me accompanying on bass. Rather than practice until perfection, we record multiple takes of the same song and use bits and pieces to get a good clean copy–the sneakiest edits are when I use audio alone from another clip to fix an error (who actually watches what the musician’s hands are really doing?)
With that said, she is often frustrated that she can’t play at the standard she did in the past, following the quoted words to a T. It’s not because she is not able to; it’s more that she doesn’t have the time to devote to the effort.
The last time she remembers being able to play flawlessly was when she was asked to play Handel’s Messiah for a church choir several years ago–it is only a slight exaggeration to say that she practiced that piece for so long that she wasn’t able to play a wrong note.
It blows me away that while I am struggling to play one note at a time on my bass, she is playing complex measures with dozens of notes, hands flitting over the keys.
So they fall asleep instead of trembling from stage fright?
My experience with beta blockers is that you go through life feeling like you are driving with the parking brake on. I spent a month or two struggling to stay awake at work, at church, wherever, until I finally asked my doctor to come up with another option.
Funny that this comes the day after I played a very unsatisfying gig w/ my trio (definitely neither professional nor classical.)
W/ the pros, I think others have hit it well - they are the most talented AND they practice/study intensely. Also, as others have noted, there are likely minor lapses rather regularly that go unnoticed by all but the most informed/attentive.
Speaking as an (amateur) classical musician, the answer is definitely “Practice”. You get all the wrong notes etc out of the way in rehearsal.
And if you practice enough, you get muscle memory. Which can be a weird thing: not that long ago I did a choir concert of some Brahms pieces. I had no memory of seeing any of them before, but for one of them at our first rehearsal I could feel my vocal cords automatically moving into place for each jump between notes. I didn’t consciously remember the piece but my body did. (On consideration, I likely sang the work in college some three and a half decades ago.)
Yep, the first thing you should learn as a performing musician is: No matter what happens, keep going. Most people won’t notice the mistake unless you stop.
Hehehe, yeah. I can’t count the number of times where the band starts a song and my brain raises the “WE HAVE NO IDEA HOW THE NEXT PART GOES! THIS IS NOT A DRILL!” alarm. But when we hit the next part, my fingers know exactly where to go and when.
This level of musical talent is not limited to the actual players. My father was a music major (but didn’t play an instrument), and I remember him telling me about a test conductors are sometimes given when they’re being auditioned by a new orchestra.
The candidate will be given a piece of music to conduct, and one of the musicians will be told to play one wrong note during the piece.
The candidate must identify which instrument made the “mistake,” what the right note was, and what was actually played.
Even the best classical musicians make mistakes but they remain absolute stoic when it happens. Their faces don’t respond, they don’t repeat notes to make them right, you simply move forward. You’ll never know they made a mistake unless you also play at that high level.
Also a lot of it is hours and hours of mindless practice. One of my favorite exercercises for preparing for an important performance is setting up a stack of 10 quarters on top of my piano. If I play a piece perfectly then I get to move one quarter over to the other side of the piano. The idea is to move all 10 quarters to the other stack, if at any point I make a mistake, then I knock the stack down and move all quarters to the other side of the piano. The song typically takes 10 minutes to play through just once.
That’s the sort of discipline you need to be a classical musician. If you dont have that sort of discipline then you aint cut out to be a classical musician, try rock or jazz.
God yes. It’s like you have to lay a track over it and then grind it until the mistake is completely erased. I have always found that if there is one weak spot in a piece that I always have to focus to get right, I will invariably get it wrong in performance.
A music director once reassured me that audiences only really hear the start and the finish anyway. She wasn’t talking about truly educated audiences of course. I’ve had fellow musicians give me a sympathetic pat as I resumed my seat after a royal screw up and after all was over members of the audience came up to tell me how wonderful it was.
This is the drill my son’s cello instructor has him use for difficult passages. But he calls it 5/5/5 and you have you to first play it five times perfectly (not in a row), then 5 times using a +/- system (gain one if you do it perfectly, lose one if you don’t), and then 5 times in a row perfectly, starting over from zero if you mess up. It can a long time to finish, even for very short passages. He’s 13.
The key is doing it so many times you can’t do it wrong, as others have said.
As someone with a poor memory, it’s the memorization of very long pieces that amazes me. There must be a process by which doing something enough times commits it to long-term memory. I never got there with any instrument, but I played more jazz than anything where memorization is expected.
Not true - mistakes are made all the time. It’s just the ones that result in smoking craters that don’t afford more opportunities for further learning.
Having been the parent through many a child piano recital the teacher always drilled that into the kids heads: “if you make a mistake keep going. I’ll know. You’ll know. Virtually no one else will know unless you stop.” For a professional? The conductor and fellow performers will know but the audience?
Not that anyone at the professional level stays there long if it happens more than once in a very long time.