The courage to play it simply

Two students can play the same short Schubert piece in the same afternoon, and the difference between them often has nothing to do with how well they play. The first arrives having decided that the music needs help. Every phrase is shaped, every repeat is varied, there is a small hesitation before each important note. It is skilful, and it is tiring, and somewhere around the twentieth bar I stop listening to the piece and start listening to the performance of it. The second one simply plays. Very little appears to be happening. And yet halfway down the second page the room goes quiet in a way it was not quiet before. After twenty years of teaching in Zurich I am fairly sure this is not a difference of talent, and not really a difference of taste either. It is a difference of honesty.

Simple is not the same as plain

The two are easy to confuse, because from a distance neither is doing anything dramatic. But a plain performance has nothing in it at all: the notes are correct, the printed dynamics are approximately observed, and the player is reading aloud in a language they do not speak. A simple performance has nothing extra in it, which is a completely different achievement. Everything that is present is present for a reason, and everything that was not needed has been taken out. That takes more decisions than an elaborate performance, not fewer, because each thing you leave in has to survive the question of why it is there. Simplicity is what remains after the choosing, not what happens before it — which is why it usually belongs to the last stage of learning a piece rather than the first. It is also why telling an inexperienced player to "just play it simply" often makes things worse: they subtract the shape along with the clutter, and what is left is not honest, only empty.

Where the extra comes from

Nobody adds decoration out of vanity, or at least almost nobody. In my experience there are three sources, and they are worth telling apart because they need different remedies. The first is the fear of being uninteresting. A quiet, plain passage feels enormously exposed from the inside; four bars of steady crotchets feel to the player like silence, and the reflex is to do something so that nobody gets bored. Nobody is bored. From out in the room those four bars are not empty — they are the reason the next phrase means anything at all. The second source is imitation: a student hears a great recording, notices its two or three most audible features, a delay here and a swell there, and imports them without importing the reason they exist. The third and most common is that the player has no particular opinion about the passage and supplies intensity in place of one. Where there is nothing to say, there is often a great deal of expression.

Sincerity is a decision, not a temperament

Students sometimes hear the word sincere and assume it describes a kind of person — soulful, serious, born that way. It is much more practical than that. Sincerity at the piano means the sound coming out of the instrument matches something you can actually hear inside your head. There are two quick tests for it and both take seconds. The first: before you play a phrase, sing it, badly and quietly, the way you want it to go. If you can sing it, you have an intention. If nothing comes, you do not have one yet, and any shaping you add is decoration on an empty box. The second: say in one sentence what the phrase does. "It asks a question and never gets an answer." "It is the same as before, but tired." "This is the moment it gives up." Sentences like that are unglamorous, and they change playing immediately — partly because you cannot perform a sentence you do not believe, and partly because once you have one, you stop needing to prove anything.

How to practise honesty

A few concrete things, in the order I usually suggest them. Play the piece flat, once, on purpose: even tone, strict time, no rubato, no pedal beyond what the notes require. This is uncomfortable and extremely revealing. You discover how much of the piece was being carried by mannerism, and you very often hear the harmony properly for the first time. Then add back only what you genuinely miss. Whatever you do not miss does not go back in. Next, record yourself and listen from the next room while doing something else — at half attention you hear only what is really there, and an intention that survives that test is a real one. Play for one person rather than an imagined hall; the imagined hall is what makes people push. And when you feel the urge to do something to a passage, ask whether it is for the music or to cover your own discomfort. That question sounds moralistic. It is only diagnostic, and the answer is usually obvious within a bar or two.

The places that take the most nerve

Some passages ask for this kind of restraint more than others, and they are worth naming because they catch everyone. Long held notes: a piano tone begins dying the instant the hammer leaves the string, no movement of the wrist changes that, and yet almost every student tries. Do nothing, and listen to the decay — the listening is the expressive act. Slow movements, where everything is visible and there is nothing to hide behind. Repeated accompaniment figures, an Alberti bass or the rocking left hand of a nocturne, where the temptation is to make them interesting rather than steady; steady is interesting, because it lets the melody be free. And endings, where an extra ritardando and a soulful lift of the hands feel almost obligatory. Most closing bars need considerably less than you think — often just the tempo held to the last note, and then a silence you allow to finish.

The student performances I actually remember are almost never the most impressive ones. What stays with me is a fourteen-year-old playing two pages of Schumann exactly the way she heard them, with no hurry and nothing added, and a hall of restless parents going completely still. What an audience recognises in that moment is not simplicity as such. It is the absence of someone trying to convince them. That is worth aiming at long before the repertoire gets difficult — and it is still worth aiming at long afterwards.