Noctave
The piece
In this Presto, con fuoco étude, the sixteenth notes never stop, but they change hands: a run starts in the right hand, passes to the left, comes back, while the other hand punctuates with dry chords. Near the end, Chopin asks for con più fuoco possibile, “with as much fire as possible”. The text follows the first Paris edition by Maurice Schlesinger, published in 1833 and encoded by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute.
Both hands move almost equally fast: nearly 12 attacks per second in the right, nearly 11 in the left. The work therefore consists of making them equal, especially the fourth and fifth fingers, which the runs use relentlessly. Learn each hand alone at a reduced tempo until the fingerings no longer shift. Then polish the hand-offs: when a run passes from one hand to the other, no seam should be audible, neither a gap nor an accent. Some accompanying chords exceed the octave (up to 16 semitones), and the runs reach out to both ends of the keyboard, between a low C-sharp and a high E, which means large shifts at full speed.