Le 30/01/2016 10:29, Tilman Skowroneck écrit :
> Then, about when the passing thumb entered the picture, nobody surely knows. If we imagine the passing thumb to have come up as part of some virtuoso's technique, this would mean that it was by nature individual, and as such likely not widely advertised (even Beethoven hated it when people listened to him practising and later imitated his technical tricks). And most importantly, before the passing of the thumb was standardised into the modern system, IF it existed at all in a certain environment it would have co-existed with all other kinds of fingering on the market, and it is thus, in retrospect (through a few rather tiny holes in the wall of history) almost impossible to spot. That is something else than to say it simply wasn't there.
C.P.E. Bach mentions that his father knew "great men" who didn't use the
thumb except for large stretches:
Mein seeliger Vater hat mir erzählt, in seiner Jugend grosse Männer
gehört zu haben, welche den Daumen nicht eher gebraucht, als wenn es bey
grossen Spannungen nöthig war. Da er nun einen Zeitpunckt erlebet hatte, in
welchem nach und nach eine gantz besondere Veränderung mit dem
musicalischen Geschmack
vorging: so wurde er dadurch genöthiget, einen vollkommnern Gebrauch der
Finger sich
auszudencken, besonders den Daumen, welcher ausser andern guten Diensten
hauptsächlich in den
schweren Tonarten gantz unentbehrlich ist, so zu gebrauchen, wie ihn die
Natur gleichsam
gebraucht wissen will.
Which implies that in Bach's youth the avoidance of the thumb was already considered the exception rather than the rule. At least as something worth pointing out.
And even Couperin uses "modern" fingerings at times in his second book, such as crossing the third finger over the thumb.
Dennis
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