The Prolonged Touch: Finger Pedaling and Legatissimo in Classical and Early Romantic Piano Music

Blake Proehl

The term prolonged touch comes from Carl Czerny and is synonymous with finger pedaling, legatissimo, overlegato, and, in some cases, legato. This was a common technique used by the early pianists who took it out of the practices of harpsichord, clavichord, and organ playing. Its use in piano music declined during the Romantic period and beyond, due to the development of the piano and its sound, the advancement of damper pedal technique, and a more "literal” reading of notation. My research aims to understand how and where in music the prolonged touch was used in Classical and early Romantic piano music. Passages describing this technique were found in treatises and works by C. P. E. Bach, Türk, Milchmeyer, Adam, Hummel, Moscheles, Czerny, and more. From these passages, I examined the ways the aforementioned composers notated or indicated the use of this technique in their compositions. Next, based on what the treatises tell, I organized categories of musical applications of the prolonged touch. And then I gave examples from piano literature to further illustrate their use within each category. Finally, I demonstrated my artistic use of the prolonged touch in Mozart’s Sonata in F major, K. 332.

What is the Prolonged Touch?

The term “prolonged touch” comes from Carl Czerny and his Complete Theoretical and Practical Piano Forte School, Op. 500 from 1839. He defines the term as when “one or more keys are held on, while other notes are played to them.”1 These keys and notes are often chord tones in an arpeggiation. However, Czerny uses another term in his Op. 500 to describe a very similar type of touch, legatissimo. This term means to Czerny that “each finger is suffered to remain on the key for a longer time than the note actually prescribes.”2 This is nearly identical to the definition of the prolonged touch, and Czerny says so himself: “Legatissimo & Molto Legato = very connected; nearly approaching the prolonged touch.”3 This is further confirmed by an earlier published work. In Op. 335, “School of Legato and Staccato,” Czerny describes many different types of touch. The prolonged touch term is not used but legatissimo is. Czerny states at the beginning of etude number four: “The legatissimo touch, in which every sound belonging to one and the same chord, must be held until the finger has to strike afresh, is only applicable to chords played in arpeggio and only to those notes which essentially belong to the chord.”4 Based on this definition, the terms prolonged touch and legatissimo are essentially the one and the same.

Louis Plaidy’s Technical Studies for the Piano (1852/1875) and Ernst Pauer’s The Art of Pianoforte Playing (1877) use the term legatissmo in to mean “that a key, after being stuck, is not raised again at the striking of the next one.”5 In a posthumous reprint of Louis Köhler’s Practical Method for the Pianoforte, Op. 249 in 1894, the term legatissimo means to allow “the fingers to remain on their respective keys” if they form an harmonic chord.6 Johann Peter Milchmeyer simply equates this touch to legato style of execution. Other composers like Carl Philip Emanuel Bach and Daniel Gottlob Türk think of this type of technique as a function of notation.

Sandra Rosenblum uses Czerny’s term prolonged touch in Performance Practices in Classic Piano Music (1991) and defines it as a touch consisting of “holding notes for considerably longer than their written values.”7 Rosenblum then goes on to equate the prolonged touch to overholding and finger pedaling.8 Donna Louise Gunn in Discoveries from the Fortepiano (2016) also uses the term prolonged touch and equates it to finger legato.9 Eva and Paul Badura-Skoda in Interpreting Mozart (2010) use the terms finger legato, super-legato, and finger pedaling to define a touch that keeps two or more notes depressed causing an overlapping of sound. However, legatissimo to them is simply a true legato line realized by delaying the raising of a finger after another note is struck and not an overlapping of more than two notes.10 Frederick Neumann in Performance Practices of the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1993) also uses the work “superlegato" to signify when “successive tones overlap in a pedal effect.”11 In Technique and Interpretation on the Harpsichord and Clavichord (1987), Richard Troeger uses the term overlegato to describe a technique on the harpsichord that is “in some ways analogous to the sustaining pedal on the piano.”12 Finally the term tenuto touch is used by Howard Fergunson in Keyboard Interpretation (1987) to describe “the holding down of notes for longer than their written value.”13

Confused yet? There are many terms and many definitions that can mean more or less what Czerny explains as the prolonged touch. Some of these terms can even just signify a touch that is a more of a true legato. Part of the diverse names or even un-named aspect of this touch is due to its origins in the technique of the harpsichord, organ, and clavichord. It was an understood part of playing any of these instruments prior to the fortepiano. In this document, the term prolonged touch will be the default term and the definition will be based off of Czerny’s description of both the prolonged touch and legatissimo.

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What is the Prolonged Touch?