To play a wrong note is insignificant, to play without passion is inexcusable.
Ludwig van Beethoven
The meaning of the quote
In 1801, a teenage pianist named Ferdinand Ries started taking piano lessons from Ludwig van Beethoven in Vienna.
When Ries hit a wrong key or skipped a note, Beethoven rarely said a word. When he played without feeling, ignoring a crescendo or missing the mood of the piece, his teacher got angry. Ries later explained why in the book Beethoven Remembered:
“Mistakes of the other kind, he said, were due to chance; but these last resulted from want of knowledge, feeling or attention.”
The quote grew out of those lessons. A wrong note is bad luck. Fingers slip and nerves kick in, and anyone who plays long enough will hit one. Playing without feeling is different, because it means you stopped caring what the music was trying to say.
Beethoven held himself to the same standard. Ries wrote that his teacher hit plenty of wrong notes too, even in public concerts. Those slips are long forgotten, yet his music still fills concert halls 200 years later.
The same rule works away from the piano. Two students give the same class presentation. One reads every slide word for word without a single slip. The other stumbles over a name, laughs and keeps going because she loves the topic. Ask the class a week later which talk they remember.
Julia Child knew this too. She once dropped a potato pancake on her cooking show, scooped it back into the pan and carried on. People watched for her love of food, and a dropped pancake didn’t change that.
The fear of wrong notes is often what kills the feeling. Scared of slipping, you play small, stiff and careful, getting every note right and saying nothing. The quote tells you which worry to drop.
Action steps
Conductor Benjamin Zander has spent decades coaching nervous music students to stop playing it safe. These steps borrow from his approach and work for anything you do in front of other people.
- Laugh at the wrong note. In the book The Art of Possibility, Zander tells his students to throw their arms in the air and say “How fascinating!” whenever they make a mistake. The silly gesture keeps the slip from turning into shame, so you can see what went wrong and keep going.
- Pick the feeling first. Before you play, speak or write, decide what you want people to feel, whether that’s excitement, comfort or courage. Let every choice serve that feeling instead of a flawless performance.
- Fix notes in practice. Work on the hard parts slowly when nobody is listening. When it’s time to perform, stop checking for mistakes and give the piece everything you’ve got.
A wrong note lasts a second. The feeling you bring to the whole piece is what people take home.
About the author
Beethoven learned music from a father who punished every mistake. Johann van Beethoven was a court singer and a heavy drinker who wanted his son to become the next child star like Mozart. He would drag young Ludwig out of bed at night to practice and beat him when he played wrong notes.
The boy who was beaten for wrong notes grew up to be the teacher who barely noticed them.
In 1792, at 21, Beethoven moved to Vienna, studied with Joseph Haydn and made his name as a fiery young pianist.
In his late 20s, his hearing started to fade. By 1818 he could barely hear at all.
He kept writing music anyway, and some of his best-known work, including the Ninth Symphony, came after he went deaf.
At the Ninth Symphony’s first performance in Vienna in 1824, Beethoven stood on stage with the orchestra. When the music ended, he was still facing the players and couldn’t hear the crowd. The singer Caroline Unger turned him around so he could see the audience on its feet, clapping.
In 1838, 11 years after Beethoven’s death, Ries and Beethoven’s childhood friend Franz Wegeler published their memories of him. Their memoir is now published in English as Beethoven Remembered, where you can read Ries’s account of those 1801 lessons alongside stories of Beethoven’s temper and his deafness.
Resources
- Beethoven Remembered (Book)
- The Art of Possibility (Book)
- The transformative power of classical music (Video)
- Do not be embarrassed by your mistakes (Article)
- Ludwig van Beethoven (Wikipedia)
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