Daily Inspiration Quote by Johann Nepomuk Hummel

Hummel is drawing a hard line between musical difficulty that proves artistry and difficulty that merely punishes anatomy. The delicious sting is in his phrasing: “devilish complexities” are welcome, even celebrated, as long as they’re the kind the player can conquer through intelligence, training, and taste. Octave spans, by contrast, aren’t “complexities” at all; they’re genetic gatekeeping. He’s defending a version of virtuosity that still has to answer to the instrument’s human interface: the hand.

The subtext is both pedagogical and political. As a composer-pianist straddling Mozart’s clarity and the early Romantic arms race, Hummel knows the market is hungry for spectacle. But he’s wary of a compositional trend that confuses the impressive-looking for the musically meaningful. When a passage is difficult because it ignores “the formation of hands,” it turns the pianist into a stunt performer and the composer into a showman. That’s not moralizing; it’s quality control.

Context matters: the early 19th century is when the piano becomes louder, more robust, and more public, and with that comes an escalation in technical demands. Hummel’s insistence on playability reads like an aesthetic manifesto: write fearsome runs, jagged leaps, intricate textures - but make them lie under the fingers. In other words, challenge the performer’s mind and craft, not their handspan. It’s a surprisingly modern argument about accessibility, only framed in the pragmatic language of technique: virtuosity should be earned, not inherited.