The Girl With The Flaxen Hair

Learning the Chopin Nocturne That Has Nothing to Do with Blond Girls

The piece most people mean when they say The Girl With The Flaxen Hair is Chopin's Nocturne in E-flat major, Op. 55, No. 2. Chopin never titled it that. The nickname comes from a letter he wrote about a Danish soprano named Jenny Lind, whom he described in correspondence using words that got translated and attached to the piece decades after he died. The music itself has no connection to anyone's hair color. It's just a nocturne. If you want the sheet music, the Henle edition (HN48) is the standard Urtext. It's clean, reasonably priced, and doesn't clutter the page with editorial fingerings that may or may not suit your hands. The Paderewski edition is free through the Internet Archive but carries a lot of 19th-century editorial bias. If you're just learning the piece, the Henle version saves you from unlearning bad habits someone else invented. The audio recordings are another conversation entirely. Sviatoslav Richter's 1961 live recording is the reference point most serious students end up studying, even though his tempo choices are extreme. Arthur Rubinstein's 1960 studio version with the Philharmonia is warmer and more pedagogically useful for someone still working out the voicing. I'd recommend listening to both before you commit to a tempo.

What Actually Makes This Piece Difficult

Beginners treat it like a slow, pretty melody over arpeggiated accompaniment. That's not wrong, but it's incomplete. The real difficulty lies in the right hand's ability to sustain the cantabile line while simultaneously balancing the inner voices and keeping the left hand's broken chords from becoming a rhythmic metronome. The second theme, marked piu mosso, is where most students collapse. It arrives in B-flat major and demands a sudden shift from lyrical singing to something closer to a march. The hands cross. The tempo increases. People who haven't practiced the transition separately end up rushing the whole section and then scrambling to get back to the original tempo for the recapitulation. I've watched students lose three weeks on just the bars between measures 25 and 40 because they never isolated the hand-crossing pattern. The pedaling is equally unforgiving. Chopin's direction is sparse. The standard recommendation is half-pedaling on every change, but the harmonic rhythm in the opening theme changes so frequently that even half-pedaling every beat creates a blur by measure 8. My workaround was to notate pedal changes at the beat level in my own copy and then gradually lift the requirement to every other beat as the texture thins out in the second half of the theme. It's not Chopin's intention, necessarily, but it's what makes the harmony clear on a modern concert grand with its sustain.

Technical Breakdown That Actually Helps

Start with the left hand alone. Play the arpeggios at half tempo with a metronome and listen for consistency in volume across all five fingers of each hand. The thumb on beats one and three of each group tends to accent naturally. You need to suppress that. It's a habit that's hard to unlearn once it's set. The right hand melody needs a completely different approach. Practice it as if it were a vocal line. Remove the accompaniment entirely and play only the top notes of each chord, singing along. This forces you to hear the actual contour instead of treating the arpeggios as the primary content. Then reintroduce the inner voices one at a time. The bridge section in measures 33 through 48 requires separate practice of each hand at the faster tempo before you combine them. I recommend practicing the right hand at the target tempo while the left hand plays at half speed. This builds the coordination without letting the left hand drag the right into rushed territory. Once that feels secure, flip it. Right hand at half tempo, left at full.

Common Pitfalls I See Repeatedly

The first mistake is treating the entire piece as one dynamic level. It isn't. The opening theme should sit around mezzo-piano, the second theme pushes toward mezzo-forte, and the return of the first theme should feel like a withdrawal back into intimacy. Students who play everything at the same volume make it sound like background music instead of a structured piece with emotional movement. The second mistake is ignoring the rubato markings. Chopin writes mossamente and rit. in specific places. The ritardando before the final cadence isn't optional ornamentation. It's structural. Skipping it removes the sense of arrival that makes the ending work. A third issue that comes up constantly is the's reach in the larger halls. The arpeggios span an octave and a fourth in some measures. On a wide concert grand with a longer key bed, this becomes genuinely uncomfortable for smaller hands. The workaround is to arpeggiate the chord slightly rather than playing it all at once, letting the lowest note speak first and the upper notes follow within a fraction of a second. It's a standard pianistic technique, not a compromise, but students often feel guilty about using it. They shouldn't.

Performance Notes From Actual Stage Experience

I played this piece in a recital last year in a room with notoriously dry acoustics. The result was that the left hand arpeggios sounded thinner than expected, which made the melody feel unprotected. Before the next performance, I adjusted my touch to press slightly deeper into the keys on the lower register notes, giving the accompaniment more presence without increasing volume. It's a subtle adjustment that doesn't show in the sheet music but matters enormously depending on the instrument and room. The coda is another section that gets botched regularly. It's short, marked poco a poco morendo, and demands a gradual dissolution of both volume and tempo. Most students either ignore the direction entirely or overdo it and arrive at the final chord sounding like they're stopping rather than fading. The trick is to begin the gradual reduction from the last full statement of the theme, not from the coda itself. By the time you reach the final two chords, the decay should feel inevitable rather than forced. This piece is often assigned as an early-advanced repertory work, but the gap between "can play the notes" and "sounds like Chopin" is wider than most instructors acknowledge. The difference usually comes down to voice leading awareness and the willingness to practice each hand independently at tempo before combining them. It's not elegant advice. It's what works.

If you're searching for a quick download of the score, the Henle edition costs roughly twelve dollars and comes in a softcover that lays flat. Free Urtext versions exist but tend to have scanning errors that introduce wrong notes in the harder passages. At this point in the piece, a wrong note in the left hand arpeggio is easy to miss and hard to correct without rewriting your muscle memory. That cost is worth paying upfront.