Those were Chopin’s words.
Chopin played with a simple, natural position of the hands – and used the easiest fingering. Which was sometimes against the rules.
We know he played with a beautiful singing legato touch. He used lots of pedal, especially in all those left-hand arpeggio passages, which are present in most of what he wrote.
He changed fingers on keys “as often as an organ player.” This means something to me. In my few years of pipe-organ lessons fingering took on a whole new meaning. There is no pedal to sustain the sound. It’s all in the fingers. You shift fingers on the keys as much as you have to.
Chopin used his thumbs on black keys, which was against the rules that Czerny had set. He passed the thumb under the fifth finger.
And – something we wouldn’t dream of allowing young students to do – he slid a finger from a black key to a white key, or even white to white.
The question then is: at what stage do we allow the students to use these unconventional fingerings?
Which is, of course, assuming that they’re using any correct fingering at all 
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Source: The Great Pianists by Harold Schonberg
Image: via The Music Point
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To answer your question “… at what stage do we allow the students to use these unconventional fingerings?”, I’d say when it’s appropriate – when the repertoire calls for it and the music benefits from it. It’s all in my piano fingering book “The Art of Piano fingering – Traditional, advanced, and Innovative” http://pianofingering.tripod.com/
Best regards,
Rami
Thank you Rami.
I agree with Rami above – when the music calls for it, or when your students start playing Chopin
…which would put them at an early advanced level! I’m inclined to agree! Not too young, I’d say.
Thank you, just enjoy your post, your question, ha, that depends on how talent the student is (my view)?
I think you nailed it! For a lot it takes talent to just read the notes, rhythm and conventional fingering!
Thank you.
I’m not a pianist, but I think that fingering standards really depend on the era that the music belongs to. Certainly, many modern pieces can’t be played by the standards that Czerny has set. It’s a bit like the theoretical concepts. For instance, parallel 5th used to be considered wrong but I guess since Beethoven many composers started to use it e.g. Ravel, Debussy, etc.
So I don’t think that there is anything wrong with it, we should teach the students both maybe or the Chopin style as a trick!
Daniel Barenboim on the violinist Nathan Milstein: “His great palette of colours stemmed also from the fact that he had a very individual way of fingering, which he always took great pride in saying he did intuitively and very differently from evening to evening.”
Oh dear. Well that throws all MY teaching out the window! I preach “consistency” on an hourly basis
Thank you for this.
Haha, well, I’d also agree with consistency to begin with. But I guess that above a certain level, intuition and improvisation can also be of great importance. After all, this was Barenboim talking about Milstein!
Right. So we just won’t let our students see that quote