Leo Enticknap speculated here recently:

> The actor [Farley Granger] playing the [Phillip] part [in Hitchcock's ROPE] must have been carefully
> selected for his piano-playing ability. I have grade 8 piano (and organ)
> and adore Debussy, Milhaud, Poulenc and Satie, but find 'Mouvements
> Perpetueux no. 1' virtually impossible.  My right hand just won't stretch
> enough to hit the 10-semitone gaps, for starters.  Rubenstein's
> transcription of Manuel de Falla's 'Ritual del Fuego' is kids  stuff
> compared to that.  With the possible exception of Rachmaninov's entire
> output and Granados' 'El Pelele', IMHO, this is the most technically
> difficult piece ever written for solo piano, and I'd love to know whether
> [Farley] Granger really played it in the fillm, and if not, who played for
> the dub (having viewed the sequences in an original 35mm IB print on a
> Steenbeck in slow motion, the synch looks incredibly convincing - if he is
> dubbed, the technicians who synched it should all have got Oscars).

Leo, on the recent DVD of ROPE, screenwriter Arthur Laurents says that
Granger merely pretended to play the piece, which 'was, of course, a
dub'!

Mind you, Laurents also claims that Hitchcock appears in the street at
the start of the film, even though - after years of hearing this matter
debated - I would have sworn that Hitch's only 'appearance' in the film
is as the neon profile of himself seen at one point (in a full-screen,
uncropped rendering of the film) in the distance outside the window.
(Like you, I saw ROPE in a 35mm print, on a big screen ...)

- Ken Mogg (Ed., 'The MacGuffin').
http://www.labyrinth.net.au/~muffin

----
For past messages, visit the Screen-L Archives:
http://bama.ua.edu/archives/screen-l.html