Keys

Every pianist grows up with a sixth sense, an inculcated suspicion that various keys might be guilty of certain crimes, certain assumed identities, masks hand-tooled by composers who have already decided on the disguises for their own pieces in those keys, but disguises which are possibly intrinsic to the keys themselves. Whether a composition determines the nature of the key, or the key of the composition, the result seems to be the same, that most pieces in the same key share an uncanny number of facial resemblances and family memories. The instinct that made Chopin write a cradle song in D Flat is the same premonition which makes a pianist know intuitively that D Flat is a somnolent lullaby of a key, partly because he is aware of that Berceuse and other similar pieces in D Flat, but mainly because D Flat would lend itself to such harmonies of the evening even without Liszt's Harmonies du Soir to argue its stained-glass case.