The celebrated chop waltz

September 28, 2011 10:27 PM

The Celebrated Chop Waltz is probably one of the best known musical pieces of all time. Usually performed on piano (for example, this version, inspired by Franz Liszt) it has also been performed by full orchestra, notably in versions by Rimsky-Korsakov and others. Other versions: guitar, mini-harmonica, ukelele, accordion, Liberace, and Tom Hanks.
posted by twoleftfeet (7 comments total)

I searched high and low for that scene from "The Best Years of Our Lives", where Hoagy Carmichael plays this with Harold Russell, who had no hands. If you can find this, please post it here.
posted by twoleftfeet at 11:12 PM on September 28, 2011 [1 favorite]

"Christmas Chopsticks" - describes my family's Jewish Christmas to a T. Or to a =, since it looks more like chopsticks eating Chinese food on Christmas.
posted by Mooseli at 2:37 AM on September 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

This is the piano piece that people who don't play the piano invariably play, but I've never known quite why.
posted by Segundus at 5:59 AM on September 29, 2011

guitar, mini-harmonica, ukelele, accordion, Liberace, and Tom Hanks.
This list has a parallelism issue.
posted by Wolfdog at 6:03 AM on September 29, 2011

wolfdog, are you somehow suggesting that
guitar -> accordion
is not || to
Liberace -> Tom Hanks?

Or that mini-harmonica is non-collinear with guitar -> accordion ?

Show your work!
posted by IAmBroom at 8:28 AM on September 29, 2011

I am just saying that it appears at first to be a coherent list of musical instruments, and then one's mindframe is uncomfortably jerked in a different direction entirely by the inclusion of the ukelele.
posted by Wolfdog at 10:29 AM on September 29, 2011 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I got it. It was a joke.
posted by IAmBroom at 2:39 PM on September 30, 2011