I want to blame Beethoven (for my injury)

I was working earlier this year on learning the awesome third movement of the Beethoven Moonlight Sonata Op 27, No. 2. There is a section where your hand is stretched an octave wide, its forte, and you have to jump around on the keyboard. I was having some trouble making the jumps accurately at speed and had intensified my practice on this section in preparation for performance and suddenly and unexpectedly felt something give on the top last knuckle (distal interphalangeal joint) of my pinky finger on the right hand. Unfortunately, I was then a bit reckless having never experienced an injury of this sort before and continued playing despite the small initial pain and feeling of the tendon tearing. I should have known better.

Injury Analyzation:
So, of course I thought a lot about my technique when analyzing why the tendon on my pinkie finger ripped. "Move with every note" and "be ahead of the sound" were some excellent axioms from my piano teachers which came to mind immediately after my injury. After a lot more thought, I realized I was doing three things wrong during my practice.

1. I didn't warm up properly prior to practicing. I had done some warmups prior to playing Beethoven, but I didn't start my warmups slowly and work up to speed gradually. I had tried to play my warmups as fast as possible to work on speed and to get on with practicing my music. So, my finger tendons were a bit strained before I even started my Beethoven practice.

2. I was setting my fingers to reach the chords and keeping my the ends of my fingers curled in a fixed position as I moved between one chord to the next.  So, I had constant tension at the end of my knuckle as I played the chords over and over for accuracy. As Thomas Mark says in his book, What Every Pianist Needs To Know About The Human Body, "You can allow your hand to fall on the chord or octave without setting it in advance, and you'll play with less tension........An image that helps many pianists open the hand by just the right amount is "let the piano open your hand". Be sure to think of the opening of your hand not as a spreading of the fingers but as an opening from the CMC (Carpometacarpal - inside the palm of your hand) joints, like an umbrella."

3. I didn't take enough breaks when practicing this particular passage. Some music passages are physically difficult to manage and a pianist risks injury when practicing them for too long a time in one session. Shorter, but still intense practice periods can be just as effective. I should have worked on this passage for a bit, realized my fingers were tired and then worked on a different section before come back.

Recovery:

My recovery was very uneven. I had never had an injury to my hand like this and in the beginning I felt the injury was perhaps just a strain. Consequently, I tried to treat it like other injuries I had experienced previously. At first, I just tried to rest my finger and stop playing piano for a while. Unfortunately, injuring your hand is definitely not like other injuries. It was virtually impossible for me to stop using my right hand. I still needed to prepare and cook food, do the dishes, clean the house... and eventually weed the garden. Weeding the garden several weeks after quite a bit of recovery caused me to re-injure myself badly. That's when I realized I needed to protect my finger somehow to help it heal. I tried some finger braces, but they were simply too big, uncomfortable and awkward. I tried some elastic ace bandages for fingers, but they quickly ripped at the seam and I didn't like it when they got wet. Then I tried just using some cheap 1 inch wide strapping tape and that worked great. I replaced the tape several times a day, but I had a lot of tape and it really prevented me quite well from bending my dip joint unnecessarily. I would wear a disposable latex glove over the tape when cooking and doing the dishes to keep it from getting wet. I could even play the piano with my finger taped which was a great relief to me. So, once I found the tape solution, I was finally able to heal my finger properly, but it did take a long time.

Now my finger is all healed up and I'm finally thinking about working on that Beethoven Sonata again, this time with better warmups, technique, and practice habits.