Mastering double trills
After many years of playing piano I recently encountered the double trill in Chopin's Barcarolle. I'm having a hard time getting my fingers to actually play them. Although I do have what could be called "slow fingers", I don't really have trouble with regular trills. Below is the tricky part:
What would you recommend for me to be able to play something other than a muddled mess of sound?
I suspect my 4th and 5th fingers aren't strong enough...perhaps strengthening exercises?
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Your doesn't show the important fact that the trills start on the upper note. See the Peters edition here, for example. imslp.org/wiki/Special:ReverseLookup/102120
The fingering in your edition is good, but it's not obvious what it means (and @MattPutnam guessed wrong about contrary motion). Play the lower trill with your thumb under the second finger. In other words start on D#-B fingered 5-1, then Cx-A# 4-2, and similarly for the second trill.
Final comment: you don't get any extra credit for playing trills insanely fast.
First, I agree with alephzero about the fingering. The fingering in your edition assumes that you start on the upper auxiliary rather than the lower, and as I have detailed in my note to his answer this is not set in blood. If you like the lower auxilary, then reverse the numbers in the fingerings. 4-2 on the lower notes and 5-1 on the uppers, changing to 3-2 on the lowers when the Cx moves to C#.
Now, you can go to Hanon or Czerny (or Chopin's G# minor etude if you really want a serious challenge) and look for trill exercises, but this is a great one in its own right. You can treat it like its own strengthening exercise.
I'll amplify what alephzero said about "extra credit". To start with, play the passage as if it were a fairly slow melody. Forget about playing it fast, forget about teaching yourself how to play a trill, just focus on the (actually more difficult) challenge of making music out of that trill passage when you are playing it slowly enough for all the notes to be distinct. You'll definitely notice some weakness in 4 and 5, but you'll probably notice even more the lack of coordination between the two fingers. Work to balance the placement of the fingers on the keyboard so they can play the notes smoothly. And above all, forget that it is more difficult to play a trill with 4-5 than it is with 2-3. You're not playing a trill right now, you're playing a melody. As you get that sense of melody, you'll find it begins to take off. The longer you can hold onto the sense of making music first and a trill second, the better you will execute the trill once you work up to it.
Don't think of it as two simultaneous trills, think of it as a coordinated single trill or tremolo. Also, I'm not familiar with this piece, but the fingering would seem to indicate that the trills move in contrary motion (which I'm finding to be immensely easier as I test it out by tapping on my desk). Finally, I would note that barcarolles are very lazy sounding by nature, so I don't think this needs to be done very rapidly.
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