What's in a Signature

Signatures of Franz Liszt, Joseph Haydn, Franz Schubert, Claude Debussy, and Johann Sebastian Bach

Score study is crucial. There is no way around it.

Looking at a handwritten score is even better. The handwriting alone says so much about a person. A facsimile score looks like a picture created by the composer, a drawing full of energy, or elan, or full of frustration, or even full of doubt.

One of my favorite ways to experience the personality a composer is to look at his or her signature. I enjoy that mini picture the composer draws without thinking about it. I don’t intend to pass myself off as a graphologist - the people dealing with hand writing analysis -, but here are some probably crude basics: slanted to the right is the signature of a social person, to the left that of an introvert, and quite straight is the writing style of a logical and practical person. This can be taken further to the open ‘o’-s, and the placement of the dot on the ‘i’, and all sorts of other things. 

No, I am not a graphologist, but Schubert, Liszt, Bartòk, Brahms, Bach, they all have their individual ways of signing, but I love the simple expression of that mini drawing, which gives me lots to muse about.