When I was a kid learning to play the piano, I was very much taught a classical method, playing classical music. I never learned as such to play modern popular music or jazz music. My piano teachers only knew how to play classical music so therefore that is all that they taught, which is actually fair enough.
So I was taught to play music composed by J.S. Bach, Mozart, Scarlatti, Hayden, Beethoven, through to Chopin and Debussy (plus many, many more). If you know much about classical music (and in this context I am using the term in the general sense rather than the specific period of time that is known as The Classical Period), then you may realize that the difference between J.S. Bach and Debussy is stylistically enormous because both composers lived hundreds of years apart.
The one thing that all the music I ever learned while I was a piano student was that you play the music exactly the way the composer intended. You didn’t change the dynamics, or the tempo. You didn’t even change the fingering. The aim was always to play the piece of music exactly as written and the closer you came to achieving what the composer wanted, the better.
Don’t get me wrong, being able to faithfully reproduce what the composer intended takes hours of practice and a huge amount of skill, often developed over many years. This is one of the objections of people who play jazz music is that there is no room for improvising or personal interpretation.
If your dream is to learn to play classical piano and play the ‘classics’ the way they were intended, then I encourage you to stick to this course of action – its what I do and have done in the past with no regrets whatsoever. Actually, it’s what I enjoy the most.
However, if you would like to learn some of these classics and put your own interpretation on them in some way, then go ahead. Some people will approve and others will object because apparently you are not meant to tamper with these classical pieces of music.
No matter what anyone says, if you want to improvise or even completely reinterpret some of the classics, then there is no reason why you shouldn’t. After all, playing the piano in your retirement is about playing the piano the way you want to play the piano and it is most certainly not about playing the piano a certain way because that’s the way it is normally done.
To put it bluntly, the ‘should’s can go take a hike. Feel free to abandon the average, the normal and play the piano the way you would most enjoy.