Back to Beethoven

Six years ago this month, I returned to the piano lessons I'd abandoned in my youth.  (Actually, I had also taken lessons for a couple of years in the early 2000s.)  I had a favorite number that I'd been practicing on my own for a while.  I was having fun, and I decided to obtain some professional assistance with it. 

It was a wise decision, and the following December I played the piece, reasonably successfully, in a student recital.  The piece was the second movement to Beethoven's Pathetique Sonata.

At the end of the school year last June, I decided to take a break (although I didn't advise my teacher of this decision until September).  Weekly lessons require virtually daily practice, and I was feeling burned out.  I remember practicing daily for 1½ hours in junior high, but now, in my dotage, that seemed like a lot of work, always looming on my daily calendar.

But this week, I pulled out that first Beethoven number, and tried playing it.  My god, the first time through, it was as though I'd never seen it before, let along played it in recital.  But after playing it about four times, it's coming back quickly.  It's fun playing without the pressure of an upcoming lesson.  But -- as I recall clearly -- the incentive to keep working created by those weekly lessons was one of the reasons I returned to piano lessons in the first place.

Anyway, I hope to keep chipping away at old Ludwig and see how it goes.  I suspect I'm going to have it worked up fairly well before too long.  (But not with the same polish as if I had an imminent recital, and a teacher pushing me along.)

If that prediction comes true, I'll go ahead and begin work on the final movement as well.  I like both movements a lot.  Probably not the first movement.  It's the most difficult of the three, and although I played it well enough to satisfy my teacher that I wasn't going to get much better at it, and it was time to move on, I never enjoyed it that much.

After (if?) I'm satisfied with my efforts on the second and third movements, will I return to regular lessons again?  Maybe.  Stay tuned.