Getting back into Beethoven
Do any of you have a composer who, while you enjoy listening to their music, just seem to have trouble deriving the same enjoyment from playing it? For me, that composer is Beethoven. Don't get me wrong, I love the piano sonatas--I just could never really bring myself to like playing them. My piano teacher tried to introduce me to Beethoven, but I just struggled so much with my distaste for playing him that our best efforts never really ended well. I played some of his chamber music in my senior year of college, and while I'm not sure that I enjoyed playing that music any more than his sonatas, what I did enjoy was playing in chamber groups, so all in all the experience was more palatable for me. When I would go to concerts where Beethoven piano works we performed, I would love it. But when it came time for me to sit down at the piano and try it myself, I couldn't muster up that same enthusiasm.
I'm going into my second year without a teacher, and so far my piano playing has improved immensely. Despite having the best teachers I could possibly have in college, studying piano as a major became too stressful in the end and took out much of the love that had made me want to take up the instrument in the first place. I'm learning more contemporary music to balance out the steady diet of Bach/Beethoven/Chopin/Mozart that I got in college, and doing more accompanying, where I'm learning pieces that are worlds harder than what I was playing in school, and doing it in a fraction of the time. Today, on a whim, I whipped out a random book and opened up to a Beethoven sonata, the "Waldstein". As I played the first movement in that awkward fumbling way that you do when you sightread something for the first time, I ended up thinking, "hey! I really enjoy this!".
Long story short, I think I want to give poor Beethoven another chance. The problem is, I don't really know how to play Beethoven, and I'm not sure that's something I can teach myself. I think the problem is that, though I've analyzed the sonatas before, when I'm playing I get lost and have trouble following what Beethoven's doing. Somewhere in the middle of the development, Beethoven runs on ahead of me and I spend the rest of the movement going through key area after key area trying desperately to catch up to him. Beethoven and I start out on the same page, but then we diverge and I find myself just bumbling around trying to get us back together again.
Do you guys have any suggestions on how to tackle Beethoven after years of avoidance? I feel like maybe I should find a teacher (I'm in grad school now-though not for music-and I considered trying to wrangle lessons out of one of the piano teachers there), but if there was anything I could do while I'm still on my own and can't afford to pay for a teacher, it would be appreciated.
This doesn't mean I'll be getting into Liszt any time soon, though...Liszt and I reeeeeally don't get along, and I'm not sure we ever will.
I'm going into my second year without a teacher, and so far my piano playing has improved immensely. Despite having the best teachers I could possibly have in college, studying piano as a major became too stressful in the end and took out much of the love that had made me want to take up the instrument in the first place. I'm learning more contemporary music to balance out the steady diet of Bach/Beethoven/Chopin/Mozart that I got in college, and doing more accompanying, where I'm learning pieces that are worlds harder than what I was playing in school, and doing it in a fraction of the time. Today, on a whim, I whipped out a random book and opened up to a Beethoven sonata, the "Waldstein". As I played the first movement in that awkward fumbling way that you do when you sightread something for the first time, I ended up thinking, "hey! I really enjoy this!".
Long story short, I think I want to give poor Beethoven another chance. The problem is, I don't really know how to play Beethoven, and I'm not sure that's something I can teach myself. I think the problem is that, though I've analyzed the sonatas before, when I'm playing I get lost and have trouble following what Beethoven's doing. Somewhere in the middle of the development, Beethoven runs on ahead of me and I spend the rest of the movement going through key area after key area trying desperately to catch up to him. Beethoven and I start out on the same page, but then we diverge and I find myself just bumbling around trying to get us back together again.
Do you guys have any suggestions on how to tackle Beethoven after years of avoidance? I feel like maybe I should find a teacher (I'm in grad school now-though not for music-and I considered trying to wrangle lessons out of one of the piano teachers there), but if there was anything I could do while I'm still on my own and can't afford to pay for a teacher, it would be appreciated.
This doesn't mean I'll be getting into Liszt any time soon, though...Liszt and I reeeeeally don't get along, and I'm not sure we ever will.