Sight reading is an interesting phenomena. I am pretty fair at it, and though I love this sonata quite a lot and should’ve practiced it, I decided to just read it today as I had a three dog audience at hand. When I sight read I like to follow the advice of Martin Luther and “sin boldly”. Sight reading is like skiing or mountain biking or technical trail running. You need to look at where you want to go, not where you are afraid to fall.
Imperfection abounds, yet mostly Beethoven Op 10 no 3 will look good in any outfit. My husband of going on 35 years thinks I too look good in any outfit. He likes me when my chin hairs emerge and when I have nasty surgical scars on my neck. He likes me when I sit in my recliner which is where I’ve been for the majority of the last 4 months and when I ask for a coffee refill from my La-Z-Girl throne. It’s nice to be cared for in such an unconditional fashion. Perhaps I do the same for him, and maybe this is why we are in our third decade of marriage despite a child in prison and a life-eating profession like medicine.
I am now five weeks post my second major surgery in 3 months. I have found piano playing to be painful in the literal sense but a palliative balm in the figurative sense. At first I could manage 5-10 minutes. Now I can at least fumble my way through a sonata despite a slow movement that is bloated with gravitas. Serious as movement two is (largo and mesto which indicates slow and melancholic, though it just occurs to me it sounds like something you’d eat at a trattoria), the rest of the sonata is full of jokes. Dramatic pauses, ridiculous sforzando-pianos, and a rondo theme that opens with his favorite scheme of “the third time is the charm.” That is, LVB liked to start something twice then the third time take it to fruition. It must have driven his other band members nuts sometimes. Fun fact, Beethoven precisely counted his coffee beans every morning. 60 beans per cup. He was a beautiful brilliant batty barista with a knack for piano and an ear for composing, even when he was deaf.
I’m going to leave this edition of the Beethoven Dog Project as it is, warts and all. It’s just not every day you get three dogs clamoring for classical music. They like Beethoven best as they can really dig their teeth into his music. The bones of each sonata hold the seemingly simple tunes and fragments together, and the marrow of those bones signal a deep connection to sacred creativity. Fueled by 60 coffee beans and an ego that was never afraid of falling, rather always keeping focus on where he was headed, riding the black diamond musical moguls of this rugged, ragged life.
