Piano Forum

Quick follow-up: I was courageous enough to ask my teacher how much time she expects "a" student to need to reach the level at which "he" can play the inventions (roughly). She seemed quite worried (in her head she was probably thinking: you, never), thought for a while and said : "about three years. If you're a genius, maybe 2. If you don't practice much (= if you're retarded), 6 years.  But 6 months, no way". ...

I thought you might want to know. Quite a different answer from the posts here! (She has me do Burgmuller's Arabesque instead, which is not bad).

Cheers,
Thomas

Hi Thomas,

Firstly, I think Angela Hewitt's rendition of the inventions is superb.  She does have a lot to say about each of the works.  I own glend gould's version, and heard Angela Hewitt's from my teacher.  In terms of interpretation, I think you need to know the work quite well (listen to it lots of times, or learn to play it) before you can easily identify where she is coming from.  Also own a copy of gould's edition, but do not like them as much.  (Just out of curiosity, what's the order they are played in suppose to represent?)

So apart from there, just to tell you abit about my experience.   I started last year by learning the two minuets you've mentioned as well -- i took three week!  After that I learn a simple hydyn sonata and later moved on to invention no. 1. 

I'm not sure what my teacher thought when I said that I wanted to learn the sonata, but perhaps she was thinking (as with your's), that I was not up to it yet.  I suppose the thing that did convince her was when I did execute the sonata and did not completely botch it.  After the sonata, she asked what I would like to play next.  I said the inventions and that I liked them alot and asked if they were much more difficult than the sonata.  She said no. So I started playing invention no. 1.

Some of the inventions are not out of grasp.  The are not huge works so, you won't have problems with length.  Also, there are only two (equal) voices, and are thus not as complicated as the symphonias or fugues (despite bernard's quite, adding a single dimesion makes the music a whole lot more chellanging).

There are a lot of challenges -- they are not simple pieces.  I would advocat learning one or two of the simpler ones as soon as you can.  If you don't have trouble reading notes and finding where each of the keys are, you should be fine.  The technique and movement that you need to learn is not particularly simple.

There are a lot of threads on how to learn the inventions, especially no. 1 (with what you should be doing broken down in excruciating detail).  Have a look at some of those. It is important to learn it hands (and therefore voices) separate, before joining them together, for both motion and for musicality.  Also expect to relearn the inventions --  I relearnt two of them three times, as your technique/musicality improves.

btw, burgmuller's arabasques is really fun!  You need good technique to play it at fast speeds. 

al.