Third movement Beethoven Moonlight: my personal adventure

[fred3000gt]

I decided to re-work on this extraordinary, wonderful, amazing, sonata . The goal is to master it as good as I can, and record the performance, possibly creating a video showing mountains and accelerated clouds over the mountains. I however limited my work to the first 5 pages (the rest is not fundamentally different) and cut out the 2 famous trills on 2nd page for the time being
Started in July, since then playing about 2 to 10 times a day, every day since then, except 10 days vacations when I could not practice seriously (wife and children now getting mad!). I play with metronome at between 140 and 200 bpm. I authorize myself a recorded or fun "fast" play, without metronome, every ~10 times. I am very careful of not to break my learning by playing it too fast too often . I still make some mistake or sometimes forget entire parts (for a few sec but that's a killer ).
I am psychotic and obsessed   about it and *love* this outstanding piece (if you did not guess it yet...), Kempff is my god. Every time I play it is a moment of pure pleasure. I got to the point I know it by heart and can play most part of it with the eyes closed (or looking at the mountains...). My instrument is a simple Yamaha Clavinova, which I really appreciate. I also started to haunt piano shops and play the Sonata on all the pianos the sellers will let me (3 shops so far, 3 to 5 pianos per shops, totally crazy...). I played last Saturday on a huge grand Bosendorfer of 2.25m, unfortunately I have not all the muscles required to feel confortable with these mechanical pianos. I intend to test soon the Yamaha N2. It is very interesting to play at different location, in front of unknown people, a very good exercice actually (a very hard experience too since my general performance is always much lower in public). Moreover, the "engagement" is enough strong that I sweat like hell  :) Yesterday, I even broke a key on a Schimmel grand piano  

Anyway, this is my weird story, I guess (hope) there are others around here with similar experiences!

[indianajo]

Set high goals, then climb that mountain.
I played 1st movement of Moonlight in 1961, second movement when I bought a Sohmer console in 1982. Started working on third movement then. Work intervened, but I am not working now. Have time to practice. Have it up to 80 bpm. At my age probably won't ever be a lot faster.  But compared to Serkin, etc, I play the trills with four notes instead of two.  Take that all you professionals! A trill is not two notes. 
I see the first movement as a couple in a rowboat on placid lake Como. Second movement is a fancy dress ball in a windowed ballroom overlooking the lake. Third movement, Marlon Brando and his motorcycle maniac pals smash their Harleys through the windows, taunt the dressed up guys, tear up the furniture and the food, and ride away with the girls on the back of the bikes. 
Hope you can achieve enough real estate to buy at least a console, eventually.  Playing this way makes me sweat and breath after dinner, important exercise at my age, in a world of couch potatoes.  Maybe in a decade or two I can get it up to 100 bpm.

[fred3000gt]

Hello Indianajo,

Thanks for your answer. About the age: I am 43, but I guess you're older since I was not born in 1961 
I also like the 1s mvt, like everyone, the 2nd... well sorry but the few times I heard it, it sounds like something absolutely uninspired.... To follow your metaphoric views, I would see the 1st as windsurfing when there alsmot no wind  8)and the 3rd when you are planning  (a special situation when you go fast enough not to need  Archimede force in order to float).
I guess you are counting tempo with one quarter-note per beat  (like it should be actually), I counted with 1 eighth note per beat... so in reality I am playing with metronome between 70 and 100, and faster than 100 without metronome.
I did my first recordings with video camera, it's a bit weird to see the fingers move like this  There was another interesting post where people were saying that recording may add some psychological stress that is good to improve the learning (in addition to muscle memory).
I am not too sure if I want to go with an acoustic piano, that may be nice during the day for this particular piece, but at night playing a Chopin, I love a the digital piano which is less loud and sounds more appropriate to me...

[dcstudio]

started that mvmt at 19 I am now 47--Ludwig and I didn't see eye to eye on that one for years!!  Recently I tackled it again--seriously...  I found that a lot of what was difficult was "unlearning" all the programmed difficulty I had put in it when I was younger.  Those trills--took me a while too--but I got it finally.  For me--the trick to that whole piece is 0 tension--none.  I am a jazz pianist but I love to sneak in a classical piece now and again. This one is a beauty. Played it on an outside gig at a classic car festival just last Saturday--out of the blue--a crowd appeared!! I also got two more bookings from other event planners--finally... someone is going to pay me to play BEETHOVEN!!! yeah yeah!! 

[pianowolfi]

Yeah some jazz pianist told me: "You know the difference between us jazzers and you classical pianists? We don't really care about wrong notes!" Somehow that got stuck in my mind, but as a "classically trained" it's really difficult to get over that point Still working on it.  

[dcstudio]

we don't care about the wrong notes!!!

you got it!! it's the only way to sleep at night when you do this daily. We don't usually do the concert hall gig--much of the time we play to people who are consuming alcohol  .  They tend to be much more forgiving--hee hee. 

I had 18 years of classical training--it was monumentally difficult for me to accept my "mistakes" and completely liberating at the same time. That is the beauty of jazz--there are no wrong notes 

[werq34ac]

Your approach to practicing is fundamentally wrong. One of the worst things you can do is practice a piece by playing it front to back repeatedly. You play it once, you think to yourself, hmm that wasn't so good, let's try it again. In this case, you need to THINK what wasn't so good about it? What are you doing wrong? What do you need in order to fix the problem(s)?
Or even worse is play it through and think, hey that was pretty good, let's do it again. There is always something wrong, even for professionals, there is always a little something that could have been better.

Also, a piece like this you could benefit very much from practicing SLOWLY even if you can play it faster. Playing it slowly ensures that you know all the notes, and more importantly, you know how it should be played. It should be slow enough that you have time to think about every aspect of every passage. (Slow practice should NOT be front to back, that would just be tedious).

In general, you should work more in small sections and maybe even divide those small sections into even smaller chunks so that you can make progress on a piece rather than bull through it several times.

[fallen_star]

a piece like this you could benefit very much from practicing SLOWLY even if you can play it faster.

In general, you should work more in small sections and maybe even divide those small sections into even smaller chunks so that you can make progress on a piece rather than bull through it several times.

I'm totally with him (her), slow practice in sections, first not looking at the keys, only the music, then with eyes shut as you learn it off by heart. You need to feel where the music is going, so slowly, then slowly speeding up without looking, without music, going bar by bar to learn it, to enter it into your soul. I tend to play through the piece start to finish just to warm up, select which bit needs the most love, and head to that. When I start making mistakes because of overplaying a small section, I head to another small section. I isolate the gicky bits and learn them off by heart immediately, keep playing them randomly and independently, slowly. I establish different metronome speeds for each section, to the level I have reached in each.

If you just play through a piece, you are playing, not practising. Practice involves repeatedly playing the same section over again until you can play it standing on your head!

Suddenly blasting it faster can undo all the good groundwork you have put in, it's possible for your fingering to alter subtly, timing, muscles tensing more in the hands and shoulders when they should remain relaxed reducing the delicacy of the piece.

1. Slow it down
2. Section it
3. Learn it without looking at the keys
4. Shut your eyes more and more

[werq34ac]

But more importantly, you have to THINK when you practice. Listen for anything, even the smallest things such as unintentional accents, lack of dynamic control, lack of clarity, absolutely anything. If you hear something you don't like, you have to think to yourself, why don't I like it? How can I fix it? Then practice the bit you don't like (it could be anything from an entire section, to a quarter of a measure) until you like how you are playing it.

[brogers70]

I also like the 1s mvt, like everyone, the 2nd... well sorry but the few times I heard it, it sounds like something absolutely uninspired....

Don't give up on the 2nd movement. Someone described it as "a flower between two abysses," "un fleur entre deux abimes." If you think of the sonata as a whole, the 2nd movement is just the right emotional break between the 1st and 3rd movements. And it's fun to play, especially the trio section.

[indianajo]

I think werq34 and fallenstar are talking to students with the fantasy that they are going to be professional classical pianists someday.  I'm about 25 years from taking "Moonlight" very slow one hand at a time. Moonlight comes at the end of my practice, somewhere in the second hour.   What I do, at my age, is check my speed today on the infamous trills. At the end of the summer like now where my hands have been too dirty to practice for months, it takes a few times to get up to my 80 bpm speed, and sometimes I do it more slowly.  Then at the speed I can do the difficult parts, I play the piece.  There aren't mistakes anymore; that was years ago. I believe the poster Fred3000gt was talking the pleasure of playing this piece, which is a piece of beauty and a joy forever.  It is also at the outer limit of my and his skill.  Grinding bit by bit practice is fine for students. Also, cutting up the piece into difficult segments does nothing for strength or memory training.  If you play a million times stopping and starting, one is liable to stop in a performance. I've got the first two pages memorized as a unit and am gradually extending this. As this is my last piece usually  my forearms are very tired at the end of the third movement. Stopping and starting doesn't build muscle strength, either.    

[werq34ac]

I think werq34 and fallenstar are talking to students with the fantasy that they are going to be professional classical pianists someday.  I'm about 25 years from taking "Moonlight" very slow one hand at a time. Moonlight comes at the end of my practice, somewhere in the second hour.   What I do, at my age, is check my speed today on the infamous trills. At the end of the summer like now where my hands have been too dirty to practice for months, it takes a few times to get up to my 80 bpm speed, and sometimes I do it more slowly.  Then at the speed I can do the difficult parts, I play the piece.  There aren't mistakes anymore; that was years ago. I believe the poster Fred3000gt was talking the pleasure of playing this piece, which is a piece of beauty and a joy forever.  It is also at the outer limit of my and his skill.  Grinding bit by bit practice is fine for students. Also, cutting up the piece into difficult segments does nothing for strength or memory training.  If you play a million times stopping and starting, one is liable to stop in a performance. I've got the first two pages memorized as a unit and am gradually extending this. As this is my last piece usually  my forearms are very tired at the end of the third movement. Stopping and starting doesn't build muscle strength, either.   

Did you even listen to what I said? You are practicing without THINKING about your playing. Who gives a f--- what notes you can play? Do you like the way you play them? When practicing, you have to think, what do I want to communicate with the audience? How will I communicate this? Don't be obsessed with the idea that music consists of only notes.

You are 25 years away from having to practice slowly? Even professionals understand that they are an infinite amount of time away from having to practice slowly. Any professional can sight read pieces full speed 100x more difficult than moonlight. Heck, I know a guy who pretty much sight read islamey, and he's not even pro. And yet, professionals know that there is ALWAYS something more to work. And thus they practice slowly so that they can COMMUNICATE with the audience. Even if you only play for yourself, how fulfilling is it to play only notes and no music?

As for playing in sections, once you get to more advanced levels (yes I am looking down on you, your last post has proved to me you are a very inexperienced pianist) you will realize that memory will come with practicing properly. Endurance will come with practicing properly. In fact, it's much more tiring to practice a particularly difficult passage several times (AND MUCH MORE EFFECTIVE) than it is to play the entire piece 10x. The point of practicing the notes is so that we can play them WITH EASE in order so they do not hinder us from expressing ourselves.

[fallen_star]

I think werq34 and fallenstar are talking to students with the fantasy that they are going to be professional classical pianists someday.  I'm about 25 years from taking "Moonlight" very slow one hand at a time. Moonlight comes at the end of my practice, somewhere in the second hour.   What I do, at my age, is check my speed today on the infamous trills. At the end of the summer like now where my hands have been too dirty to practice for months, it takes a few times to get up to my 80 bpm speed, and sometimes I do it more slowly.  Then at the speed I can do the difficult parts, I play the piece.  There aren't mistakes anymore; that was years ago. I believe the poster Fred3000gt was talking the pleasure of playing this piece, which is a piece of beauty and a joy forever.  It is also at the outer limit of my and his skill.  Grinding bit by bit practice is fine for students. Also, cutting up the piece into difficult segments does nothing for strength or memory training.  If you play a million times stopping and starting, one is liable to stop in a performance. I've got the first two pages memorized as a unit and am gradually extending this. As this is my last piece usually  my forearms are very tired at the end of the third movement. Stopping and starting doesn't build muscle strength, either.   

You section the music to lay the groundwork. Playing from the start is playing not practising. Once the groundwork is laid, the sections can be melded together. No-one would take a piece that is still sectioned (and therefore in it's infancy) into a concert. It is how it is initially learnt, how you teach your subconscious/muscle memory/reflexes to SLOWLY place each note in front of it's predessessor with the correct fingering, without having to consult the music squinting in for every note, without hesitating at the accidentals, then playing with a metronome to ensure there are no hesitations you were not aware of, and ensuring a steady tempo.

Difficult sections need to be played more than more simple sections, how is that possible if you do not section it, and attack the more difficult sections more often and for longer than the more simple sections?

As to your 25 years, that doesn't make your point valid. I have been playing for 20 years and learn something new all the time, am continually working on my technique and strengthening my weaker right hand with exercises on a daily basis. If I learnt the Rach 2 as a single unit, I fear I, nor any pianist, would be able to do the runs and sweeps that require isolating and repeated playing with closed eyes until they seep into your soul. And only, at that point, can you truly express yourself in your music.

[werq34ac]

Adding to that, even right before a performance, I do section practice and slow practice (well.. I know that I should *guilty chuckle*). In fact, right before a performance is a perfect time for slow practice. Memorization is actually much more difficult at slower speeds since you need to think about every little note rather than letting your hands play themselves at higher speeds. It really checks the memory and whether you really understand the piece musically speaking. Of course, if you can't play it from memory slowly, then there are gaps in your memory and that means you might actually have a blip in memory. When one practices, one does not think to carefully about the notes they are playing, they simply play them. However when one  performs, all of a sudden, one is self-conscious and starts thinking which notes they are actually playing. Then they realize they were only going through gestures and do not actually know the notes. This is how we have memory blips when we are nervous. Slow practice ensures memory.

And if one does know how they are going to express themselves at a slower tempo, they most certainly WILL NOT express themselves at faster tempos.

I will acknowledge the element of speed, since faster does make it harder in a different sense. But you will find (or perhaps not, considering the incredible amount of wasted practice you have) that the difficulty of speed is really not that big of a deal compared to the difficulty of expressing oneself.


And just a note, when I played this piece 3 years back, I played it at the unnecessary tempo of 170 to the quarter so don't say I'm lacking in technique. I said unnecessary since it was a bit fast and i couldn't control the musical elements of the piece.

[indianajo]

Well, I see one ray of light where we can agree.  170 bpm is awfully fast, 192 that Serkin does it is even worse. I heard a new version of Moonlight on WUOL last week, I didn't write the name of the artist down because he was doing the same thing all the other versions do.  He was playing the famous trills as three notes instead of five.  His pianos (soft) were't very, despite tremendous advances of the CD over the LP that Serkin was recording for.  And his sixteenth notes were rippling off so fast, it was like water blasting over the edge of Niagra Falls, one big blast of sound.  Just like every other recording I have heard.
One of the privileges of not going for an academic degree, or not trying to make money with your art, is that you can decide that all the booking agents of concert halls, and all the A&R men at recording companies, and maybe all the academics, are wrong.  A previous post discussed the importance of stopping and thinking about each note individually. That is not music to me.  Music is a sequence and consonance of mathematical vibrations whose   relations in both simultaneity and sequence, is pleasing to the mind.  Thus, I think of great melodies and harmonies, and they run through my mind asleep or even when I am in the garage with earplugs grinding steel off an exhaust pipe.  Last summer there was a mockingbird on my property whose only song was a single note, Brakkkk!!  That got him the territory, but it is not music, even in bird calls.  Most mockingbirds are much more artistic than that.  
The beauty of Moonlight 3 is that there are great melodies, both in the right finger where one expects them, but also in the left hand where they are mostly ignored by the recordings.  When I play it, I emphasize the right pinky sometimes when I feel that is appropriate.  There are enough repetitions of material in the piece, other times I emphasize the great melodies in the lower fingers of the left hand.  Boring repetition of treble dominance is not part of my performance.  
And I have to say, Beethoven did not write this for the 5 touring pros hitting the Wien concert stage. He hoped to sell it to his publisher, who hoped to sell copies to every piano owning home in Germanic Europe.  Ripping it off at 192 bpm was something the piece was capable of, but not inherent in its creation.  I'm doing it my way, which is not at all what you can buy on a CD.  Fred3000, the originator of the thread, does not even own a wood piano yet.  But the piece is enjoyable to us amateurs, that do not enjoy cutting the piece into little snippets of notes all over the living room carpet.  While cutting it up might help me achieve 170 bpm, I really am not interested in that as a goal.  I love the melodies, right and left hand, and I love emphasizing them my way, instead of just putting a CD on the system and letting the pro handle it.  

[fallen_star]

I just don't see how you can profess to know a piece without actually "knowing" it. Without the basic mechanics in place, I don't believe anyone can truly master a piece.

I'm not of a Bach school of thought, that music is merely mathematics, I'm just suggesting slow practice and sectioning is an effective use of time while practising, and well laid groundwork is essential to a coherent performance.

[nyiregyhazi]

" A previous post discussed the importance of stopping and thinking about each note individually. That is not music to me.  Music is a sequence and consonance of mathematical vibrations whose  relations in both simultaneity and sequence, is pleasing to the mind. "

Why don't you post a recording- so we can see whether the results of this romanticised ideal are actually pleasing to the mind? If you're not interested in details, I'm afraid that I am very skeptical as to whether the whole will be terribly pleasing to many people's minds. It's by mastering detail that a state of {insert vague and ultimately meaningless, yet admittedly poetic language} comes into being. Idealistic thinking is all very well. But all too often the ideal can only be witnessed by the person who dreams of it. If you cannot find real music within details, there is something missing. By all means take the attitude that you can't personally be bothered to do that kind of work. But please do not imply that such approaches are "not music" (even if you do wisely qualify it with "to me"). There's no high ground in refusing to see that music exists in detail as much as in the whole.

As a general rule, a pianist who can spend half an hour practising a single melodic strand has a lot more music to offer than the pianist who cannot find music without inserting all other voices and continuing straight to the next section.

PS. "famous trills"? It's all very well scoffing at others while playing at only 80 bpm. But I find it more than mildly ironic that you are horrified by such a piffling detail as whether the trill features 3 or 5 notes- in the light of your argument about the bigger picture. It seems that argument is somewhat selective...

[Derek]

disclaimer: amateur alert.

I've been playing this piece a bunch lately, and worked on it in college so I thought I'd chime in. For some reason, the common sense of honing in on the parts of the piece that I'm not that good on yet didn't settle in til a couple of weeks ago. But, it really seems to be working. Instead of playing most of the piece that I already know well, I'll spend entire practice sessions on just a single passage, working out the fingering or "sequencing" things that I usually had messed up. I actually have the piece already memorized, but I don't have it "smoothed out" yet. I've found the most learning during practice comes from the first few minutes of focused practice on something. Spread your learning too thin and less progress will be made.  I'm not sure if this is true in general for piano students or not, but for me as an amateur it definitely seems to be true. To put it another way, I had a bad amateur habit of always starting at the beginning of the piece, enjoying what I could already play, and then just "hoping" the ratty parts would clean themselves up. It finally sank in that it really doesn't work that way.  My piano teacher in college warned against this of course, as any good piano teacher would do.

[werq34ac]

Well, I see one ray of light where we can agree.  170 bpm is awfully fast, 192 that Serkin does it is even worse. I heard a new version of Moonlight on WUOL last week, I didn't write the name of the artist down because he was doing the same thing all the other versions do.  He was playing the famous trills as three notes instead of five.  His pianos (soft) were't very, despite tremendous advances of the CD over the LP that Serkin was recording for.  And his sixteenth notes were rippling off so fast, it was like water blasting over the edge of Niagra Falls, one big blast of sound.  Just like every other recording I have heard.
One of the privileges of not going for an academic degree, or not trying to make money with your art, is that you can decide that all the booking agents of concert halls, and all the A&R men at recording companies, and maybe all the academics, are wrong.  A previous post discussed the importance of stopping and thinking about each note individually. That is not music to me.  Music is a sequence and consonance of mathematical vibrations whose   relations in both simultaneity and sequence, is pleasing to the mind.  Thus, I think of great melodies and harmonies, and they run through my mind asleep or even when I am in the garage with earplugs grinding steel off an exhaust pipe.  Last summer there was a mockingbird on my property whose only song was a single note, Brakkkk!!  That got him the territory, but it is not music, even in bird calls.  Most mockingbirds are much more artistic than that.  
The beauty of Moonlight 3 is that there are great melodies, both in the right finger where one expects them, but also in the left hand where they are mostly ignored by the recordings.  When I play it, I emphasize the right pinky sometimes when I feel that is appropriate.  There are enough repetitions of material in the piece, other times I emphasize the great melodies in the lower fingers of the left hand.  Boring repetition of treble dominance is not part of my performance.  
And I have to say, Beethoven did not write this for the 5 touring pros hitting the Wien concert stage. He hoped to sell it to his publisher, who hoped to sell copies to every piano owning home in Germanic Europe.  Ripping it off at 192 bpm was something the piece was capable of, but not inherent in its creation.  I'm doing it my way, which is not at all what you can buy on a CD.  Fred3000, the originator of the thread, does not even own a wood piano yet.  But the piece is enjoyable to us amateurs, that do not enjoy cutting the piece into little snippets of notes all over the living room carpet.  While cutting it up might help me achieve 170 bpm, I really am not interested in that as a goal.  I love the melodies, right and left hand, and I love emphasizing them my way, instead of just putting a CD on the system and letting the pro handle it.  

I never said 170 was too fast, only too fast for ME to make music with AT THAT TIME (3 years ago is a lot for a 16 year old, i've come a long way from there).
I never said to agonize over every note. One must think in terms of gestures and phrases rather than single notes. The left hand is mostly ignored in recordings? Every pianist knows they need to bring out the melody, I find it hard to believe that pros fail to do this. As for playing it conventionally, I never said you needed to, I said that you need to be able to communicate the music with your audience, not play notes for them. It's not about the notes, it's about the way they are connected.
 As for your comment about using the art for money, I have not made a single penny off piano (well my violin teacher did tip me for accompanying a child, which I felt I didn't deserve but she insisted), I accompany my friends for free since I don't feel I'm competent enough to charge.
Music is math? Can emotion be calculated? Can expression as a human being be put into a math equation? Although pitches are based on frequencies and dynamics based on intensity of sound (I took physics last year), there's more to music than just vibrations in the ear. It's how we, as human beings, interpret the sound, and make meaning out of these scientifically speaking, fluctuations in air pressure. So you hear it in your head everywhere? You don't think I don't hear music in my head? You don't think how I constantly think about how I can improve the pieces I'm learning? The mental practice is 1000x more valuable than actual physical practice. When in the practice room, why not do both at the same time? By the time you achieve musical mastery over a passage, you will have played it enough times that the technique is all there. So you want to play it your way? Does your way ACTUALLY GIVE THE PIECE JUSTICE? The way you practice, there is no way you can.

[dcstudio]

disclaimer: amateur alert.

 I actually have the piece already memorized, but I don't have it "smoothed out" yet.

funny how this piece is so easy to memorize yet "smooooothing" out those passages is so difficult--I had it memorized for 25yrs before I could actually play it...

[fallen_star]

When I play jazz, I express myself first and foremost, and perhaps get around to learning the notes 

When I play Beethoven, I learn the notes first and it expresses itself.

I'm autistic, and the only way I can really express feeling is through music, and I feel it comes so naturally to me. But when it's all you have, you treasure it more.

[dcstudio]

When I play jazz, I express myself first and foremost, and perhaps get around to learning the notes 

When I play Beethoven, I learn the notes first and it expresses itself.

I'm autistic, and the only way I can really express feeling is through music, and I feel it comes so naturally to me. But when it's all you have, you treasure it more.

well said--I can totally relate.