Another question on 3rd mvmt of Moonlight Sonata

[pjjslp]

I'm still chugging along on this, and parts of it are starting to sound OK. However, I am having an incredible amount of difficulty getting bar 65 to anything faster than about half tempo. Jumping from the sixteenths in bar 64 to the chord in 65 and then back into the arpeggios is not going well. I either make a mess of the chord or end up with a hideously obvious brief pause. Any tips on practicing this transition and getting it up to tempo? I feel very stuck. (The arpeggios at the very end are also tricky, but at least I have some idea how to approach those!)

Thanks in advance!

[indianajo]

If you are having to pause, you are practicing too fast before and after the jump.  The transistion into the final chord of one arpeggio is pretty smooth, you just don't pick your fingers up.  The next arpeggio starts waay down the piano.  You have to know where you are going, and for the first 100 or 500 times, you have to look where the hand will land.  But there comes a time where you don't, you get bored with looking and the hand just goes there on its own.   
Physical  learning of this sort is like an exponential curve.  Progress is very slow for dozens or maybe hundreds of repetitions. The key, is NEVER go so fast you make a mistake.  If you do, you are learning the mistake in your inner motion brain instead of the correct motion.  So you go very slowly, for weeks and in my case, months and years.  Then you have the motion down where you don't have to think about it.   Your inner brain is doing it the same way you walk, no frontal lobe involvement at all.  It just happens.  Same as memorizing, it just happens with slow  absolutely correct practice.  Then when this jump is just happening slowly without your thinking about it. you turn up the speed.  Going from 40 bpm totally correctly to 120 bpm can happen in a couple of weeks.  It is just movements you memorized, you just play them faster and faster.  I'm quite amazed my hand can fly across the keyboard and find that lower starting note correctly. It happened because I went slowly.  After 32 years of practice on this movement (not intensively until I quir working 2008),  I showed this piece to an 83 year old teacher.  She said something about picking the hand up more flying down to the lower start note so I didn't hurt myself on the black keys.  I don't see any point in changing that memorized movement: it is a movement I do correctly every time, the way a pro baseball player throws a double play, without thinking too much.
Now that the third movement is out of my daily practice repretoire, I have to practice it slowly for a few times before I reconnect with the memories of the fast performance.  But once I find them again,  away I go - - - --!
This slow practice with absolutely no mistakes until you've memorized everything and every movement was one of the key points of the teaching of Mrs. Nikki Jelson.  I don't think conservatories teach this, and certainly I don't see anybody else on here talking about it.  But when you do memorize everything this way, not just slob through it sightreading as you go, you have the pieces memorized permanently.  Then it is fun playing them, and you can think about the interpretation you are performing, the emotions, not the movements or mechanics of the piece.  
Best of luck with your practice.  

[spenstar]

You have to practice it so slowly that you NEVER make a mistake. You should never make the same mistake twice. So play it slow and get it correct. Then put it on the metronome and start slow enough to play it perfect. Play it through about 5 times then speed it up. If you make a mistake even 1/5 times, slow it back down. After each set of 5, increase the metronome by 2 ticks and do it again until you have it up to tempo.

[pjjslp]

Thank you both so much for your responses! Yes, I am a bit impatient with speed. I think it's my main practice demon . It is so easy to get caught up in the ability to make 90% of the piece sound great and just ignore that 10% that doesn't. Definitely the thing that frustrates me most about myself!

I will practice with the metronome if it kills me, and it just might. I think it's time to invest in a pair of headphones to avoid driving my husband and kids crazy. Thank you again!