Piano Forum

These pieces are not all that difficult (about grade 6 – , yet to a beginner they may seem completely daunting. Each has a certain number of difficulties, the more so, the less experienced the player is.

Have you tried tackling any of these pieces? If so, can you pinpoint what particular difficulties you found? Maybe everything was difficult. Maybe you could manage most of the piece except for two or three bars. If so what was it on those two or three bar that made it completely impossible? Once you know the answers to these questions, it is not difficult to find repertory of quality that will help you get to grips with your difficulties. The more specific the difficulty, the easier and the more appropriate will be the suggestion for a repertory.

Imagine you go to a doctor and say: “Doctor I do not feel very well. I would like to feel well, and I heard you have a number of remedies. Which do you suggest I take?” You get the idea.

But many times beginners do not have even the minimum experience to answer this sort of questions. So I will give some guidelines for Debussy’s “Reverie”, and maybe you will be able to supply more specific information for the other pieces.

Reverie.

Difficulties:

1.   Polyrhythms.
2.   Bringing out the melody over a subdued, arpeggiated figuration.
3.   Pedal use.
4.   Balancing melodic lines in a chorale-like figuration (second part).
5.   Facility to play arpeggios in the left hand.
6.   Facility to play chords, octaves and broken chord/octaves on the right hand.
7.   Maintaining a long melodic line shared between both hands.
8.   Lack of familiarity with “impressionist” music.

Now, you could tackle and master all these difficulties by just working on this piece – rather than wait to acquire these facilities and then play the piece.

On the other hand, it can be demoralising to spend a couple of years struggling with 3 or 4 bars.

So, it is always a good idea to find some piece that is worthwhile musically, and learn it before. This will allow you to acquire the technique necessary to tackle the more difficult piece and at the same time add – in usually a short time – a new piece to your repertory.

So here are some options. Don’t feel that you have to learn all of these before embarking on Reverie. I am giving you choices since I don’t know your tastes or your actual difficulties. They are specific to each of the 8 difficulties above, and I have divide in five levels: level 1 a complete beginner can tackle. Level 5 is just below Reverie itself. For each level I will try to provide at least one piece. As I said, you do not need to learn all these pieces, or even start at level 1. However a complete beginner who came to me in his first lessons and said “I want to learn Reverie”, I would suggest that s/he learned one piece for each level before tackling Reverie (yes, that is right , 40 pieces! But many of them overlap to a certain extent, so it will not be that many in the end).

[to be continued…]