On several occasions Doctor Robbins, my piano teacher during my high school years, would say that in his day you couldn't consider yourself a real pianist unless you could sit down and play from a dozen or so Preludes and Fugues and six or seven Beethoven sonatas. Playing the WTC right now bores me to tears, but I started thinking a while back about the Beethoven challenge, given that since I've been playing more in the past few years I've been ignoring most everything prior to Chopin, and it seemed if I really did want to try out one of these amateur competitions one of these days, something from the classical period was probably a good idea.



So where better to start with Beethoven than the first movement of the first sonata, Op 2 no 1. It goes by quick (less than 4 minutes even with the repeat), and lo and behold after a few months of repetition, I had it memorized. So I thought, you know, I've always liked the Op 31 No 2 sonata, and had worked on it off and on for years but never studied it with anyone or performed it, I should try that one out, and within a couple of months, I had the first movement of that memorized. Then the Op 10 No 2 first movement, which I studied at NU and was my first performance there, although it never made a solo recital program. Then the Op 101 first movement, which I had worked on shortly after I moved to Boston. So now I've got four first movements memorized, and the first real test comes at next Saturday's soiree when I attempt to play the 2/1 from memory. It's a bit of a stretch, as I haven't played a memorized piece in public in nearly 20 years.



It could be that the power of memorization is coming back (I had it pretty good by 1986, when I stopped practicing) and things are getting easier to memorize again, but I think it helps that these are works with which I am pretty familiar, even if the 10/2 is the only one I'd actually memorized before. Next comes Op 22, then maybe another late one and then probably one of the biggies (Walstein, Appasionata, which are half-memorized anyway and, like Dr R used to say, basically play themselves), then that will be seven, and it will be time to go back and learn the last movements (we'll save the slow movements for last, since they seem to be the hardest to remember). Op 101 is the exception, but most of the others are pretty snappy, and each has a definite repetitive structure to it that makes it easier to memorize. There's really no reason to memorize them in order to play them better, but I would like to have the ability to sit down and play >something< on demand without the music in front of me if the occasion ever warrants itself (which it rarely does). And depending on how long this takes, then maybe we'll go for Chopin next. Just don't expect any of those Bach Preludes and Fugues any time soon.