For a non-professional, I’m a pretty good sight reader and I can more or less bluff my way through most of Mozart’s piano sonata in F (K. 332), having studying it centuries ago in college.
The challenging thing for me is oddly always this one passage in the middle of the slow movement where there’s suddenly a chromatic run of notes that’s beyond my ability to just fake it.
There are just too many of them (they’re 64th notes, meaning that there are 16 of them per quarter note beat). Basically, they’re super-fast and I can’t keep the flow going and be accurate.
It’s always been a bit of a sore spot for me because the rest of the entire piece I can just casually play except this passage. In order to get it really right would require slowing down completely and/or playing it in isolation.
Most often, my strategy is simply to play the movement from beginning to end and just sort of fudge my way through that passage––it’s only a half measure amongst 40 other measures. (IE, I can handle 98.5% of the rest of the notes; why am I letting the 1.5% drag me down?).
In a fit of virtue, however, recently I’ve realized that it’s ridiculous to not just deal with the 1.5% that’s getting in my way. Thus, I’ve “done the right thing” and simply played through the passage a half-dozen times until now it sets well under my hand.
I thought that was my lesson: slow down and address/remove the pebble in your shoe, rather than coasting along and making the same mistakes.
But here’s the twist: I wanted to find a video clip of someone playing it perfectly and the first several that came up –– the venerable Elisabeth Leonskaja and Christoph Eschenbach –– both play the simplified versions, omitting the run entirely. They simply simplified.
In fact, I had to track down the Daniel Barenboim recording where he plays the run at 9:21 to hear it. (Although I would heartily recommend just starting the second movement at 6:55 to hear the whole Adagio played splendidly.)
What does this mean I wonder?
Are other pianists, even famous ones, as lazy as me?
Was I just making it needlessly harder for myself by NOT playing the upper level version without the short-lived but splashy/difficult chromatic run? (And feeling guilty all the while for not learning it properly).
It’s hard to say.
In the end, I suppose perhaps I was setting too high a standard and simultaneously being a little lazy, rather than just embracing the simplified option.
In the end, I’m glad that at least I took the time (and honestly we’re really talking about all of 5 minutes!) to smooth out the kinks in the 1.5% that eluded me.
That speedy run became my own Cosmic Speed Bump, requiring me to pause and really examine what was going on…or just opt for a simplified version.
In the end, either choice is valid…but you’ve got to make a clear decision or you’re just fudging your way through your entire experience.
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