I am — for better and for worse — a pianist. For about a year I was a very, very good one. Before that I was an amateur; after that I became what I am now, a composer who plays the piano.
This morning I awoke with the first few bars of Beethoven’s Opus 49, Number 1 in my head. Morning coffee made and carried into the music room, I pulled out the well-thumbed second volume of complete sonatas and placed it on the rack, turning, for the first time in twenty-eight years, to page 355.
It is said that this humble (some say even insignificant) sonata, probably the easiest of them all to play, was written to be learned by students, and that its publication was an accident — that Beethoven’s accountant took it upon himself to publish it during one of Beethoven’s periods of financial distress. No matter, there before me sat the first page of my old friend; for like so many fledgling pianists before me learn it I did. The music was covered with fingerings and lesson notes, even an oily discoloration in the lower right hand corner of the page from having been so often turned.
When I placed my hands on the keys, I felt first the flush of familiar pleasure as my thumb played the upbeat to the first bar. Then a rush of motor memories, life memories, and admonitions from my beloved teacher, Ms. Ross came to me as my pinky began the second bar. The row of descending thirds in the left hand that enters next provoked rueful gratitude for the weeks spent practicing fingered thirds I was assigned when it emerged that I had never practiced them before.
And then, in the third bar, the crossed out fingerings (this was the Schenker edition) and the Schnabel fingerings that my teacher preferred I learn. ‘Why Schnabel’s?’ I asked. ‘Because he studied with Leschetitzky, who studied with Czerny, who studied with Beethoven,’ she answered.
The familiar outward rotation of the right hand in the second movement once carefully rehearsed as a teenager to serve as a moment of relaxation prior to a difficult passage triggered not just the thought ‘relax here’ but also a warm, clear memory of being stopped at that point during a lesson and being asked how much sleep I had had. I confessed that I had been for the past thirty-six hours copying the parts to a new orchestra piece. ‘Then, my dear,’ my teacher sighed, ‘go home, get some sleep, and come back tomorrow, because you can’t possibly expect your hands to do what your head and heart tell them to in this state. Not just the lack of sleep but the gripping of the pen for all that time has clearly short-circuited your coordination.’
Double bar reached, I closed the volume and placed if back on the shelf, thinking unsetimentally that there is for me an intense satisfaction to be taken in the knowledge that my fingers had just traced pretty much the same patterns Beethoven’s did two centuries ago. Musicians all know that muscles remember, that motor memory is fashioned over time through the repetition of a given collection of motor skills and the ability of the brain to internalize it such that they become automatic; that once muscle memory is created and retained, there is no longer need to actively think about the movement and capacity is freed up for interpretation and expressivity.
This is the place I love the best — where the mystery of talent unfolds, knuckles and digits are forgotten, the poetic memory runs free, and the exhilarating music ‘sans commencement, sans fin,’ which this morning sounded to me like the Opus 49, Number 1, fills the the air.
