The first real piece: a Burgmüller arabesque and about forty hours
A year in, the course pieces had started to feel like exercises with titles, and I wanted something that was actually music. The Burgmüller arabesque, Op. 100 No. 2, is the piece that every adult-beginner forum eventually recommends, and now I understand why. It is two pages, in A minor, fast and light, with running sixteenth notes that pass between the hands. It sounds impressive at tempo and is built almost entirely from five-finger patterns a first-year student already knows.
The log says I spent forty-one hours on it between late March and the end of May, which seems like a lot for two pages and probably is. The first week was learning the notes hands separately, at whatever speed they came. The second week was hands together at 60 beats per minute for the quarter note, less than half the marked tempo, which made the piece sound like a funeral march with a limp. Then the ladder: 60, 66, 72, 80, 88, 96, raising the metronome one step only when I could play the whole piece three times in a row without a wrong note. Some steps took two days. The step from 88 to 96 took eleven.
Measure 11 was the wall. The right hand plays a quick descending run that ends on a note the thumb has to reach by crossing under, and at anything above 80 my thumb landed a key too high, every time, as if it had its own opinion. I tried the standard things: playing the run alone fifty times, playing it with dotted rhythms, playing it with my eyes closed. What worked, finally, was something a video suggested: play the run and stop dead on the thumb note and hold it, twenty times, so that the hand learned where the destination was before it learned the speed. Two days of that and the measure stopped being a measure I noticed.
I played it for my partner on a Sunday evening in May, at about 100, a bit under the marked tempo, with one wrong note in the second half that I covered by not stopping. It took one minute and ten seconds. Forty hours for seventy seconds of music. It was, by a wide margin, the most satisfying seventy seconds of the year, and the first time a piece came out of my hands sounding like itself.