Two years in: the Chopin E minor prelude at forty beats a minute
At the two-year mark I gave myself a piece that was slightly out of reach: the Chopin prelude in E minor, Op. 28 No. 4. It is short, twenty-five measures, and the right hand is almost nothing, long repeated notes and a sighing figure. The whole difficulty is in the left hand, which plays a chord on every eighth note and changes one voice at a time, a half-step here, a half-step there, so that the harmony slides downward under a melody that barely moves. It sounds simple. It is a trap.
The trap is that each chord looks like the one before it with one note changed, and your hand wants to play the one before it. I spent the first two weeks learning the left hand alone, with no metronome, just naming the changes out loud: this note moves, that note stays. Then I set the metronome to 40 and played the left hand alone at that speed, which is painfully slow, for ten minutes a day for another two weeks. At 40 you have time to look at the next chord, decide which finger moves, and move it. Mistakes at 40 are decisions, not accidents.
Hands together started in week five, still at 40. The right hand kept pulling me forward, because it knows where the melody is going and wants to get there. Week seven I moved to 48. Week nine, 56. I am now at 60, and the marking is largo, which could reasonably be anything from 50 to 60, so I am in the neighborhood. The crescendo in measures 16 to 18 is still a mess because when I get louder I also get faster, every time, and I practice it with the metronome clicking in my ear specifically in order not to speed up.
I record myself on my phone every Sunday and listen on Monday. The first recording, from week five, is hard to listen to. The one from last Sunday has about four wrong notes and a tempo that wobbles but holds. Most of the chords are right. The last four measures, where everything stops and then there are three slow chords, I can play in a way that gives me goosebumps, which was the point.
I have no idea whether I would have gotten here faster with a teacher. Probably. But it has been eleven weeks of twenty-minute sessions, roughly twenty-five hours, on a piece I wanted since before I could read music, and it is nearly mine.