After a five year endeavour to learn Un Sospiro by Franz Liszt, I finally had to finish the piece and move on. It was a bittersweet decision because it wasn’t as polished as I wanted it to be, but instead only as good as it will ever likely to be.
I don’t recall what inspired me to learn this piece, but it is almost certainly the most difficult and challenging piece I’ve ever attempted. One might say that I bit off way more than I could chew, and after about five years of chewing, I just had to swallow.
While I learned other pieces, this one I kept on as a long term project. I would work on a section here, but parts that I though I finally got in my fingers would start to fall apart. I practiced getting the cadenzas up to speed, only to find my fingers to slip on arpeggios elsewhere, and being unable to lift the melody out in key sections. When I finally tamed the dynamics, my fingers would trip over previously passages that I thought were solid.
Listening to my performance again, it is possible that I am too hard on myself, and on social media at risk of being a humble brag. But in my personal musical journey, these sentiments of inadequacy linger. I can hear my old piano teacher saying that I’m torturing the music. Perhaps I should be boiled in oil, or go out and sit in the snow chair. In fact, when I went to him a couple of years ago, his only advice for me is that I should just stop.
Instead, I plugged away for another 2 years, and after much thought and self-reflections, I decided it was time for me to finally perform it and move on to something else.
I did a debrief video on this piece as well, reviewing my state of mind this week as I wrapped up this piece.
