I get up. Make a giant pot of coffee. Sit down at my piano, and pull out: Bartok. The Sonata I played for my graduate recital,
ten (holy cow, t-e-n) years ago.
It's strange that this is how I choose to start my day, because the reality is: I hated that dang sonata. I did not appreciate its inherent aggressive attitude, or the fact that it required a lot of loud banging of giant key-clusters from a lovely sweet and gentle girl such as myself.
Lyrical is far more my style, Bartok!
But I worked and I toiled; it was on my program, and it had to be done.
One lesson day, I handed the music to my teacher, sat down at the piano, and proceeded to crap all over it, from beginning to end (please excuse all of the lovely sweetness I seem to have lost since then...).
When it was all over, that dear lady looked at me. Not typically a mincer of words, she inclined her head toward me, very very kindly. Speaking softly and gently, she told me how one day when she was in school she brought a difficult piece in to play for her teacher. When she finished, he told her he believed in always finding something positive to say. He said he liked her socks.
"So," she said, looking me directly in the eye.
"I really like your sweater."
I looked back at her, tears glistening everywhere,
and wailed "It's not even my sweater!!"
Needless to say, it was not a very good day for Bartok, or for me. Eventually, though, I got it together well enough. I played it for the recital, well enough. And then, I put it away. I've re-played every other piece from that program in the ten years since, but not that one. That one had gotten the best of me, and I didn't want to remember it. It exposed my weaknesses, and I simply wanted to forget that when it came down to it, I was only...well enough.
[What if they find me lacking, now, and always?]
So is it surprising that today, in this weary early morning, in this season that is kind of wearing me down to my emotional and physical nubbins, I take it out again? After ten years of putting it behind me?
I think it is.
But I also think, it isn't.
And here's why:
We all know that my experience with the score of this opera started out as a beast leading its victim smack into the middle of the arena.
I was not amused. Terrified of the mistakes, of the being lacking.
[What if...lacking...now...always...?]
But I was also determined: It would not get the best of me.
And now, in this final week of preparation, relegated to an impossibly annoying little keyboard in the very back of the stage, unable to see and sometimes even hear the singers I entered the battle with those seemingly few weeks ago, playing off of two bare-bones harpsichord/celesta/piano/harp scores that are really quite uninteresting, I find:
I miss that piano score.
I miss the complexity of it, the beauty of it, the reward of moving my hands and my arms all over the keys and marveling at how it is possible that I know so easily where to go and what to do to make such glorious sound.
The thing that was so daunting has become the thing I miss. And the journey of entering deeply into the mess of it, of setting my mind to the difficulty of it, of coming to know it far more richly than I ever could have predicted and of finding more of myself in the process of it,
has left me in a place of:
I want to know who I am. I want to know who I am, as a pianist.
So yesterday I dig out the CD from that ten-year ago recital, the CD I've listened to only a handful of times, not wanting to hear all of the things I wished were different.
And I listen to it. I listen this time for the wholeness of it, for the beauty and the mistakes. I realize: Enough of my life has been lived listening only for mistakes.
And I find that it really is quite beautiful. I find that I hear some things differently now, that I'd change things if I were to play it all over again. And I find that even the mistakes are beautiful in their own way, because they are mine. Ten years ago, they were me, being me,
on my journey of learning to live.
And so this morning I pull out that crazy Bartok, after a ten year hiatus. And I discover:
It's not as bad as I remember it being. I even kind of like it,
and it's actually pretty easy to play.
It turns out that in these ten years, in this opera season: I've grown.
As a pianist, as a person. In knowledge; in being me.
It turns out that this morning I wake up early to find that the only failure I will not accept from here on out is the failure to enter the mess.
For, if now I decide to keep myself clear from danger of mistake,
then always lacking you would in fact find me.
Lacking all that I might have otherwise come to know;
the richness of who I could have come to be.
You would find me lacking, me.
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