pleasing my Teacher

I practiced hard this week, almost all of it on Bach. This morning's voluntaries were the two settings of Aus tiefer Not from the Clavierübung, and the prelude for this evening's Evensong was the Passacaglia.

I played it in the 1980's, but have not done it since. Several times I have scheduled it for a Lenten Evensong, but scrubbed it when I saw that there was not enough time to prepare it. This year, I was determined to do it, even though my intentions of working on it well in advance came to naught. I had a solid fingering from the previous times when the piece was scheduled, and began the First Workout last weekend. Could I get the thing ready in one week?

The answer is: sort of. I think that I gave a reasonably good presentation of it in terms of overall concept, but there were a lot of missed notes. And not a few in the Aus tiefer Not this morning -- the smaller setting (manuals-only) was played cleanly and I think very well; the large six-voice chorale fugue not so much.

I am okay with this. I want to please my Teacher, who was listening. He always is: "He knoweth my sitting down and my rising up; he discerneth my thoughts from afar" (cf Psalm 139:1-2). My Teacher knows how hard I worked this week, how many of my other duties I laid aside for these three pieces. No matter how well I might play, he has heard better - he heard JSB himself play these pieces, and I can never approach that standard.

I know that a teacher - this Teacher - does not want or expect perfection. What the teacher wants is progress. And the teacher knows that it will not be a straight-line journey; there will be setbacks, blind alleys that waste months, perhaps years, many failures. And he is okay with this. What the teacher wants above all is for the student to come to maturity as a musician and as a person, and the teacher is thrilled whenever there is a step along that path. Sometimes a performance with lots of rough edges (like the Passacaglia this evening) is more fruitful in this sense than a spotlessly clean playing of the piece, one that might make the student proud and complacent.

So, what have I learned? I had been feeling some pride in my practice methods, having had some success with them. This time, I pushed too far; no, I am not able to prepare a piece on the scale of the Passacaglia in one week, not even with the fingering in place. If I am to attempt something like this again, I must allow more preparation time. But on the positive side, I had a terrific day on the bench yesterday, seven hours of Bach. Yesterday, and this week's concentrated work, has perhaps made me a Better Organist.

For those who might wish to hear the piece, here is a performance by the late Helmut Walcha, one of the great German organists of the last century. I love his tempo, the registrations, the clarity of this playing.